Percy Shelley's Defense

Shelley's defense is poetry, not prose. He was such a beautiful writer, and clearly so intelligent that it amazes me that people say they don't like to read. What they are missing! It makes me want to be a poet myself, just to be able to write like he did. I really love his similes: "A poet is like a Nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why." And also "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it reproduces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it coexists." The lines are so beautiful and enlightening that I must stop myself from quoting the entire defense. He was a god among men.