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All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.
The best way to understand what Shelley is referring to here, is that narrow utility and dogmatic custom/tradition are closer to being truly dead, than the sacrifice of a Joan of Arc. To merely prolong a physical existence in all our bodily functions is no different from the existence of someone who has been lobotomised or is in a comatose state.
The greatest value to life is what partakes in something beyond merely the physical. "The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven," means that our mind is what shapes our "reality," it is what shapes our choices, our decisions, our future"our possibilities. Depending on the decisions we make, the course of our lives and of entire civilizations can be changed for the better or worse.
Imagination is what allows a hopeless situation become a fortuitous one. It is imagination that seizes a rare opportunity when it presents itself, and it is truly from the imagination that we are able to "seize the day," as the story of Dumas' "The Count of Monte Cristo" beautifully exemplifies to us.
And thus we conclude with:
The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.
For information on our upcoming symposium "Towards an Age of Creative Reason: Why the Poetic Principle is Imperative to Statecraft" click here.It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
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