"A Defense of Poetry"

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry" works in harmony with "Arcadia," an essay wherein he praises the Romantic poetic practice of preferring imagination and creative inspiration to reason and rational thought. The author points out that Shelley inextricably links rational thought and imagination to acts of creation, a concept crucial to understanding the role of Thomasina Coverly, the adolescent daughter of the manor, as the central character in "Arcadia." The paper stresses that, in "Arcadia," Thomasina represents Shelley's poet as a prophetic voice.

From the Paper:

"Hannah Jarvis and Valentine Coverly are two modern era characters studying the historical records and gardens of the Croom Estate. Both characters present an indifferent disdain for Romanticism with each passionately defending their preference for the rational thinking Neo-classicists of the Enlightenment. Hannah Jarvis, an emotionally detached historian, is interested in Sidley Park's hermit as a symbolic representation of Romanticism's "decline from thinking to feeling" (Stoppard 27). However, she undermines her stated rationalist view when she fervently proclaims to Valentine, "it's wanting to know that makes us matter" (Stoppard 75). By claiming, the passion for knowledge matters most and not the attainment of knowledge Hannah's statement explicitly demonstrates her reliance on feeling over reason in what otherwise appears as her wholly analytic thought process. Valentine Coverly, an Oxford mathematics and biology student, dismisses Thomasina's genius declaring, "she was just playing with numbers" (Stoppard 47). A theory he declares unknowable in Thomasina's time, "You can't open a door until there's a house" (Stoppard 79). By opening that door Septimus become Hannah's lunatic and Thomasina becomes Valentine's poet."

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