Pleasure and Purpose: Shelley's Literary Theory

"The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are Poets or poetical philosophers . . . Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry' . . . This power arises from within" --Percy Bysshe Shelley

I found these provocative quotes from "A Defence of Poetry" intriguing because of Shelley's sense of authority. Most of us take for granted the assumption that poetry should celebrate pleasure, and I think that most of our post-Romantic writing has reflected this sensibility. However, I also think of poets who commemorate pain (such as Whitman in his "O Captain! My Captain!") as part of the elite group of "poetical philosophers." Does reading someone else's expression of sorrow give us some sort of twisted pleasure? Perhaps we identify with the poet's lamentation because of our shared humanity, and this commiseration lessens our own personal burdens and assures us that our suffering is normal.

The second portion of Shelley's quote relates to poetry and the will. Shelley seems to say that the ability to compose comes from spontaneity. I would insert that spontaneity enables us to write well.

Before I decided to focus on literature, I spent my first year and a half of college as a writing emphasis student. I experienced a rude awakening in Introduction to Creative Writing where the professor expected the class to compose poetry on command and before deadlines. This killed my ability to write well because my work lacked the magical spontaneity that gives poetry its essence. Like Shelley's hypothetical poet, I told myself I would compose-- and nothing came out on paper. I recognize now that my best writing comes when I least expect it-- whether that means late at night, during a crisis, in the middle of my heart's greatest joy, or on a lazy summer afternoon devoid of constricting deadlines. Because of the ephemeral, unpredictable nature of my inspiration, I could never support myself financially with my fiction.