Responding to Thomas Love Peacock’s partly satirical essay, Four Ages of Poetry, published in Charles Ollier’s Literary Miscellany (1820), Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry argues for poetry’s utilitarian function. Shelley composed his rebuttal of Peacock’s arguments about the redundancy of poetry, in February and March 1821, intending A Defence of Poetry to appear in another volume of Ollier’s Literary Miscellany. When Shelley learned that there would no further issues of Ollier’s periodical, he started on plans, which remained incomplete at the time of his death, to publish A Defence of Poetry as a pamphlet in its own right. In 1822, Mary Shelley endeavoured to have Shelley’s essay posthumously published in The Liberal (see separate entry) but, thwarted by the journal’s discontinuation, A Defence of Poetry did not appear until its inclusion in Essays, Letters from...
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Citation: Sandy, Mark. "Defence of Poetry". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5662, accessed 05 December 2025.]
