Shelley writing Prometheus Unbound by Joseph Severn
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Born August 4, 1792 Horsham, England Died July 8, 1822 (aged 29) Livorno, Italy
"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity." Shelley, Adonais
I have taken quoted excerpts from Shelley's Essay on Poetic Theory, A Defence of Poetry (1821) coupled with what I believe to be a true representation of the correlation between poetry and its muse as found in paintings and or sculpture.
"Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates
more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense
of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they
express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds,
communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from
that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it
marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their
apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through
time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of
integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create
afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will
be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse."
Apollo and the Muses by Simon Vouet, 1640
"A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time,
place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of
time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur;
the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a
relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains. Hence
epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the
poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures
and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which
makes beautiful that which is distorted."
Polyhymnia the muse of lyric poetry by Giovani Baglione, 1620
"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes
familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that
it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light
stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated
them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends
itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists.
The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the
spectator beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance,
stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which everyone
feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would
become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and
passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity
of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are
strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted
calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into
the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror
and all its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of
the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its
wilfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their
choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure
or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither
the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it
resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a
prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of
human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of
these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and
multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of
propagating its like wherever it may fall."
Melpomene the God of Tragedy
"A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom
and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its
divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share,
another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed,
the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time
the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from
which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if
blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren
world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of
life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things;
it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the
elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to
the secrets of anatomy and corruption. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest
and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and
feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding
our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing
unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: It is as it were the interpretation of a diviner nature through our own;
but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea, which the
coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the wrinkled sand
which paves it."
The Kiss of the Muse by Paul Cezanne
"Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the
world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the
interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form,
sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to
those with whom their sisters abide—abide, because there is no portal of
expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the
universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the
divinity in man. Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that
which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most
deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity
and change; it subdues to union under its light yoke all irreconcilable
things. It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within
the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an
incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: its secret alchemy turns to
potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life;
it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the
naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms."
Please feel free to leave any comments,
Endymion by G.F. Watts
6 comments:
What a beautiful tribute to one of the greatest Romantic poets of the age. You really did a wonderful job matching the quotes with the paintings. Just beautiful.
Hi Maggie, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for commenting.
As always, a great and informative blog, Kimberly. Most enjoyable.
Lorri xx
Hi Lorri,I'm so happy you enjoyed my tribute to Shelley. Thanks for stopping by.
I love Shelley and have pursued him over land and sea. He was such an inspiration to me and he felt like a friend.I read as much about him as I could and the circle around him.Thanks for this post,I am following now. All the best Angela.
Hi Angela, welcome, glad you found me. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
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