"A sterner conscience and a friendlier home." --- W. B. Yeats

In I.A. Richards's _So Much Nearer_ p. 150~

"The Future of Poetry"

p. 151~

Try it again: "the central importance of poetry." What do you feel about that?... That would be a danger: should not enough people care enough to resent poetry's exacting and perennial claims.

Let us see for a few moments, ow great these claims are. W. B. Yeats wrote of Shelley's _Defense of Poetry_: "The profoundest essay on the foundation of of poetry in English." The culminating and closing sentence of that _Defense_ is...:"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." It is with a view to heightening, not by any means reducing, this claim that I would propose an emendation---as a quick way of making a crucial point. I would like to read, not "/Poets/ are the unacknowledged /legislators/," but "/Poems/ are the unacknowledged /legislation/ of the world." That would take the weight off the poor, brief, human, limited poet and put it on the august, enduring, superhuman artifice of eternity the poet can be the means of bringing into existence. That would hand the legislative function over to a Being much better fitted to bear it. An influence that is to help us with how we should and shout not /choose/ needs all the authority it can get.

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