셸리의 『시의 옹호』와 시의 생태적 옹호

Abstract

This study approaches Shelley's A Defense of Poetry from an ecological perspective. This perspective tries to clarify that Shelley shows that poetry is ‘a song that arises from the persistent desire for the intrinsic nature that humans have had as a natural object in nature.’ This investigation into the reductionism placed between humans and nature through poetry is based upon comprehensive examinations of the relationship between human sense and reason, between one human being and human beings (society), and between humans and nature, as revealed in A Defense of Poetry. Shelley asserts in A Defense of Poetry that “we want the poetry of life”(37), and “poetry is the record of the happiest moments of the happiest and best minds”(40). From a realistic point of view today, his rendering of truth, goodness and beauty to the vitality of poetry can be seen as too romantic and as aesthetic also. However, in the vitality with which he imbues poetry, there grows a huge deep-rooted nature and a transcendental and inherent symbiosis between humans and nature. Through poetry, he wants man to rediscover the original relationship that has been petrified within him as time passes. This individual awareness, he believes, leads next to the awareness of relationships of others in society and eventually expands to an awareness of all relationships in the vast universe. The entire process of awareness through poetry, Shelley suggests, is a reductive recognition that the beautiful order of nature is an existential order that intrinsically constitutes human beings. Consequently, ‘poetry is not about writing, it is about awareness of all relationships among humans, nature, and the universe and about the resonance of them all in human mind,’ which is Shelley’s ‘ars poetica’(prosody). In the beautiful order of nature, light and darkness coexist harmoniously. The situation of COVID-19 that all mankind is experiencing is a dark realm, and the only way to overcome it is, as history proves, through nature's prescription of ‘herd immunity'. In the darkness of nature, there is an ‘order of circulation' that promises the light, which can be called as the self-purification of nature. But this circulation cannot be found in the darkness of human civilization, where global pharmaceutical companies and some superpowers of the world strengthen their wealth by using the darkness. The awareness of the beautiful order of nature, which poetry can trigger, is the wisdom that nature has bestowed upon man, and can act as the best deterrent against all the impatience and excesses of human society today.