The Poet in History

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) tra le rovine delle Terme di Caracalla a Roma
(Image by Alessandro Volta from flickr)   Details   DMCA

There once was a very famous saying attributed to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". I was wondering if you could go into some depth and detail as to how and why this was once true, but now couldn't seem further from the truth...

Microsoft Copilot AI:

Shelley?s line has become one of those phrases that people quote because it sounds grand, but its original force is almost never understood. When he wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he wasn't imagining poets as policy makers or moral authorities. He meant something far stranger and more ambitious: that poets shape the imaginative conditions under which a society thinks, feels, and therefore acts. They legislate not by decree but by altering the inner weather of a civilization.