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Percy Bysshe ShelleyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“England in 1819” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)
This is one of Shelley’s earlier, more overtly political poems. He uses the form of a Shakespearean sonnet to savagely critique the English monarchy. The visceral language drips with disgust: “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, / But leechlike to their fainting country cling / Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow” (Lines 4-6). Shelley wrote this poem in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre, a clash between English soldiers and peaceful protestors resulting in 15 civilian deaths.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (1819)
One of Keats’s most iconic poems and one of the most iconic Romantic odes, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” puts the Romantic obsession with art and imagination on full display. Like Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind,” Keats elevates a mundane subject with inventive language, building on his images to make observations about the human condition.
“Address to A Child During A Boisterous Winter Evening” by Dorothy Wordsworth (1815)
This poem by fellow Romantic poet (and sister of the much-more-famous William Wordsworth) Dorothy Wordsworth bears some strange similarities to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry
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Adonais
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Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude
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Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
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Mutability
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Ozymandias
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Prometheus Unbound
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Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem
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The Masque of Anarchy
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The Triumph of Life
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To a Skylark
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