Painting the Revolution

Percy Bysshe Shelley famously called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”  He argued in “A Defense of Poetry” that they “measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit” to make “immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world.”  That function of imagining, Shelley argues, reaches beyond language to form civil society. Epics by Homer and Virgil resonate across later ages because they demonstrate rather than just describe what virtue means.