Form, History, and the Politics of Lyric in Shelley's 'ode to the west Wind'

• Published in: ELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 723 - 765
• Main Author: Powell, Eric Tyler
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Argument structure; British & Irish literature; English literature; Historicity; History; Lyric poetry; Modernism; Poetics; Poetry; Poets; Politics; Poststructuralism; Reading; Semiotics; Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822); Sonnets; Speech acts; Writers
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2023.a907207

The protocol of lyric reading is well-known: there is a speaker of the poem, who should not be confused with the poet; the dramatic situation of the speech act must be gleaned as context for interpretation and analysis; the poem itself should be the focus of interpretation, without considering the biography or intentions of the poet; historical context is only relevant insofar as it is "in" the poem itself. Mill's examples of his two kinds of poetry in the essay are Wordsworth (the poet of culture) and Shelley (the poet of nature), and Shelley is the "most striking example ever known of the poetic temperament," that is, the lyric poet.8 Readings of poems and poets have their own historical specificity, and the case of Shelley is no exception: few canonical poets have had their stock rise and fall as rapidly and dramatically. Pottle's student Harold Bloom carried forward the line that Shelley was a "passionately religious poet," reading the Ode in relation to the Old Testament prophets and Martin Buber.9 The 1980s marked the beginning of a Shelley renaissance: post-structuralist readings found the arbitrary play of language and (dis) figuration where previous criticism had found flaws or confusion; historicist and new historicist readings found in Shelley a poet deeply concerned with his own historicity; formalist readings found a poet engaged in thinking about and experimenting with form and genre; and political accounts sought to recover Shelley's (proto-) socialist or anarchist politics.10 Through all of these different critical orientations and modes of reading, however, it can be argued that the "Ode to the West Wind" has maintained the privileged position granted to it by Leavis. A strong version of this argument would be to say that Shelley understood the formal structure of what Abrams would later call the Greater Romantic Lyric, and quite deliberately produced a "variation" on the form in the Ode.