Tag Archives: Defence of Poetry

Bloom: The Bard Invented the Human

I examine how Harold Bloom believes that Shakespeare changed history.

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Read Lit, Then Fight for Freedom

While literature may seem irrelevant to our political battles, it provides (as Shelley points out) an invaluable human compass.

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Lit & Nature Light Up Same Parts of Brain

The brain doesn’t distinguish between reading about something and actually experiencing it. This has interesting implications for lit.

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13 Books That (Kind of) Changed America

I review Parini’s “13 Books That Changed America” and find his view of change to be limiting. For one thing, he excludes most of American literature.

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In Defense of The Merchant of Venice

Percy Shelley believes that great art transcends the prejudices of its time, even when it is cloaked in them. If he is right, then “Merchant of Venice” is less of a problem play than many people consider it.

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The Liberal Arts Will Not Die

Thursday My colleague Jeff Hammond, a national authority on Puritan poetry and a much lauded writer of reflective essays, recently gave a stirring defense of the liberal arts for our parents-alumni weekend. Jeff’s observations dovetail very nicely with Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, which I happen to be teaching at the moment. Watching poetry getting […]

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How Poets Are the Legislators of the World

Shelley saw great literature as changing the way we see reality. Sometimes, however, it takes hundreds of years for this to be evident.

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Poetry Enlarges the Moral Imagination

Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” makes one of the strongest cases in history for how poetry changes the world.

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Poets Unacknowledged Legislators? Maybe

A debate on whether poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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