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Shelley’s Poetry

For insight into how “Ode to the West Wind” fits in with other key poetic works by Shelley, please consult this guide.

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Keats arguably stands as one of the masters of the ode form, regardless of time period or language of composition. As it happens, Keats wrote his extraordinary sequence of six odes the same year that Shelley wrote “Ode to the West Wind.” To see how the two poets’ approaches to this ancient tradition differ and converge, it’s worth comparing Shelley’s ode to one of Keats’s best: “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”

Shelley belonged to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, which is the generation that rose to prominence as earlier poets such as William Wordsworth were settling into middle age. To get a sense of the key elements that both connect and distinguish these different generations, it’s worth investigating the work of Wordsworth more closely. In particular, it’s worth considering the difference between Wordsworth’s rustic representation of the natural world and Shelley’s more mythopoetic approach. This difference can be made plain by comparing Shelley’s ode with Wordsworth’s great lyric poem, “Tintern Abbey.”

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