Tone plays a most pivotal role in the conveyance of meaning in Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. While many other factors contribute to the meaning of the work as a whole and how the work is perceived, tone is the dominant device manipulated by Shelley to portray his anguish and internal sense of inferiority. However short his life may have been, Shelley was able to accomplish more in his thirty years than most people accomplish in a lifetime. He attended Oxford University, he rescues his first wife, Harriet, from the grip of her abusive father, and had a nice family with her (Marshall 729-741). Many things influenced his poetry such as ideas of revolution and a utopian society. He included many natural motifs from his childhood including water, trees, and grass to symbolize the simplistic power these things possess (Tomalin 1-30). Alongside his achievements are his shortcomings. Soon after he was admitted to Oxford he was expelled due to his openly atheistic views. In consequence, his family disowned him; however, he still maintained his idealistic and optimistic view towards life. Next he ran away from his wife with Mary Godwin. Leaving behind his suicidal wife and his young children, he married Mary and had a few children with her (Marshall 729-741). Pain and suffering accompanied Shelley during these years, but the fault is all his own. These self-inflicted tortures greatly affected his poetry, morphing his perspective into romantic understanding from his previous view of naïve hope (Tomalin 1-30).
Even as a man of brilliance, Shelley struggled greatly with inferiority complexes and a fear of the inability to express himself. Obviously he had nothing to fear, because his poems would not be cherished today if he w...
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...maintain a state of progress. Seek a higher power for assistance if your unable open up on your own. Beg the Wind to clear your mind as it “loose(s) the clouds” from clogging up the beautiful blue sky. Perfection cannot be achieved without the contribution from everyone part of society.
Works Cited
1. Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Views: Percy Bysshe Shelley . New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1-22. Print.
2. Tomalin, Claire. Shelley and his world. New York: Charles Scribner’s sons, 1980. 1-30,122-124. Print.
3. "TTM's Guidance for Studying English Literature." freehelpstoenglishliterature . Awesome inc., 01 Jan 2009. Web. 4 Apr 2011. .
4. Marshall, Kristine. Elements of literature. Austin: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1997. 729-741. Print.
Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein. The Mary Shelley Reader. Ed. Betty T. Bennet & Charles E. Robinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1999.
"Frankenstein." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker. Vol. 170. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W. W.
A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind; and, bounding with joy, I communicated my discovery to my father. My father looked carelessly at the title page of my book, and said, "Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash…. It is even possible that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. But the cursory glance my father had taken of my volume by no means assured me that he was acquainted with its contents; and I continued to read with the greatest avidity.” (Shelley 22)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Multibility.” The Norton Anthology English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. 647.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Maurice Hindle. Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. "Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve." Reprinted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Norton Critical Edition. 1979; New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 225-240.
Baldick, Chris. In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Print.
English Literature. By Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. 8th ed. Vol. 2. New York:
Percy Bysshe Shelley is a very influential Romantic poet, who is part of what is the second generation of Romantic poets, the “young hellions”. He is catagorized with Lord Byron and John Keats, who are also important poets during their times. Shelley, like his other two comrades, died at a young age, as they lived fast and hard. He had died in a boating accident, when he was 29 years old. Shelley had a few notable poems, such as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark. As a Romantic poet, Shelley often used connected nature to spirit, and did that using examples of personification in his poems Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark.
The last two stanza exemplified Shelley's definition on the role of a poet. He argues that "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of anotherand of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is imagination." In the "Ode to the west wind," he acts accomplished his goal by representing the pain and pleasure of human and even nature. He resorts to imagination in order to accomplish his goal and full exemplified his role as a poet.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.