ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -“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.

Detailed explanation-2: -Shelley argues that the world has been stunned by reasonable thinking, and poetry “creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure”. He delicately explicates that the “poetical faculty” is characterized by a divine power.

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: -Shelley goes on to say that “Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination.

Detailed explanation-5: -As Shelley explains in his essay A Defence of Poetry, he believes that poetry expands and nurtures the imagination, and that the imagination enables sympathy, and that sympathy, or an understanding of another human being’s situation, is the basis of moral behavior.