Recently, as I have reflected on my purpose as a writer I have thought at length about the task of using writing as a tool for upholding integrity. Viewed as such, I, as well as writers like me, have quite a high calling. Writing which serves to validate the poetry of all man-kind is that which Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests in A Defense of Poetry. That writing serves to validate the poetry of all humankind, emphasizing its infinite, and ultimate source. This flowing from transcendentalism would allude to the human imagination. As Shelly suggests poetry, “ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful, or generous, or true can have place in an evil time.” The reading of poetry has the potential of making us more ethical persons as its poetical faculty is two-fold. It engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange according to rhythm and order and creates that which is good or beautiful. Writing as an ethical value system, something that I can’t say I had ever previously seriously considered.
Interesting background information to consider when reading A Defense of Poetry:
http://www.clayfox.com/ashessparks/reports/kate.html
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