The poet for Shelley is therefore a person of singular revolutionary political importance. Indeed, to use the phrase with which Shelley closes A Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” because they are the ones who transform people, and therefore the world, through their artistic creations. They bring visions of possible futures into the present, they give hope, they inspire, they create desires for something better; and though they themselves do not necessarily understand the full significance and power of the words that they have been inspired to write,
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