Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
- Source
- A Defence of Poetry
- Date
- 1840
Meaning of “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Shelley argues that imaginative writers can reshape moral language, social possibility and public feeling without holding formal legislative office.
Where does it come from?
A Defence of Poetry, written 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840; Wikisource transcription. This is the essay’s concluding sentence and summarizes Shelley’s historical literary theory about poetry’s indirect cultural and political influence, not literal legislative authority.