The long shadow of P.B. Shelley’s Defense of Poetry on Anglo-American Modernist Manifestoes

Abstract

This paper aims at showing how Shelley’s Defence of Poetry proved influential in 19^th- and 20^th-century aesthetics, despite Modernist criticisms of his poetic achievements as immature and overly sentimental. In particular, the article examines textual instances where James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Wallace Stevens’s pronouncements of poetics seem not merely to respond to, but to have been shaped around and through Shelley’s Defense.