A Defence of Poetry

For the work by Sir Philip Sidney, see An Apology for Poetry

1840 title page of Essays. Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Edward Moxon, London.
1891 title page of A Defense of Poetry by Ginn and Co., Boston

"A Defence of Poetry" is an unfinished essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in February and March 1821 that the poet put aside and never completed.[1] The text was published posthumously in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments.[2] Its final sentence expresses Shelley's famous proposition that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

  1. ^ Ernest Bernbaum, ed., Anthology of Romanticism, 3rd ed. rev. & enlarged (New York: Ronald Press, 1948), p. 990.
  2. ^ Sandy, Mark. "A Defence of Poetry" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. 25 August 2004. The Literary Encyclopaedia