After the dramatic revolution happened in French, more and more Men realize the important of freedom, the rights of being independent, the idea of expressing their own thought and the bravery to question the existed.  People started to rationalize their surrounding and everything they had experience in their life, but Percy Shelley has a different picture for the world. He pictures the world as a place full of harmony, creativity, and imagination, where people can effortlessly share their passion to each other.  and in his mind, the best tool to express individual’s emotions is by poetry.

In “A Defense of Poetry” Shelley mentions that “it (poetry) arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunation of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide,” which imply that although logic and reason were the central ideas of enlightenment, the time, when people began to use their mind to visualize the whole world, he is the man who still values the spiritual, the intangible parts of a human being, the feelings that were always inside of ourselves but may not be easily recognized. Thus the need for poetry to capture all of those transient ideas in our life and retain them for the eternally.

Furthermore, as he discusses about the application of poetry, he describes poetry as a massager between government and its people. “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in an opinion or institution, is poetry.”  during the English civil war, when the authority has suppressed its people,  it is the movement which poets stand out to public and the  power of their poetry to  help people fight for their liberty. Therefore, making them “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”