Although Wordsworth’s thought unquestionably ushered in the Romantic era, his theories were not universally accepted or respected. Abrams opens Chapter 6 with a nod to Thomas Love Peacock’s “Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), which was a parody and critique of Wordsworth’s tenets of poetry. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a year later, wrote Defence of Poetry as a serious rebuttal to Peacock’s essay.

In the essay, Shelley’s aesthetic and poetic theory begins, as Wordsworth’s does, with a sketch of primitive humanity interacting joyously with nature and almost accidentally creating art as a result. Shelly then moves to a more Platonic perspective of poetry, in which poetry strives to evoke or depict the “realm of Essence” (128) and therefore is more Mimetic in nature. However, Shelley attempts to consolidate Plato’s ideas into Shelley’s own sense of the value of poetry. As a result, Abrams points out that Shelley essentially fails to construct a coherent theory of poetry, even though the Defence is beautifully written and accomplishes a significant and convincing defense of the art of poetry.

However, what Shelley does accomplish is a combination of Platonic Ideals with Plotinus’s concept of the One, which is delivered through poetry. Rather than viewing poetry, as Plato did, as a mere reflection of reality or lived experience, Shelley uses language from Expressive Theory, Empiricism, and emerging psychology to describe poetry as the vehicle that harmonizes the internal with the external. Further, this approach allows Shelley to subtly argue that poetry brings the reader into the sphere of the Forms, reflecting the combined truth of beauty and feeling within the human soul.

While Wordsworth and Coleridge both evaluate poetry based on an overflow of feeling onto the page and Shelley advances Plato’s Forms, other Romantic thinkers, especially William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Leigh Hunt represent a Romantic picture of poetry more directly related to Longinus’s On the Sublime. In this view, the sublime comes from fragments of verse that affect the reader intensely. Therefore, these thinkers argued that the greatest poetry is poetry that is short and delivers an intense dose of sensation to the reader.

Another variation of Romantic thought on poetry was related to Aristotle’s concept of catharsis, in which a work of art can pull emotion from an audience, relieving the internal pressure caused by the emotion. The Romantics discussed the cathartic experience of the poet in creating the poem as a kind of therapy—Abrams quotes Lord Byron suggesting that poets are prone to “madness,” but they avoid it by creating art. William Hazlitt, similarly, built from Francis Bacon’s work to argue that writing poetry channeled the imagination’s capacity to explore desires that were unachievable in real life, and as a result gave the poet relief from dissatisfaction.

John Keble gave a series of lectures that solidified this concept of literature as a poet’s cathartic act. Keble argued that true poetry is the expression not of inherent or universal human emotion, but rather the spilling-out of emotion caused by repressed desire. Abrams explains that Keble’s discussion of repressed feelings was a precursor to Freud’s theories, with Keble believing that literature must be the representation of the poet’s repressed desires, thereby relieving the poet and, by extension, relieving the reader of those desires.

Abrams then introduces an essay he’s discovered and traced back to Alexander Smith, a Scotsman who published several articles primarily about philosophy. This essay, Abrams argues, should be considered valuable or important in any discussion of Romantic literary criticism. Smith, unlike Hazlitt and others, made a serious attempt to define poetry in terms of the use of language, rather than only by the source or effect of the poetry. Smith argued for a dichotomy of poetry and prose based on whether the words used are seeking to impart knowledge or emotion. He gave several examples of lines of poetry that are clearly designed to express true emotion and share it, rather than informing a reader of a fact. Abrams argues that Smith’s theories are limited, but that they seek to genuinely define poetry in semantic terms, not solely purposeful terms.