LITERATURE QUESTIONS
CULTURAL AND LITERARY (18TH 19TH) CENTURIES
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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reason can help man understand beauty.
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civilization comes through beauty.
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language shows humanity’s impulse towards order.
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poetry has no effect on society.
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Detailed explanation-1: -In A Defence of Poetry, [Shelley] attempts to prove that poets are philosophers; that they are the creators and protectors of moral and civil laws; and that if it were not for poets, scientists could not have developed either their theories or their inventions. Poets introduce and maintain morality.
Detailed explanation-2: -He writes: Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food.
Detailed explanation-3: -But Shelley was able to believe that poetry makes people and society better; his poetry is suffused with this kind of inspired moral optimism, which he hoped would affect his readers sensuously, spiritually, and morally, all at the same time.
Detailed explanation-4: -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. The parts of a composition may be poetical, without the composition as a whole being a poem.