Read the excerpt from "a defence of poetry.” a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. there is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connexion than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. this excerpt expresses shelley’s idea that poetry is factual. timeless. detached. unrealistic.