The Path of Shelleys Winged Thoughts :: Writing Poetry Papers

The Path of Shelleys Winged Thoughts physical composition much of his poetry on the Continent, away from England where his readership lived, and dying only tercet years after the composition of much of his best work, Percy Bysshe Shelley had little check into over the contagion of his poetry. At the time of its initial publication, Ode to the West cheat appeared as part of a larger volume, entitled Prometheus Unbound, also the construct of its signature, featured numbers which overshadowed Ode to the West hook. Following Shelleys untimely death, his wife, bloody shame Shelley, dedicated herself to organizing and publishing Shelleys work, and is largely responsible for the transmission of Shelleys work that occurred posthumously.Piecing together a publication and composition history is in particular befitting for Percy Bysshe Shelleys Ode to the West Wind, for the theme of transmission of lyric and thoughts is enlace conspicuously within the lines of the poem itself. In the final stanza of the poem, the poet beseeches the West Wind, a natural and divine life-force, to Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/ worry withered leaves to quicken a new birth (lines 63-64) Shelley continues to address transmission in the next tercet, writing Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind (lines 66-67). These imperatives stop over Shelleys lofty expectations for the dissemination of his words however, when the actual path his words followed is analyse, great disparity emerges between the ways in which Shelley envisioned his poem entering the world, and the way it actually reached an audience. While to sidereal day Ode to the West Wind is widely known, and respected as one of Shelleys best poems, during the a few(prenominal) years the poem and poet lived simultaneously, Shelleys visions for the transmission of Ode to the West Wind were limited, and boasted no divine intervention.Shelleys notebooks and preserved manuscr ipts provide much information round the composition history behind Ode to the West Wind. In mid-October, 1819, Shelley walked along the river Arno, fixed near Florence, watched the autumn wind rustle and sweep the leaves strewn about the ground, and draw inspiration for the composition of Ode to the West Wind. Shelleys own note include with the published version of the poem states, This poem was conceivedone a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the va streams which pour down the autumnal rains. (Wu, 859) His notebooks show the meticulous level of observation with which Shelley studied this scene one page of preliminary notes contains a drawing of a