Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Shelley Defend Poetry

Thomas Love Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry stands as a near-perfect archetype for perhaps the finest type of negative critical evaluation, one that defiantly provokes the creators of the work it is criticizing while elegantly pointing out the problems in the work itself and at the same time issuing a heartfelt call for wholesale evolution of the form. Thomas Peacock choose a style of writing that is not only guaranteed to offend but, unfortunately, to be misread by some less careful readers. His ironic, satirical tone and his beautifully scathing deconstruction of the deleterious state of poetry can cause readers to mistake him as a mere hater of poetry. Clearly, that point of view is undermined by a statement such as "Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society."

Peacock obviously does not see poetry as a branch of useless knowledge, else why would he be so passionate in his attack? The underlying theme of the essay is to question why isn't poetry evolving like all other the arts and sciences. What may seem like a mean-spirited attack is in actuality a ringing of the bell for change from a man who desperately loves the art form he is assaulting and who wants nothing less than to see it restored to its former glory. Peacock wants contemporary poetry to move forward, not backward, and he is savvy enough to understand that nothing so foments evolutionary revolution as calling the violators to the carpet in the most provocative language possible.