A Critical Study of Shelleye’s “Ode to the West Wind”

Abstract

Abstract Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is an ostensible romantic poet, who has imparted the English literature with his innovative and immaculate works, that bear witness of his greatness and mastery in writing poetry. Thus, he reflects and outstanding rejection for injustice and oppression in his society through his revolutionary forms. So he is “grown up with violently revolutionary ideas, which contrasted with those of his fathers.”1Shelley’s realization of life is so mature since his early years of study, moreover, he calls for human rights and justice. Thus, he “saw the petty tyranny of school masters and schoolmate as representative of man’s general inhumanity to man, and dedicated his life to a war against all injustice and oppression.”2He refuses to accept life as it is lived and tries to convince the others of the absence of any necessity for doing so. believing that life would be beautiful and an experienced governed by love , “if tyranny, cruelty and the corruption of man by man through jealousy and the exercise of power are removed.”3 Shelley urges the people to release their potential power that could change their status in life, so he calls upon them to:Rise like lions after slumberIn unvanquishable number!Shake your chains to earth, like dewWhich in sleep had fallen on youYe are many, they are few! 4Being strongly concerned with the imaginative faculty purporting to the desired aspect ever sought unrelentingly by active minds, Shelley believes that “the moral customs of a particular era are the result of imaginative vision of great men, and he discovers the ideal aspect of other people which are no already embodied in existing moral codes”5