Recommendations
Books Like A Defence of Poetry
Best books to read after A Defence of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Readers engaged by Shelley's visionary argument for the social necessity of poetry will find companion works in Romantic criticism, essays on the imagination, and the creative works that the Defence theorizes.
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Biographia Literaria
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The companion Romantic critical work — Coleridge's two-volume account of the imagination and its relationship to poetry (especially the famous distinction between Fancy and Imagination) runs parallel to Shelley's Defence; reading both together gives the most complete picture of Romantic critical theory in English.
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Preface to Lyrical Ballads
by William Wordsworth
The companion statement of Romantic poetics — Wordsworth's Preface and Shelley's Defence together constitute the foundational documents of Romantic critical theory; reading them alongside each other reveals both the common ground and the significant differences (Wordsworth on language and common life; Shelley on the imagination and liberation).
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Prometheus Unbound
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The creative work that the Defence theorizes — reading Prometheus Unbound alongside the Defence shows how Shelley's theory operated in his practice; the drama is the most complete embodiment of the argument about poetry and liberation that the essay makes.
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The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
by Matthew Arnold
The Victorian critical essay that most directly inherits Shelley's Defence — Arnold's argument that criticism has a cultural mission and that 'the best that has been thought and said' defines civilization is the Victorian development of Shelley's argument about poetry's social function.
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The Four Ages of Poetry
by Thomas Love Peacock
The essay that provoked Shelley's Defence — Peacock's satirical argument that poetry had been superseded by philosophy and science as a vehicle for human understanding is the direct occasion for Shelley's reply; reading Peacock first makes Shelley's Defence more vivid as a polemical act.
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Adonais
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Written the same year as the Defence, Shelley's elegy for Keats is the creative embodiment of the essay's argument — the claim that great poets become part of immortal beauty is enacted, not just argued, in the poem; the two works are natural companions.
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The Decay of Lying
by Oscar Wilde
The aesthetic essay that most brilliantly extends the Defence's argument into the late nineteenth century — Wilde's claim that 'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life' is the dandy's version of Shelley's argument about the imagination's priority over mere fact.
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The Sacred Wood
by T.S. Eliot
The Modernist counter-statement to the Romantic critical tradition — Eliot's essays (especially 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and 'Hamlet and His Problems') argue against the Romantic emphasis on individual genius and imagination; reading Shelley's Defence alongside Eliot shows the critical fault lines of modern literary history.
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