Shelley wrote quite a lot in his “A Defence of Poetry,” some
of it good, too much of it bad, in my opinion. I understand that Shelley was
writing in response to Peacock, but he did not really defend poetry well until
the end of the piece. He focuses too much on the mechanics of poetry in the
beginning, which is akin to defending religion on its mechanics. Religion and
poetry are not quantitative disciplines, but are very subjective and so should be defended based on experiences with religion or poetry, yet he does
not focus on this until near the end. Religion and poetry are different from
the world of reason as Shelley states, but yet he tries to make them fit within
the rational world. I think his misguided focus leads to such things as him
saying that poetry cannot be translated and then later on saying “if Hebrew
poetry had never been translated.” Shelley really comes through in the end, but
is too flat in the beginning of his defense of poetry.
Having just come back from a Mock Trial tournament with questionable judging, I can fully appreciate Shelley's desire to make the subjective into something objective. Peacock has just called into the question the necessity of poetry, something Shelley excells at. Its only natural for Shelley to want to explain how clearly his work is fundamentally of more value than what Peacock gives credit for. The same way, Vandy's Mock Trial team is clearly fundamentally better than Washington State. In the end though, poetry and Mock Trial are both extremely subjective things and people like Peacock and psychotic Memphis judges are entitled to their own opinions based on their experiences.
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