Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his "Ode to the West…
Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his "Ode to the West Wind"
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Identity
An English poet, humanist and a Platonist.
Experience
At 19
Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook.
Once married
Shelley moved to the Lake District of England to study and write.
Two years after his marriage
Shelley published his first long serious work,
Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
In 1814
Shelley became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, and they eloped to Europe in 1814.
In 1818
He and his new wife left England for the last time.
in 1822
Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghorn to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the
Don Juan
Style
Romanticism
Contribution
Shelley‘s ideas, embodied in his verse, his prose, and his life, remain as a challenge to the servile acceptance of authority and as a challenge to us to achieve our highest potential-- to always aspire to higher goals for ourselves and for society.
Ode to the West Wind
When and Where
the poem was written in the woods outside Florence, Italy in the autumn of 1819.
What
The speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this death and decay because it means that rejuvenation and rebirth will come soon.
Why
In the final two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote this rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.