The inconstant wind and the ever-changing veil

Emerson has a sense that poetry falls short of his divine ideals, and that poetry, despite its best attempts, usually forms "a corrupt version of some text in nature." There's a similar idea in Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry." Shelley distinguishes poetry as very different from any rational act that a person can intentionally perform. He describes the type of inspiration necessary for creating poetry: "The mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness" (713). This idea of the mind constantly seeking to grasp a "transitory brightness" or reach some divine realm of the sublime is very Romantic and much like Emerson. I like Shelley's imagery that some kind of wind, which acts as a strong and influential external force, works together with the imagination within the poet's mind to create poetry. It's like only the right combination of internal and external force allows the poet to glimpse the brightness he seeks.


Another image that Shelley used to describe the poet that I really liked was the veil. Poetry "strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms" (714). What we see when we look at the world is something like Plato's shadows on the cave wall, but Shelley describes it with the image of the veil. We see things through this veil, or "film of familiarity", that hangs over our eyes and our thoughts, but true poetry suddenly pulls the veil back slightly or rips a little hole in it so we can get a glimmer of the essence of truth. However, even the clarity that comes through the breakthrough of one veil only reminds us that there exists something like an infinite number of veils. Shelley writes, "Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed" (710). This makes poetry sound so frustrating. It tries so hard to uncover the truth and real meaning, but it can never break through the endless layers of veils. It never shows us the object in distinct clarity rather than its hazy outline, and we never can fully "see things as they really are" (as Matthew Arnold would say).


But Shelley also describes a way that poets create veils of their own: "[Poetry] arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form sends them further among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide" (714). So in some cases, poets create their own veils that can cover times of despair with some type of beauty or meaning. The veil dictates the type of light that can penetrate through it, and it controls the clarity of the objects that exist on the opposite side. Poets are the veil-changers. That must be why Shelley considers them “the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men” (715).