Frank F. Pauly: Die Wahrheit der Dichtung: P.B. Shelleys Defence of Poetry im Kontext der Tradition neuplatonischer Poetologien. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (MS 1821), the poet’s serious answer to Thomas Love Peacock’s humorously satirical The Four Ages of Poetry (1820), is usually thought to belong to the tradition of Platonism without, however, outlining that tradition in any detail. The monograph under discussion here fills that gap, tracing the transformation of Platonist poetologies from Plato through Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Plotinus, Porphyrius, Proclus, Ficino, Scaliger, and Sir Philip Sidney to Shelley’s outline of a Romantic poetology, defending it against the strictures of both Neoclassicts and Utilitarians – and ultimately against Plato’s critique of poetry itself, arguing with Plato against Plato. The Shelley-Peacock controversy thus had a notorious predecessor in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie against the strictures of the Puritan Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse, upon which Shelley modelled his title as well as some of his arguments.