ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his seminal work of British Romantic poetics, ‘Defence of Poetry’, famously exalted the role of poets and named them ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the World’. Poets can read the seeds of the future in the present; they are ‘the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’, and humanity owes its progress in all areas of the knowledge. British Romantic writing, whether fiction, poetry or criticism shares much – though not all – of the concerns over the fluctuations in the valorization and orientation of the significance of the poet or author and of literature in a changing society due to the rise of the bourgeois industrial capitalism and the impact of progressive social movements, of abolitionism, of the French Revolution. Shelley explicitly addresses the poem towards ‘an unforeseen and unknowable future readership’.
