A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays (Esprios Classics)

"A Defence of Poetry" is an essay by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1821. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". The essay was written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock's article "The Four Ages of Poetry", which had been published in 1820. A Defence of Poetry was eventually published, with some edits by John Hunt, posthumously by Shelley's wife Mary Shelley in 1840 in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments by Edward Moxon in London.