Shelley

During Romanticism, there were two generation of poets. The first generation includes Wordsworth and
Coleridge, the second generation includes Byron, Keats and Shelley; the poets of the first generation
weren’t interested in the reality of their time, while the poets of the second generation was more
interested in the reality of their time. The Romantic poets had in common some characteristics like:
concern for the feelings, love for nature and overall love for poetry; but they used them in a personal and
original way. The preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads is regarded as the Manifesto of the English
Romantic Movement but not every poet followed most things established in the Preface. The best way to
express feelings is poetry but during the romantic period, novels were written.

Three types of novels developed:

- The gothic novel with Mary Shelley who wrote “Frankenstein”;

- The novel of manners with Jane Austen who wrote “Pride and prejudice” and “Clueless”

- The historical novel with Walter Scott who wrote “Ivanhoe”, and Manzoni who wrote “The
Betrothed”.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Sussex in 1792; he was expelled from Oxford University because he wrote
a pamphlet, titled “The necessity of Atheism”, challenging the existence of God. In 1818, Shelley left
England and went to live in Italy, in voluntary exile, during which he composed the “Ode to the West
Wind”, “to a Skylark”, “the Cenci”. He died in 1822, during a storm in which he drowned near Livorno. His
grave is in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

If we compare Shelley with Wordsworth, they had a different conception of poetry: for Wordsworth poetry
must express feelings not immediately feelings but emotion recollected in tranquillity and modified by
imagination, for Shelley poetry must express immediate feelings, in fact he compose his “Ode to the West
Wind” while he was in Florence, in a wood, in a windy day.

Wordsworth and Shelley exalted nature. They had a Pantheistic conception of nature, but unlike
Wordsworth, who saw God in nature, Shelley believed in a supernatural force but this force wasn’t God, in
fact he was atheist. Shelley was a follower of the philosopher William Godwin, who preached the necessity
of Atheism, but unlike Godwin, Shelley was less radical because Shelley believed in a better future life.

The two pillars of Shelley’s poetry were love and freedom. In fact, Shelley rejected the society of his time
that, according to him, was dominated by tyranny and oppression. He advocated a new society dominated
by love and freedom (a sort of utopia); he wanted to change the society and he admired the French
revolution. For Shelley poetry has a moral function, in fact he wanted to change the society of his time
through his lines: in the ode to the west wind, he asks the wind to spread his lines among mankind.
 Emily Dickinson

After the American Revolution, there was a difference between the north and the south of the USA, as
regards economy:

 The North was more industrialized and was inhabited by bankers, financiers, puritans who
colonised the East coast.
 The economy of the South was based on the plantation of cotton, where slaves, who came from
Africa, were employed

Slavery had been abolished in the north but not in the south, so a war started between the north and the
south for the abolition of slavery under the president Abraham Lincoln; the war ended with the defeat of
the south so slavery was abolished.

From a literary point of view, in the past, literature had been used to spread political and religious ideals,
after the civil war, for the first time literature is used for aesthetic purposes. This was possible thanks to a
group of autors who gave life to the so called “American Renaissance”, this expression was coined by the
modern critic Matthiessen; some of this writers were Melville, the author of Moby Dick, Whitman, Thoreau,
Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was born into a middle-class Puritan family in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830. She
received her university education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she refused to declare her
faith in public, as was required by Puritan tradition, and then she decided to interrupt her studies and
return home; she never left her house except for some walks in the garden.

Letter writing became her only form of contact with the world; she writes her poems for the purpose of
communication rather than publication; in fact, during her lifetime she allowed only seven poems, her
poems were published after her death.

Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysical poets and writers like Emily Bronte, influenced Emily Dickinson’s
poetry; she combined all these influences in an original way, detached from the gr eats events and
contrasts of the age including the campaign for the abolition of slavery, the Civil War and the beginning of
the campaign for women’s rights. She possessed the genius to transform a private circumstance into one of
general relevance. Her themes are the eternal issues of life such us death, love, loss, desire, time, sadness,
despair, God, nature and man’s relation to the universe. She was interested in spiritual experience and
obsessed by death, in particular she wrote about death from the point of view of the person dying or of a
witness and about her own death. Death is seen as a liberation from a state of anxiety and as the place
where the human being tends in order to become one with the universe.

The theme of love is seen from ecstatic and sensual celebration to despair due to separation. In her poems,
the speaking voice becomes a bee, which symbolised the poet, a spider, a bird, a blade of glass, in a vision
of the world where macrocosm is fitted into microscopic structure.

Her poems tend to be short and organised in simple quatrains, they do not have a title and their language is
characteristic by monosyllabic words. Dickinson makes use of rhetorical devices such as rhymes, assonance,
alliteration, metaphor and ellipses; the tone can be ironic, cheerful or melancholic. She used the dash, that
leads the reader to meditate on what he had read before and invited him to fill in the blanks.

Emily Dickinson broke away from the stereotype of poetry even if her poetry is concerned with questions,
intuitions and moods; while her free use of rhyme anticipated modern experimentation, her exploration of
universal issues through everyday imagery makes her the forerunner of the minimalist writers of the 1980s.
Ode to the west wind

The “ Ode to the West Wind” was composed by Shelley while he was in a wood near Florence during a
stormy day because for Shelley poetry must express feelings.

The ode is made up of five stanzas and every stanza is made up of four triplets and a final couplet, it’s
similar to the sonnet poem but the English sonnet is made up of three quatrains and a final couplet.

Shelley uses the “ Dante’s Terza rima” ( scheme ABA-BCB-CDC-DED-EE).

The ode is a strange combination between the sonnet and the “Dante’s terza rima”.

1st Stanza.

In the first stanza the poet is describing the effects of the wind on the land. The symbols are the deadly
leaves. In the first stanza Shelley expresses the moral function of the poetry because thanks to poetry and
thanks to his lines he wants change the society of his time; he didn’t accept the society of his time that in
his opinion it was dominated by tyranny, oppression, etc.

2nd Stanza

In the second stanza the poet describes the effects of the wind in the sky and the symbols are the clouds.

3rd Stanza

In the third stanza the poet describes the effect of the wind on the sea, in particular on the Mediterranean
sea and on the Atlantic ocean. The symbols of this stanza are the waves.

4th Stanza

In the fourth stanza the poet moves his attention from the wind to his person with a pessimistic tone. The
poet says he was falling under the sorrow of his life, he suffered, he lost blood (symbol of pain) because the
poet lost his first wife who committed a suicide and his two children; so it’s a negative period, the poet felt
weak because of these sad events.

5th Stanza

Here, we can find Shelley’s optimism and the poet’s task: he hopes that the wind can spread his verses
among mankind, in order to influence it. We can see here that for Shelley, poetry has a moral function, as
he wants to change society with it. Winter and spring refer to seasons, but in reality, winter represents
Shelley’s society, dominated by tyranny and oppression while spring refers to Shelley’s future society,
dominated by love and freedom. The final couplet symbolizes his faith in mankind.