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British Romantic Poetry

Shelley belongs to a period of British poetry known as Romanticism. Other key poets in this period include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Lord Byron. Admittedly, there’s no neat way to summarize the diversity represented by these poets. However, it is possible to note two broad trends that characterized the Romantic era. For one thing, Romantic writers generally privileged intuition over rationality. They also emphasized the expression of emotion over the communication of didactic messages. Shelley himself encapsulated both these trends in his essay, “A Defence of Poetry” (1840), which pits philosophical reason against the poetic imagination. Whereas reason emphasizes the differences between things, imagination underscores “the similitudes of things.” As such, the poetic imagination is an intuitional form of expression that reveals the underlying unity and beauty of the world, which in turn enables the development of civilization. Far more than the politicians and engineers, then, Shelley declared: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Shelley plainly reflects this faith in “Ode to the West Wind,” where the speaker—a poet—hopes to transform the world through the revolutionary spirit of his poetic vision.

The Tradition of the Ode

The ode is a type of lyric poetry that originated with the ancient Greek poets Horace and Pindar. They developed this form as a way to convey emotion, typically in response to an event, person, object, or idea. Greek odes were typically performed to music. They were also strict in terms of meter and typically involved a formal division into three parts known as the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. When early modern writers such as Edmund Spenser took up this tradition, they adapted it for their own use. They abandoned the formal requirements of the Greek models, but they retained the idea of the ode as a song that responds with a degree of seriousness appropriate to its subject. Spenser, for example, conceived his 1595 ode “Epithalamion” as a marriage song for his new bride. Odes continued to appear in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they took on a new importance for the British Romantic poets, many of whom composed odes. Among the Romantics, Keats arguably remains the undisputed master of the form, having written a stunning sequence of six odes. Even so, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” uses the genre to powerful effect, offering a remarkable vision of poetry’s revolutionary potential.

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