In this critical essay, Shelley claimed for poetry a prophetic status and for the poet the function of  making the world feel in harmony "with hopes and fears it heeded not". He describes poetry as what makes immortal "the visitations of the divinity man"; the poet is a man gifted with "delicate sensibility and enlarged imagination", a man of high moral standards. In the creative process his mind obeys an invisible influence which is outside his rational control.