ABSTRACT
Poetry is never more desired, Percy Bysshe Shelley declared in his Defence of Poetry, than in modern times when “calculations have outrun conception,” “when we have eaten more than we can digest,” when “the body has become too unwieldy for that which animates it” (502–3). It is then “we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life” (emphasis mine; 502). In thus defining the imagination biologically as the “poetry of life,” a force which acts on and through the body and bears concretely on what we know and how we live, Shelley indicates that what is above all at stake in our engagements with the poetic medium is transformation, galvanization, animation—in short, the touching and moving—of lives. With this invocation of the “poetry of life,” Shelley asserts the fundamental role of literature in the processes and procedures of “biopower” that according to Michel Foucault 1 began to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century, and thereby also insists, at a time when ever new modalities were arising for seizing hold of life, that there must be a poetic dimension to being. For Shelley, life is more than the common fact of existence, indeed to the extent that without poetry a form or way of living that is proper to individuals and to the species cannot be considered life at all.
