Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defense of Poetry (notion of pleasure)?

Question

How does the notion of pleasure play an instrumental role in Shelley's theory of art/culture?

Answer 1

Read this introduction to Shelley's Defense of Poetry:

http://www.stjohns-chs.org/english/Romantic/Rm-Sh.html

It is rather good and useful, I think.

Answer 2

Ref:
Shelley's political ballad, "The Mask of Anarchy"

The scandal of Shelley’s great political ballad, "The Mask of Anarchy," is that its appeal to the power of mass resistance is written from aristocratic exile. Certainly this position does not disqualify its interventionist rhetoric: no one criticizes a Brecht for becoming an outspoken émigré in Denmark in the 1930s. The problematic issue is not the writer’s personal safety so much as the nature and expression of his commitment to those masses whose sacrifice he exhorts. The "Mask" appeals to an ultimate and utopian harmony between the masses and the oppressor’s troops, grounded in a common nationalism ("the old laws of England") and an idealized shame provoked in that nation by the willing martyrdom of passive protesters who virtually invite the army to "slash, and stab, and maim, and hew." Such an appeal to universal Promethean virtue, shared by proletarian and stormtrooper, may indeed strike us, at the very close of the twentieth century, as so naive as to warp the very real commitment of Shelley’s art. This dilemma brings to mind Adorno’s famous critique of such "commitment" by an artist like Brecht, who was trapped in the paradox of committed art in advanced capitalism: the intellectual must speak as a kind of ventriloquist, speaking for the proletarian; yet it is the powerful bourgeois he must capture, addressing oppression in the ideological terms and values of the oppressor, appealing to a spurious "harmony" of interest. "In an attempt to bridge the gap" between the fact of oppression and the language in which he must address it for the bourgeois theatre-goer, "Brecht affected the diction of the oppressed. But the doctrine he advocated needs the language of the intellectual" ("Commitment" 187). At the same time, Adorno does allow to art a utopian, ideal aim: literary works "point to a practice from which [as ideal creations] they abstain: the creation of a just life"
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The real conflict and contradiction of this poem, then, emerges not from the political potency of words. It is the conflict over the revolutionary violence that might follow the new comprehension and the new demands of the oppressed. The danger is not at all that one particular poem may be politically superfluous; the danger is that Shelley’s "Shape arrayed in mail," imaginary though she may be, allegorizes a moment of new popular consciousness which Shelley’s poem simultaneously participates in, records, and exhorts. As part of a broad popular uprising, Shelley’s poem may be part of a larger and all-too-effective culture of resistance. So Shelley calls for a new assembly, a fantasized repetition of the St. Peter’s field gathering, in which the passive victimization of the protesters is transformed into the passive resistance of fully politicized agents. In prescribing this remedy, Shelley can fantasize himself as revolutionary leader, who, though far from the action, can decree "Let a vast assembly be, / And. . . Declare with measured words that ye / Are. . . free" (lines 295-98). The masses, like their poet leader, will arm themselves with "words" that are "swords" (lines 299-300).


Get the rest from the link below.

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