“Ode to the West Wind” is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, completed in October 1819 and published in August 1820. The poem was completed while Shelley was staying in Florence, Italy after witnessing a storm in the Cisalpine regions. Possibly intended for the proposed but not published collection of Shelley’s political poems, Popular Songs, the poem was later published in Prometheus Unbound with Other Poems. The ode is a 5 stanza poem with 14 lines per stanza, and the lines are printed in tercets denoting the terza rima rhyme scheme that ends with a concluding couplet. The poem’s structure is similar to that of the sonnet, and the poem’s form is similar to that of Hebrew prophecy. The dominant characteristic of the poem is its attempt to mimic the ebb and flow of the wind.

The first three stanzas of the poem compare the wind’s affect on the land, sea, and air. The wind, the herald of winter, is a force of destruction as it causes the leaves to fall from trees, establishes storms, and creates waves. However, the wind also provides hints of a future spring that will follow the winter. The fourth and fifth stanzas have a more personal tone as the narrator first wishes to be moved by the wind like the rest of nature and then asks to be merged with the wind. The wind represents an underlying Power within the universe, and the poem describes the narrator’s hope to establish a better future through his poetry. Although not directly religious, the poem has a similar tone to religious works, including the Old Testament, and the emphasis on the poem is to the sublime.

Critics, from the first publication of the poem to the 21st century, have ranked the poem as one of Shelley’s best lyrical pieces. Although some critics disagreed on how well Shelley’s poetry compared to the poetry of Shakespeare or Milton, the poem is universally seen as a good or perfect poem. When critics discuss aspects of the poem, such as its use of prophecy or the sublime, they celebrate the poem as a success. Although the original publication of Prometheus Unbound and Other Poems was not a commercial success, the “Ode to the West Wind” is “Shelley’s most anthologized poem.”

Background

1819 was a fruitful time for Shelley, and many of his famous poems were written that year. In total, he composed over 6,000 lines of poetry. Shelley began to write “Ode to the West Wind” in October 1819 while staying in Florence. The poem was created to be added to a collection of poems put forth by the publisher Charles Ollier that would serve as a response to the negative reviews of Shelley’s poetry by William Gifford. The actual poem took at least a week to finish, with a manuscript copy dating the first three stanzas as 25 October.

Shelley claimed that he came up with the idea for the poem “in a wood that skirts the Arno near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind … was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains [that] began … at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.” The poem was completed after Shelley wrote the first three acts of his play, Prometheus Unbound, and before he completed the fourth act.

It is possible that “Ode to the West Wind” was originally intended to part of a political collection of Shelley’s poems that would be titled Popular Songs. Though the exact composition of the collection is unknown, but many of the poems believed to be part of the set were suppressed or altered over political reasons with “Ode to the West Wind” as one of the few to be printed in Shelley’s life without major alteration.

The ode was printed in August 1820 by Ollier as one of the “Other Poems” in the poorly selling Promtheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in 4 Acts, with Other Poems. There are two surviving draft forms of the poem in manuscript collections of Shelley’s poems: the first in the Huntington Manuscript and the second in the Bodleian Manuscript. The Huntington edition contains the first three stanzas. The Bodleian manuscript dates the poem October 25 and contains a revised version of the first three stanzas that matches the Prometheus Unbound collection’s version. Two copies of the fourth stanza are found within the Bodleian manuscript and neither match the 1820 version of the poem while the fifth stanza is left incomplete in the manuscript. After working on the draft of the poem on 25 October 1819, Shelley added to the Bodleian Manuscript a Greek phrase meaning “By virtuous power, I a mortal, vanquished thee a mighty god.”

Structure

“Ode to the West Wind” is written in 5 stanzas of 14 lines, and the ode relies on a terza rima rhyme scheme related to that used by Dante to suggest the various aspects of the wind’s movement. There are hints of the sonnet within the structure of the poem while simultaneously shifting forms as the imagery changes between the lines. The rhyme scheme, ababcbcdcdedee, ends with a couplet and would appear to follow a sonnet pattern if the printed poem did not divide the lines into tercets to emphasise the terza rima. The change in rhyme from an English system to an Italian system requires a tighter system of rhyming, and this prompted its reliance by many Romantic poets. Shelley’s use, however, was not standard among his poems and alters the syntatic pattern of “if,” “then,” and “but” common to the sonnet. The run-on nature of the lines adds a wind blowing-like effect to the stanza by rushing or slowing down various lines. The poem heavily relies on alliteration and is regarded as a well-known example of it by critics with it being seen in both a positive and negative light. Although it is used to provoke humour in Shelley’s other poems, the ode relies on alliteration to emphasis aspects of the ode’s meaning by connecting words together. Examples of this can be found in line 1 (“thou breath of Autumn’s being) or line 3 (“ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”).

The ode form Shelley relies on in “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Skylark” do not fit the Pindaric model for the ode but blend in elements of lyric poetry. The poems do rely on the traditional address to specific audience but the audience within the poems exist in the imagination. Additionally, the ode form during the 18th century was associated with the Old Testament and Biblical prophecy along with being a form relied on for discussing the sublime. The poem’s organization has led critics to analyze the poem in relation to Biblical psalms or classical prayers, but the poem is original in its methods and a unique creation of Shelley’s. The poem’s effect is to model thte wind, and the terza rima combined with the enjambments reinforces an instability among the poem’s lines. The rhyme scheme also disrupts the pattern that begins with each “b” rhyme, creating a new sequence that follows.

Poem

The ode begins with an invocation to a divine presence within nature. Although the poem describes the Autumnal wind, the power of the wind is connected to the divine Power, and the destruction in nature comes as the seeds of a future spring are sent forth:

O, wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear! (lines 1-14)

After focusing on how the wind affects the land, the narrator begins to discuss the sky. The second stanza of the poem describes the creation of fractostratus and cirrus clouds. The clouds, as the poem explains, are approaching with rain and the process by which they are made is through the combing of water vapor from the water/Ocean with wind from the sky/Heaven.

Thou on whose stream, ‘mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O, hear! (lines 15-28)

In the third stanza, the wind affects the sea and the underwater vegetation. As the poem continues, night is compared to a sepulcher while nature is described in its destructive terms, and the wind destroys all that is part of the old state of things regardless of its benefit or harm:

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,

Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O, hear! (lines 29-42)

The fourth stanza breaks from the previous three in that it is not addressing the wind and how the wind affects the world, but it instead focuses on how the wind affects the narrator. The narrator wishes to be a leaf, a cloud, or a wave as connected to the previous stanzas but that is impossible:

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O, uncontroulable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. (lines 43-56)

While the fourth stanza calls for the destruction of the narrator’s being, the fifth contains the narrator’s desire merge with the wind. The narrator concludes in the fifth stanza with a melancholic tone:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? (lines 57-60)

Themes

The poem is primarily a commentary on history and secondarily a personal poem. Shelley’s life is connected to the seasons, with winter relating to his personal sorrows and spring representing the sorrows’ end. In particular, the poem contains lines related to the death of Shelley’s daughter Clara and its impact on his family. However, the seasons of fall and winter are directly connected to the time after the end of the French Revolution, with aspects of nature relating to the possibility of a future liberty that will bring about a new age for mankind. Together, the personal and historical outlook of the poem contain Shelley’s personal interest in using his poetry to bring about a better future. The symbolism surrounding the future world is related to that in Prometheus Unbound and connecting of history to personal feelings is similar to his To a Skylark.

Shelley believed that poetry in general needs to combine all the transformative aspects of the world, and the Zephyr becomes a manifestation of the destructive forces related to such movements. Although the autumn is seen as a destructive force, it contains elements of future parts of the death to rebirth cycle. Underpinning these views are Shelley’s disbelief in religious system that would punish the rebellious nature of humanity. However, he does believe in a generative force within nature and the poem contains many parallels to Biblical depictions of God. When viewed as a personal poem, the poem is similar to Shelley’s Adonais and Epipsychidion. The persona established in each is not the real Shelley but a mythic version of him that is like Orpheus. This Orpheus image reinforces the poem’s theme of merged creation and destruction, and the narrator’s request to have his leaves taken like the forests’ represents the ivy of poets and be sacrificed like Orpheus.

A central difficulty in the poem is over the ability of a poet to represent something that is without representation. The opening address of the poem casts the Wind/Power as a living entity that is present within the world but Shelley struggled with representing a reply by the Wind/Power. As such, the poem is not an allegory but a similitude and relies on metaphors that connect breath with creativity and energy. However, the poem stresses that the wind is “unseen” except through how it affects the natural world. When describing the wind’s affects on the leaves, the narrator compares the wind to an enchanter, making the action more magical than scientific. This adds to the Wind’s/Power’s mysterious nature, and the narrator focuses on his own uniting with the force, instead of trying to define it, as he says “hear, oh hear.”

The act represents hope that the breath will be similar to the Wind/Power, but it fails in the breath’s transition into speech. Thus, the unity desired within the poem turns into awareness that the imagination is incapable of being able to join the higher power because of the limitations of speech. The poem does proceed to document the various effects of the wind upon nature, and the narrator tries to become a force like the wind. The narrator calls upon the Wind/Power to become one with him and unite the Wind/Power with his imagination. The presentation of imagination in the poem and the narrator’s loss of imaginative power over time is similar to William Wordsworth’s description of imagination fading over time in Ode: Intimations of Immortality. Shelley also describes “a deep, autumnal tone,” which is related to the last stanza of Wordsworth’s ode, and this connection also appears in Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty when the hymn describes the lustre of an autumnal sky. However, Shelley’s use of the image is to reinforce his desire to become a prophet and have his words become the seeds for a future age.

When compared to the Prometheus Unbound collection, “Ode to the West Wind” is related to “An Exhortation” and “To a Sky-Lark” as they deal with Shelley’s libertarian and Utopian thoughts. The ode stands in contrast to the ontological arguments in “The Sensitive Plant” because the revolutionary forces of the world are positively described in the ode. A poet, in the ode, is able to turn to the forces to overcome the problems of the world. The forces provide the promise of a future utopia, which is symbolised by a skylark in “To a Sky-Lark,” and both poems end with a payer in which the narrator seeks to give up himself for the greater power in the universe. In both poems, there is an apocalypse of the self with the poet giving up his humanity and pursues a life of imagination so that he may become capable of creating poetry that describes the future world. Although the poem discusses cycles of destruction and rebirth, the poem discusses the possibility of breaking the cycle and having an eternal spring take over.

Religious themes

The religious aspects of the poem are similar to elements of his other poems, with the prayer directed to the Power relating to Hymn to Intellectual Beauty as a prayer to Intellectual Beauty. In the ode, the Power is the underlying force of the universe that allows for motion within all things and the approach is similar to that in “Mont Blanc.” In the earlier poems, the mountain of “Mont Blanc” is used as an image of eternal progress and light is used in Hymn to Intellectual Beauty to discuss the transcendent Ideal. For “Ode to the West Wind,” wind represents the Power responsible for immediate change in the material world. The wind is connected to the idea of spirit also unseen representing how the cause of motion cannot be known through empiricism because it contains both a literal relationship to Autumn and also the essence of what Autumn represents. However, the relationship between the wind and the Power are more than just through symbolism since they are ontologically related since the Power, the spirit of the wind, and thought are all connected. “Ode to the West Wind” is similar to Shelley’s Queen Mab when the ode denounces superstitious religious beliefs while promoting a natural rebirth cycle.

There are also more traditional Biblical connections in Shelley’s ode. Although there is little evidence to suggest that the form of the poem is connected to the psalms, the description of nature’s destructive powers is similar to the way the Judeo-Christian God. Near the beginning of the poem, the depiction of the wind acting upon the seas is similar to how Psalm 77 describes Jehovah’s relationship to nature, and the responsoral lamentation is similar to those found within the Psalms as they both ask for strength to rise above the destruction. However, the wind is different than traditional depictions of deities because the wind is described as wild and free in addition to being powerful. Furthermore, the narrator’s desire for inspiration lacks the obedient tone of his Biblical counterparts, and it contains a desire to equally enjoy the freedom that the wind embodies. This lack of obedience to a higher power is continued into the description of a new world that is redeemed through thoughts and not through the divine. Thus, the ode replaces traditional Biblical apocalyptic notions with a humanistic version. In a general manner, the use of the ode itself and Shelley’s emphasis on the sublime is connected to the Hebrew tradition, and many writers of Shelley’s day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, argued that the sublime tradition had its roots in the Old Testament. The poem is also connected to the Hebrew tradition in its connection to the Book of Job: the narrator, like Job, cries out in despair and wishes to be dissolved by the wind.

Nature imagery and themes

In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley describes the wind’s effects upon the land, the clouds, and the water. The clouds within the poem are compared to the “clouds” of Heaven and of Ocean, and the clouds the wind is able to move exist between them. However, all aspects of nature are described as dying to form the substance of what the wind moves. Shelley’s use of wind imagery in both “Ode to the West Wind” and “The Cloud” is similar to the same in Erasmus Darwin’s poems, and Darwin’s theories about the atmosphere and his descriptions of meteorological events influenced Shelley. The poem also mixes actual meteorological science with poetic images connected to the science. The description of the clouds in the second stanza as like hair is related to both Shelley’s viewing of Maenad images in Florence and the name “cirrus” (“lock of hair”) being the name used to label the clouds. The use of wind is not limited to just the sky within the poem, but it affects both the land and sea too. The wind affects the trees, the seas, and the clouds like leaves in that it causes each of them to act like they have been shed in some manner. The water goes through an Autumnal like period, and, like the leaves, go through a destructive process in response to the wind’s action.

The use of water imagery is common throughout many of Shelley’s poems. In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley describes Baiae’s bay as “wrinkled” and “unquiet,” which is duplicated in “Ode to Liberty.” This was used again in his poems “Evening Ponte al Mare” and “To Jane. The Recollection.” Similarly Shelley describes underwater vegetation in the ode and many of his works, including Euganean Hills, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples, Prometheus Unbound, Recollection, and The Sensitive Plant. The use of underwater vegetation is related to Shelley’s interest in underwater exploration and connected to his feelings on the imagination. In explaining how the wind is related to the sea, Shelley says that “the vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by he winds which announce it.” There are also human ruins beneath the waters, but the ruins are not described as related to the past. Instead, they are part of the sea’s “sleep” and disconnected from their human origin. The idea is connected to Book 5 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura commentary on human ruins not containing immortality but proof that everything is eroded over time. The sea is also used to demonstrate how the tyranny of past ages is replaced with a beautiful but illusionary form of peace that is ultimately destroyed by the wind.

Critical response

There was little immediate response to the merits of the poem, but John Gibson Lockart, in a September 1820 review in the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, claimed that the poem was, like many in Shelley’s 1820 collection, “abounding in richest melody of versification, and great tenderness of feeling.” The next major review of the poem’s merits followed in 1838; Henry Chorley’ “Author’s of England” claimed that the “Ode to the West Wind” was “of all Shelley’s Lyrics the most individual and passionate (we write, not forgetting the odes to ‘Naples’ and ‘Liberty,’ and the ode to the ‘Skylark’ in which, like the bird, the poet seems to sing ‘at Heaven’s gate,’).”

The next major review came in response to an edition of Shelley’s works edited by Mary Shelley ran in the July 1839 Edinburgh Review. The review analyzed Shelley’s use of the ode in general:

There is a peculiar and artificial workmanship in many of the choric odes of the Greek dramatists, and especially in those of Sophocles, which no one appears to us to have understood or imitated, in modern times, as Shelley has done. It consists in what may perhaps be termed an accumulative succession of ideas, instead of an antithetical one. Each image is connected with those which immediately precede and follow it, not by way of contrasts, but by immediate dependence: each draws on the next–it is a curiously linked chain, not a string of separate pearls; the links being sometimes (not always) divided at intervals by the recurring fall of the strophe.

The reviewer became more specific as he wrote: “The very beautiful ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ is an example of this kind of continuous imagery; and it is remarkable that the metre of the poem is very analogous to the choric arrangement of the ancient ode–far more so than the confused jingle, held together only by recurring rhymes, in which English poets generally seek to imitate the latter.”

Following the 1839 review of Shelley’s reprinted works, multiple reviews were issued in response other late collections of Shelley’s poetry. A review signed “MM” published in the April 1841 issue of The Dial said of the 1840 edition: “The fire of the impassioned poet burns most intensely and purely in his lyrics and smaller pieces, as in the Ode to the West Wind, Lines written in dejection near Naples, the Cloud, and the Stanzas to a Sky-lark. In these he breathed his entire soul.” Orestes Brownson, in the October 1841 Boston Quarterly Review, argued that Prometheus Unbound contained lines “drawn as the hand of a master alone could drawn them” and that “Similar remarks may be made with regard to his other poems, and his fugitive pieces. Some of the latter are prized more highly by critics than his greater efforts; as, for example, the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Lines written in dejection near Naples.'”

In his 1849 book on English Literature, Thomas Budd Shaw declared,

Shelley’s mind was in the highest degree impressionable–nay, almost feminine; and thus we often perceive a want of keeping and relief in the subordinate parts of his diction: the subsidiary or illustrative image is as vivid as that which it is meant to enforce or interpret; and in him we find a perpetual interchange of type and thing typified, as, for instance, in his exquisite ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ where the dead leaves are compared to ghosts flying before the spell of an enchanter.

He went on to argue:

Shakspeare has innumerable examples of this incatenation of metaphors and images: it is impossible to open his plays without seeing plentiful instances of it: it is, indeed, the characteristic of his manner: but in him the secondary, the illustrative, is always subordinate; while in Shelley the ornament perpetually eclipses the thing to be adorned. In short, Shakspeare ‘writes all like a man,’ while Shelley writes like a woman. This singular tendency sometimes renders passages otherwise beautiful almost unintelligible.

He concluded:

But with all these deductions made, the genius of Shelley will not fail to be held by posterity as a wonderful manifestation of power, of grace, and sweetness; and the ode we have just quoted, and the lovely ‘Lines written in the Euganean Hills,’ and that to a ‘Skylark,’ which is the very warbling of the triumphant bird, and the tender beauty of the ‘Sensitive Plant,’ and the magical translations of the ‘Walpurgisnacht’ of Goethe, and a thousand passages in the longer poems, will form for the memory of Shelley a wrath of fadeless flowers worth of him who was the friend of Byron, and the pure apostle of a noble but mistaken philanthropy.

When describing the difference between the language of poetry and prose in an essay for the 1856 British Quarterly Review, Robert Vaughan used the ode as a chief example of poetic language:

Poetry is queen of an enchanted garden, whither Goodman Prose cannot win access, lacking the royal bearing and the shining raiment of its denizens. To take an instance: suppose that a prose writer should address the west wind somewhat as follows… [quoting the first stanza of the ode]… Now here not a word is used nor a construction, which may not be found in ordinary prose. Yet how tumid, how fantastic, how insane would appear such a passage in prose composition!

He continued by arguing:

Because thoughts like these belong to poetry proper, and prose would burst and fly to tatters with them. Such ideas occur to no man while writing prose; but the very act of writing poetry summons them and their kindred in multitudes about the mind which is eminently rich in the poetic faculty. Transport these ‘thick coming fancies’ to their proper clime–restore them to their place in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, and we admire what otherwise a correct taste would assuredly have cancelled.

Later response

Responses during the later 19th century and early 20th century were very positive toward the poem. In an 1861 review of Shelley’s works in The Quarterly Review, the reviewer claimed:

We do not forget the power and passion of the ‘Cenci,’ nor the grand conception of ‘Prometheus.’ These are great works, but they are not faultless. The latter, indeed, contains many passages… which we are bold enough to say are utterly unmeaning. But the ‘Ode to the Skylark,’ ‘Ariel to Miranda,’ the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ and many others of the same kind, are absolutely perfect. They are also peculiar to Shelley. Scarcely any other lyrics combine so many of the highest excellencies of lyrical poetry–so much depth of melody, so much imaginative passion, so subtle a penetration into the most hidden feelings, and so marvellous a grasp of the most evanescent.

Leslie Stephens, in a 1876 essay for the Cornhill Magazine stated: “A different tone breathes in Shelley’s pathetic but rather hectic moralisings, and his lamentations over the departure of the ‘spirit of delight.’ Nowhere has it found more exquisite expression than in the marvellous Ode to the West Wind. These magical verses–his best, as it seems to me–describe the reflection of the poet’s own mind in the strange stir and commotion o a dying winter’s day.” He went on to argue: “They represent, we may say, the fitful melancholy which oppresses a noble spirit when it has recognized the difficulty of forcing facts into conformity with the ideal… Neither Byron nor Shelley can see any satisfactory solution, and therefore neither can reach a perfect harmony of feeling.” Following Stephens, Jonathan Boucher, in the 10 March 1877 Notes and Queries, compared Shelley to John Milton to discuss his “Place In English Literature”: “and it is, I confess, quite unintelligible to me how anyone who possesses an ear for poetical numbers, or an understanding for poetical thought, can dream of comparing Shelley’s lute-like music, exquisite as it is, with Milton’s majestic verses, which roll on like the sound of a great cathedral organ or of the sea itself.” He then referred to specific poems: “Lyrical excellence has, I suppose, attained its utmost perfection in the Ode to the Skylark, the Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, and others of Shelley’s poems; but let us compare these, or Adonais… with some of the grander passages of Paradise Lost… and I think the difference between the genius of Milton and that of Shelley will be at once apparent.”

An essay in the July 1879 Frasier’s Magazine by John Campbell Shairp argued, “Of the lyrics on natural objects the two supreme ones are the Ode on the West Wind and The Skylark. Of this last nothing need be said.” After declaring the melancholy of “The Skylark” as too depressing and not inline with an actual skylark’s song, he went onto claim:

If personal feeling must be inwrought into the living powers of nature, let it be such feeling as is in keeping with the object, appropriate to the time and place. In this spirit is the invocation with which Shelley closes his grand Ode to the West Wind… This ode ends with some vigour, some hope; but that is not usual with Shelley. Everyone must have noticed how almost habitually his intensest lyrics–those which have stated with the fullest swing of rapture–die down, before they close, into a wail of despair.

Later, in the 1880 Macmillan’s Magazine, Stopford Brooke compared the ode with A Vision of the Sea:

We are alone with Nature; I might even say, We see Nature alone with herself. Still greater, more poetic, less sensational, is the approach of the gale in the Ode to the West Wind, where the wind itself is the river on which the forest of the sky shakes down its foliage of clouds… In gathered mass behind, the congregate might of vapours is rising to vault the heaven like a sepulchral dome. Nothing can be closer than the absolute truth to the working of the clouds that fly before the main body of a storm, which is here kept in the midst of these daring comparisons of the imagination.

Samuel Andrews, in 1884 devoted a chapter to Shelley in his book on authors and stated:

There is no poem of Shelley’s so characteristic, none more entirely beautiful and touching, than his ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ In the first three stanzas, with something like supernatural power, the effects of the ‘West Wind’ on the ‘Earth,’ the ‘Air,’ and the ‘Ocea’ respectively are described. Having spoken most wonderfully of its effects on the dead leaves, the clouds, and the waves, he closes the ‘Ode’ with two stanzas which present to my mind a better idea of Shelley than anything else that has been written.

He went on to say, “Shelley himself defines poetry to be ‘the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds,’ and one can easily recognise the truth of this definition in Shelley’s own poety.” In his 1886 biography of Shelley, Edward Dowden claimed,

on a day when the tempestuous west wind was collecting the vapors which pour down the Autumnal rains, Shelley conceived, and in great part wrote, in a wood that skirted the Arno, that ode in which there is a union of lyrical breadth with lyrical intensity unsurpassed in English song–the ‘Ode to the West Wind.’ At sunset on that day the expected tempest came, attended by the magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. The poem is the clarion-cry of hope in the presence of tumultous ruin and inevitable decay.

He continued: “But Shelley dares to welcome the autumnal sadness and wintry bareness, finding in the wild win which sweeps the forest leaves away an exultant harbinger of the awakening year. Harmonizing under a common idea the forces of external nature and the passion of the writer’s individual heart, the stanzas, with all the penetrating power of a lyric, have something almost of epic largeness and granduer.”

Morton Luce, in his 1893 analysis of Tennyson, compared Shelley with Tennyson:

Tennyson has written ‘O that ‘twee possible,’ and ‘Early Spring,’ but Shelley has written the ‘West Wind’ and the ‘Skylark.’ Surely Shelley deserved some phrase of mention–we will not speak of honour–from the reviewer’s pen. If I might select one poem in our literature which represents all the best elements of lyrical poetry seem to be represented, that poem would be Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind.’

He then elaborated:

Now this is a lyric, and mere perfection of form might give it some rank, but notice the many other high qualities that unite to place it among the very finest of its kind. There is the personal element strongly pronounced–a wonderful charm in a lyric… there is prolonged and fine, mighty and prophetic emotion and thought; there is fiery passion and deepest pathos; there is imagery abundant and lovely and wonderful; and as to the manifold music… think of these and all those other elements, just enough reduced to perfect form by just enough of perfect art–and then believe with me that in the poetry of the lyre Tennyson has another rival besides Keats.

Following Luce, Richard Garnett, in a December 1894 English Illustrated Magazine essay, analyzed Shelley’s time in Italy and argued “the number of poems professedly descriptive of Italian scenery increases, and more and more of the imagery of his more important poems is derived from Italy. One of the most remarkable instances is the ‘Ode to the West Wind’.”

Following in the 1896 The New Review, Maxwell Gray compared “Ode to the West Wind” to Wordsworth’s An Evening Thought and Three Years She Grew:

In [Wordsworth’s] poems, the devout appreciation of the super-sensuous vitality of Nature is both lofty and noble in expression, as pellucid and refreshing as a mountain brook flowing over a pebbly bed. But even this, admirable as it is, cannot stir and exalt like Shelley’s impassioned plunge into the very soul of Nature in ‘Ode wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being!’ Such likes as ‘If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear’… are to the cold and lofty contemplative bard’s An Evening Thought, and Three Years She Grew, as a psalm to a sermon, as a clarion blast to a shepherd’s pipe.

He continued:

The passionless, unemotional Wordsworth reveres Nature from afar, the impassioned Shelley adores her in a communion so close and intimate as to absorb the adorer, and blend and extinguish him in the adored. Nor is this passion in any degree febrile or spasmodic; it is always present, if not at its highest pitch, yet latent, pervading every allusion to the things of Nature and supply an undercurrent to the things of man, while the contemplative reverence of the colder poet is often conspicuously absent, and the primrose, far from being nothing more than a yellow primrose, to him is even less.

In discussing the Shelley’s time in Italy, Charles Harold Herford in his 1897 study of Romanticism said,

The first year of their residence there and among the hills hard by, was preeminently the season of his lyrics of Nature. They are indeed closely linked with the great lyrical drama of 1819. The Cloud, The Skylark, The West Wind, Arethusa, The Witch of Atlas, The Sensitive Plant, carry on in detached strains of even richer beauty the elemental symphonies of the Prometheus. His master of form was now complete. Plastic definiteness and delicacy of colouring; clear and thrilling melodies, yet full of waywardness and witchery, replaced his often vague and impalpable music. Nowhere else can we study so effectively the peculiar stamp of Shelley’s imagination as in these marvels of ‘poet’s poetry.’

He went on to add: “The greatest of these lyrics, the Ode to the West Wind, combines with the highest degree of this imaginative quality the two other characteristic notes of Shelley’s lyrics–personal despondency and prophetic passion.” Also in 1897, Francis Palgrave wrote,

The note here audible, as we have said, is Shelley’s peculiar contribution to landscape poetry, though how exactly to name it–whether personifying Animism, or Pantheistic–I know not. It is a note that pervades the whole Ode to the West Wind; perhaps the most powerful of his pictures from Nature, the most finished, the most satisfying in its unity… Partial quotation, however, does this great lyric wrong.

George Edward Woodberry, in his 1899 analysis of the human spirit, declared of poetry: “The poet’s method is that of life itself, which is first awakened by the beauty without to thought and feeling; he expresses the state evoked by that beauty and absorbing it. He identifies himself with the objects before him through his joy in them and entering there makes nature translucent with his own spirit. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind is the eminent example of such magical power. He continued with an analysis of the ode:

The three vast elements, earth, air, and water, are first brought into a union through their connection with the west wind; and, the wind still being the controlling centre of imagination, the poet, drawing all this limitless and majestic imagery with him by gradual and spontaneous approaches identifies himself at the climax of feeling with the object of his invocation… and thence the poem swiftly falls to its end in a lyric burst of personality, in which, while the body of nature is retained, there is only a spiritual meaning.

He went on to conclude: “This is the highest reach of the artist’s power of conveying through the concrete image the soul in its pure emotional life; and in such poetry one feels that the whole material world seems lent to man to expand his nature and escape from the solitude in which he is born to that divine union to which he is destined.”

The positive reception of “Ode to the West Wind” continued after World War 1. Paul de Reul, in a lecture given on 13 June 1922 in honor of Shelley’s centenary, explained:

If, instead of a mere fragment of his style, I were asked to quote a whole single poem most characteristic of his genius, I should of course choose a short one, but on reflection I find that I must quote two poems. As to the first, the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ everybody will agree. By its fierce impetus, its all-embracing range, the Ode is indeed representative, especially as it combines with Shelley’s love for Nature his old unfailing love for humanity.

In 1933, Benjamin Kurtz described connections between “Ode to the West Wind” and Prometheus Unbound when he argued, “And as in he latter the story of that suffering, and of triumph over it, is idealized, so also in the Ode the pain, although it is permitted an intensely personal utterance, is nevertheless idealized, and then resolved in a splendid appeal to conduct, which recalls the exhortation at the close of the play.” Douglas Bush claimed, in 1937, that “The Sensitive Plant” contained “beautiful picture-making, but the quiet miniature falls far short of the cosmic personification, the demonic rush and power, of the simile in the Ode to the West Wind.” In 1941, G. Wilson Knight claimed that “Stanza II has a magnificent image of riotous elemental confusion” and that the poem was “perhaps the greatest of Shelley’s shorter poems, far outdistancing The Cloud and Skylar, with a prophetic and moral energy more impressive than happier revelations. In its wild speed and deep undertones, its balance of serenities and rising, gathering power, its massive swaying movement and fury of impact alike, the poem is a masterpiece of orchestration.”

F. R. Leavis, in a 1945 analysis said, defended Shelley’s status as a quality poet but criticised the imagery “Ode to the West Wind”:

Shelley, whose genius is not in dispute, preaches, in the Defence of Poetry, a doctrine that makes the writing of Poety as much a matter of passive submission to the emotional tides, and as little a matter of active intelligence, as possible. Consistently with this doctrine, a representative expression of his genius such as the Ode to the West Wind depends for its success on our being so carried along in the plangeant sweep of emotion tha we ask no questions.

He continued with examples from the poem: “To the questions that propose themselves when we do stop and consider– Can ‘loose clouds’ really be ‘shed’ on the ‘stream of the wind’ ‘like eath’s decaying leave’s? What are the ‘tangled boughs of heaven and ocean’? and so on–there is no better reply than that the questions don’t propose themselves when we are responding properly (as it requires an effort not to do).” Angela Leighton responded to Leavis’s concerns in 1984: “To attempt to ‘grasp’ their workings as objects of sight or touch, as Leavis does, is to misunderstand the aesthetic purpose behind them. For clouds are like leaves, not in appearance but in their similar subjection to the action of the wind.”

Post-WW2 response

The positive responses to the ode continued after World War 2. In 1950, Leon Vivante expressed the relationship between the ode and Shelley’s understanding of the creative principle:

Thus Shelley attained in four most memorable instances the closes and happiest contact with spirit, or more exactly, was absorbed in it, identified with it, knowing it. We may say that in the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ spirit is discovered and expressed, above all, as freedom; in the poem ‘To a Skylark,’ as perpetual novelty; in the Epipsychidion, as Oneness; and in the quietness of the forest near Pisa, as ‘self-enshrined’ eternity.

In 1960, Desmond King-Hele argued that

the other poems alone would have been enough to make the book famous, for they included Ode to the West Wind, The Cloud, the Skylark, The Sensitive Plant and the Ode to Liberty. The first three of these stand together, an abiding monument to Shelley’s passion for the sky… In all three the metre is unusual, yet not unbecoming. In all three the tone is subjective, yet not undisciplined: for if we lump the three together we find a tough core of exact science.

King-Hele later claims that

The verse technique and structure of the Ode to the West Wind could scarcely be improved: it is he most fully orchestrated of Shelley’s poems, and consequently the most difficult to read aloud. The ever-fluctuating tempo and the artful random pauses in the long lines reflect the lawless surging of the wind and its uneasy silences. This device is not overworked: the wonder is that Shelley could use it all when grappling with the problems of the terza rima and operating within a rigid structural framework.

The ode’s place as one of Shelley’s best poems was emphasised during the 1960s. In 1961, Harold Bloom characterised the poem as Shelley’s “greatest ode” and labelled the fifth stanza as a “marvellous stanza.” He went on to claim, in response to Shelley’s desccription of the mind as a “fading coal,” that

The mind of Shelley, in creating his Ode, is such a coal or hearths, never quite faded, never altogether extinguished. the west wind awakens it to a transitory brightness, but the poem’s color still comes from a power within the mind. The prophecy is Shelley’s own, for it must past through his lips if it is to reawaken man as well as earth, and his lips modify even as they sound forth the wind’s song. With Isaiah the prophet, the agnostic poet of the Ode to the West Wind could have said that a live coal from the divine altar had touched his lips.

Later in the decade, Donald Reiman, in 1969, stressed how the ode and Shelley’s other great works influenced literature:

The figures of Prometheus, Queen Mab, Count Cenci and Beatrice, and such natural phenomena as Mont Blanc, the west wind, a cloud, or a skylark evoke in literate English-speaking people conceptions that are vividly informed by Shelley’s imagination as the characters of Falstaff, Richard III, Romeo and Julie are by Shakespeare’s, those of Comus, Adam and Eve, and Satan by Milton’s, and the whole panoply of Canterbury pilgrimages by Chaucer’s… The measure of Shelley’s success will remain, however, in the number of elements of public thought and discourse upon which he has placed the ineradicable stamp of his imagination.

The emphasis of the poem’s relationship within Shelley’s poety and English poetry as a whole was discussed during the 70s and 80s. Judith Chernaik, in 1972, argued that ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is a central utterance not only of Shelley’s poetry but of Romanticism, one of the great evocations of the sublime in nature and an impassioned expression of the poet’s drive to be identified with and absorbed into elemental forces, whether they be creative or destructive” and that “the most distinctive quality of the poem is its revolutionary ardor; the whole poem drives towards its final prophecy, which expresses the essential impulse of revolutionary idealism.” She later adds, “The remarkable achievement of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is the adequacy of the secular image for divinity-power and freedom-in its effortless fusion of nature and myth. The very inclusiveness of the natural scene contributes to the religious character of the invocation.” In 1974, Kenneth Cameron declared the poem as “The most famous of Shelley’s lyrics.” In 1984, Angela Leighton claimed, “The ode is in fact a conscious and skillful expression of that divided aesthetic which is the ruling motif of so much of Shelley’s work.” This was followed by Jerrold Hogle, who pointed out in 1988 that “Ode to the West Wind” is “Shelley’s most anthologized poem.”

Recent criticism focused on particular components within the ode and how they affect the poem’s greatness. In 1997, Hugh Roberts used “Ode to the West Wind” and “The Cloud” to argue that “Shelley is perhaps the most ‘meteorological’ of English poets. That Shelley has some scientific interest in meteorological phenomena is evident, but whatever the state of his knowledge, it neither accounts for nor helps us to interpret his employment of aerial imagery and his passionate longing to become the wind.” Later in 2005, James Bieri argued, “Ode to the West Wind marked a dramatic growth in Shelley’s poetic expression combined with acute observations of natural phenomena, including types of clouds and the interactive effects of wind and ocean currents.”