An Echo of Clarke’s Address in Shelley’s Defence

This essay finds an echo of a pamphlet written by Charles Cowden Clarke, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt’s “Story of Rimini” (1816), in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821). The discovery clarifies Shelley’s involvement in a philologically informed Romantic project that sought to re-locate ‘genuine’, emphatic diction in modern poetry and thus resist inherited neoclassical literary values.