Shelley’s Conception of Poetry. Shelley has explained his lofty view of poetry in a prose-essay, A Defence of Poetry. Poetry was to him what religion is to most people—an idealization of life. According to Shelley “a poem is the very image of life expressed in eternal truth/” He defines poetry as “the expression of the imagination” as contradistinguished from that of the reason, he conceives that “the functions or objects of poetical faculty are two fold : by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure : by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. “But these functions cannot be exercised at will even by the greatest poet. A great poem is not produced by reason, by study, or by hard work. The Poets are born not made. The poetical power “arises from within.” “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moment of the best and happiest minds.” The poet embodies in his verse the evanescent visitations of a divine nature which has come into his own. “Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite and the One : as far as it relates to his conceptions, time and place and number or not. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.” Again, he says, “Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure. Poetry is indeed something divine; it is-at once the centre and circumference of all knowledge. Poetry turns all things to loveliness, it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.”