Shelley is well celebrated for the epigram that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The irony is that much of the Western world, both for good and ill, is the result of the influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley. And much of that debt is sadly unacknowledged.
Shelley called for universal suffrage, human rights for women, the end of the influence of religion on politics, the dethronement of monarchies and, to my dislike, the ending of any sort of marriage vows til death. He also argued for the, to my mind, unattainable goal of equality of resources. Not to be trite, but you can hear almost every verse of John Lennon’s Imagine in Shelley’s verse.
He was, of course, not only a reformer but a poet. He saw poetry as a certain image of the world, an image by which we are drawn out of ourselves and enabled to see beyond the repetitive sensory experiences of the everyday. He thought that the poet is tuned by a higher sensitivity that enables him or her to see into nature with a power other than that of the scientist. This sensitive vision then enables the reader to respond with love towards newly discovered nature and his fellow man.
Shelley was certainly something of an idealist. And his moral failings are almost as well known as his adage. But I believe that poets write the best part of themselves; they write with that ideal they’d like to be. And that ideal, though flawed, partakes in Shelley of the sublime. His particular celebration of liberty, equality and fraternity, his effort to dethrone idols to make room for freedom, his placing of outward facing love as the goal of poetry and human life—all this makes for perennially inspiring poetry. Worth reading by all who want to appreciate this unacknowledged legislator.
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