Percy Busshe Shelly was born into the aristocracy, his father being a Whig member of Parliament. His feelings about poetry was that a true poet needed a soothing and calm mind to write. A remark by him “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” suggests his awareness of linguistics as a tool for independent freedom as well as a vehicle for political and social subjugation. His main concern in his writing was to explain the moral function of poetry. I do not believe that it was his intention to actually be a legislator or government official.
Shelley looked at poetry like a painter would look at his art, as a thing of beauty and in “Ode to the West Wind” the first part of the poem reflects the power and the role of the wind as both “destroyer and preserver”. In the fifth stanza, Shelley transforms the wind into a metaphor of his own art while asking for Spring to hurry up and arrive. The Spring is a metaphor for imagination, liberty, or morality, all the things that Shelly wished to bring out in reader’s minds. He wanted people to be able to choose for themselves what their ‘art’ was to be. He invokes metaphors from nature to characterize his relationship to his art.
Literature Rocks 