David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. Educated at Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, he spent two years as a Kellett Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge, and worked as Lionel Trilling's research assistant upon his return from England. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including
Yeshiva Boys
(2009),
When a Woman Loves a Man
(2005),
The Daily Mirror
(2000), and
Valentine Place
(1996). His
New and Selected Poems
is forthcoming from Scribner. He is the editor of
The Oxford Book of American Poetry
(Oxford, 2006) and
Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
(Scribner, 2003).
A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs
(Nextbook/Schocken), the most recent of his six nonfiction books, won the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2010. Among Lehman's other books are a study in detective novels (
The Perfect Murder
), a group portrait of the New York School of poets (
The Last Avant-Garde
), and an account of the scandal sparked by the revelation that a Yale University eminence had written for a pro-Nazi newspaper in his native Belgium in World War II (
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man
). He teaches in the graduate writing program of The New School and lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

FOREWORD
by David Lehman

Shelley's “Defence of Poetry” (1821) culminates in an assertion of poetry as a source not only of knowledge but of power. Shelley's claims for poetry go beyond the joy to be had in a thing of beauty or a memory-quickening spot of time. The criteria of excellence may begin with aesthetics but assuredly do not end there. Poetry is “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution.” A poem is, moreover, not only “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” but also, and not incidentally, a metonymy of the cooperative imagination altogether. It “is ever found to coexist with whatever other arts contribute to the happiness and perfection of man.” The famous pronouncement that closes the essayâ“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”âdoes not do justice to the poet's reasoning. The visionary power he ascribes to the poet does not translate into laws, judgments, statutes, and legislative decrees, but something that exists independently of these things just as a Platonic ideal exists beyond empirical verification. For Shelley, poetic genius lies in the apprehension of a new truth before it gains currency. Metaphor is the medium of the change; words precede concepts that prefigure deeds. Not as a lawmaker, then, but as an interpreter of sacred mysteries the poet speaks to us and to the spirit of the age. The penultimate sentence in the “Defence of Poetry” comes closer to Shelley's intention than the equally grandiloquent final clause: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.”

Shelley has always held a great appeal for youthful idealists and romantic rebels. At eighteen he was expelled from Oxford for writing “The Necessity of Atheism.” He championed free love and eloped with
a child bride. He alienated his father and jeopardized a baronetcy. He foresaw the rise of democratic rule, the overthrow of tyrants, the triumph of liberty, the liberation of the oppressed. All these things were inevitable, he said. In a long poem presenting what he called a “beau idÃ©al” of the French Revolution, his hero and heroine escape from reactionary armies and lead a bloodless “Revolution of the Golden City.”
¹Shelley envisaged a new Athens, a “loftier Argo,” a “brighter Hellas,” a renewal of “the world's great age.”
²His amatory philosophy can be paraphrased as “love the one you're with.” He notoriously denounced monogamy:

I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

To cold oblivion, though it is in the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

Who travel to their home among the dead

By the broad highway of the world, and so

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

The dreariest and the longest journey go.
³

It is a remarkable statement even for a century whose novelists subjected the institution of marriage to unprecedented scorn.