nearer to the eternal ideal--Shelley called it Intellectual
Beauty--which is the only abiding reality. This is the real
theme of his 'Defence of Poetry' (1821), the best piece of
prose he ever wrote. Thomas Love Peacock, scholar, novelist,
and poet, and, in spite of his mellow worldliness, one of
Shelley's most admired friends, had published a wittily
perverse and paradoxical article, not without much good sense,
on 'The Four Ages of Poetry'. Peacock maintained that genuine
poetry is only possible in half-civilised times, such as the
Homeric or Elizabethan ages, which, after the interval of a
learned period, like that of Pope in England, are inevitably
succeeded by a sham return to nature. What he had in mind was,
of course, the movement represented by Wordsworth, Southey, and
Coleridge, the romantic poets of the Lake School, whom he
describes as a "modern-antique compound of frippery and
barbarism." He must have greatly enjoyed writing such a
paragraph as this: "A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in
a civilised community. . . . The march of his intellect is
like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused
around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the
darkness of antiquated barbarism in which he buries himself
like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian
labours." These gay shafts had at any rate the merit of
stinging Shelley to action. 'The Defence of Poetry' was his
reply. People like Peacock treat poetry, and art generally, as
an adventitious seasoning of life--ornamental perhaps, but
rather out of place in a progressive and practical age. Shelley
undermines the whole position by asserting that poetry--a name
which includes for him all serious art--is the very stuff out
of which all that is valuable and real in life is made. "A