Why Shelley’s ‘A Defence of Poetry’ Should Be Mandatory Reading for Students of All Disciplines
It’s that time of year where a raft of new university students are preparing to leave home for the first time, get hammered, vomit in corridors, engage in drunken copulation and go until Christmas without washing their sheets. Ah, memories. But in daylight hours that raft of students are filing into the increasingly diverse range of subjects, some increasingly specific, that constitute the range of a higher education.
For many these disciplines will rarely meet. The idea that science has anything to do with the humanities is becoming increasingly lost to what is seen as a division between the fanciful and the practical, the nice but time wasting disciplines of art or literature and the economically fruitful disciples of the STEM fields.
Yet this distinction marks one of the increasingly blind spots in the way we are coming to see how our world operates. While much of our society is driven by science and technology, the idea that these are themselves the products of what we might understand as mechanistic or systematised disciplines or organised bodies covers up a far more complicated relationship with the way that we move forward. This relationship is probably best described in Shelley’s seminal 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry.
