Literature Network » Percy Bysshe Shelley

Wendell Berry, seeds of hope, and the survival of creation.

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From: Christianity and Literature
Date: 20070101
Author:Bush, Harold K., Jr.

Poets have commonly speculated about the purposes and effects of their works. Perhaps most famously, the British Romantics posited a version of the poet as prophetic mouthpiece of God. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's memorable formulation, "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.... the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" ("Defense" 1087). In America, this lofty concept of the poet was taken up by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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