ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of music in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry as it forms and illuminates the way Shelley conceives, and articulates his views on poetry. It explores Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Essai deals mainly with the development and divergence of music and poetry from a common origin as song. The conflation of scientific and aesthetic perspectives found within Rousseau and Charles Burney’s respective definitions of music is linked to sentiments that they each express elsewhere that favor a union or interdependence between the music and the other arts, especially poetry. Shelley’s version of harmony or musica mundana as “poetry in a general sense” represents a type of emotive or spiritual union or communication, as well as a type of artistic synthesis. Having described the basic mental processes that bring about the necessary conditions for the creation of poetry, Shelley is able to begin to discuss and define his different types of poetry.
