who described poets as the unacknowledged legislators of mankind
Percy Bysshe Shelley
title: Poet as legislator text: "must write as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind" – a fully public, even patriotic role moreover By contrast the Romantic view of the poet as "unackowledged" legislator emerges at the turm of the century in the writing of William Godwin, with his anarchic view of the poet as "the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world". It received its most memorable formulation however in Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1820 "A Defence of Poetry". Shelley maintained that, through their powers of imaginative understanding, 'Poets' (in the widest sense, of ancient Greece) were able to identify title: Poet as legislator text: Poet as legislator The theme of poet as legislator reached its grandiose peak in the Romantic era, epitomised in the view of the lonely, alienated poet as 'unacknowledged legislator' to the whole world. However the concept had a long prehistory in Western culture, with classical figures like Orpheus or Solon being appealed to as precedents for the poet's civilising role. Plato's opposition to poets in his ideal Republic was predicated on the contemporary existence of Homeric expounders who claimed that "a man ought to regulate the tenour of his whole life by this poet's directions". Plato only allowed the already title: Romantic literature in English text: intellectual and political circles of his time. Similarly, Shelley's 1851 essay "A Defense of Poetry" displayed a radical view of poetry, in which the poet acts as "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," because, of all of artists, they best perceive the undergirding structure of society. His close circle of admirers, however, included the most progressive thinkers of the day, including his future father-in-law, philosopher William Godwin. A work like "Queen Mab" (1813) reveal Shelley, "as the direct heir to the French and British revolutionary intellectuals of the 1790s. Shelley became an idol of the next three or four generations title: A Defence of Poetry text: A Defence of Poetry "A Defence of Poetry" is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840 in "Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments" by Edward Moxon in London. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". The essay was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article "The Four Ages of Poetry", which had been published in 1820. Shelley wrote to the publishers Charles and James Ollier (who were also his own publishers): <br> To Peacock, Shelley wrote: "A Defence title: Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere text: Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere is a collection of essays by the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, published in 2000. It was first published in hardback by the New Left Books imprint, Verso. Described as 'A celebration of Percy Shelley's assertion that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world', the book contains thirty-eight essays on writers such as Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Larkin, H.L. Mencken, Anthony Powell, T.S. Eliot and Salman Rushdie, in which Hitchens attempts to 'dispel the myth of politics as a stone