Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest poets in the English language.

• A Defence of Poetry is an essay by Shelley, written in 1821. It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

• Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognizes in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts or order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful.

• Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with social activities of life. For Shelley, 'poets ... are not only authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Coleridge was an English Romantic poet, literary critic and philosopher. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.

• In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817.

• Biographia Literaria delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers as Wordsworth.

• Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last".

• According to Coleridge, a poem is to be judged not as a mirror of truth -- as we judge science -- but as a thing in itself, almost as a living organism, which cannot be measured by extrinsic standards, but only by its own internal consistency: "nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise."

• The organic unity of a poem is not something which can be imposed by adherence to mechanical rules but must derive from the poet's Imagination -- a supremely vital gift of the few.

• According to Coleridge, ideal poets are born and not made; ideal poems may be judged only according to their own lights and not according to any established precept or precedent; their quality is in a very direct sense derived from the quality of the mind of their creator. This gave Coleridge a freedom in respect of assessing both modern and Elizabethan poets (particularly Shakespeare) which no previous critic had enjoyed: their works were not to be judged by extrinsically defined or artificially imposed standards but in terms of their imaginative coherence.

• It is clear that Coleridge himself envisaged the poet as a man of great integrity as well as of special gifts, producing poems which would offer profound insights into man's imagination, psychological, and ultimately, moral being.

• The narrow-minded features of neoclassicism and of literature seen simplistically as a 'mirror' of reality died with Coleridge.

• According to Coleridge, poetry is about itself and for itself, art for art's sake.

Matthew Arnold

• Arnold is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Culture and Anarchy, Arnold's major work in social criticism. Literature and Dogma, Arnold's major work in religious criticism.

• Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his skeptical and pessimistic perspective was typical of the Modern era.

• He felt that poetry should be the ‘criticism of life’ and express a philosophy. Arnold’s philosophy is that true happiness comes from within, and that people should seek within themselves for good, while being resigned in acceptance of outward things and avoiding the pointless turmoil of the world.

• Arnold is more concerned with the poetry of religion and its virtues and values for society than with the existence of God.

• Arnold wrote that, “Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry”. He considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were “high truth” and “high seriousness”

• Further, Arnold thought the works that had been proven to possess both “high truth” and “high seriousness”, such as those of Shakespeare and Milton, could be used as a basis of comparison to determine the merit of other works of poetry.