Life & Wisdom Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley isn’t praising poetry as decoration; he’s pitching it as a perceptual weapon. “Lifts the veil” borrows the language of revelation and ritual, as if the everyday is a kind of mild trance and the poet’s job is to snap us awake. The move is characteristically Romantic: reality isn’t improved by new facts so much as by a new angle of attention. Beauty is “hidden” not because it’s rare, but because habit makes us blind.

The second clause is the sharper one. “Makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” describes defamiliarization before the term existed: the chair, the street, the lover’s face returned to strangeness. Shelley’s intent is to argue that poetry restores first contact with the world, the original shock of experience that routine and utility sand down. Subtext: modern life (even in the early 1800s) trains you to see things primarily as instruments. Poetry interrupts that pipeline and lets objects regain their surplus meaning.

Context matters. Shelley writes in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the rationalist confidence of Enlightenment thinking, but also amid political disappointment after the French Revolution’s promises curdled. Romanticism’s answer wasn’t escapism so much as re-enchantment: a wager that changing how people feel and perceive is a precondition for changing how they live. If you can’t see the world freshly, you won’t imagine it differently. Poetry, in Shelley’s formulation, is not a hobby; it’s consciousness, re-tuned.