The Path of Shelley's 'Winged Thoughts'

Piecing together a publication and composition history is particularly befitting for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” for the theme of transmission of words and thoughts is interlaced conspicuously within the lines of the poem itself. In the final stanza of the poem, the poet beseeches the West Wind, a natural and divine life-force, to “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/ Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” (lines 63-64) Shelley continues to address transmission in the next tercet, writing “Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” (lines 66-67). These imperatives contain Shelley’s lofty expectations for the dissemination of his words; however, when the actual path his words followed is studied, great disparity emerges between the ways in which Shelley envisioned his poem entering the world, and the way it actually reached an audience. While today “Ode to the West Wind” is widely known, and respected as one of Shelley’s best poems, during the few years the poem and poet lived simultaneously, Shelley’s visions for the transmission of “Ode to the West Wind” were limited, and boasted no divine intervention.

Shelley’s notebooks and preserved manuscripts provide much information about the composition history behind ‘Ode to the West Wind.” In mid-October, 1819, Shelley walked along the river Arno, located near Florence, watched the autumn wind rustle and sweep the leaves strewn about the ground, and drew inspiration for the composition of “Ode to the West Wind.” Shelley’s own note included with the published version of the poem states, “This poem was conceived…one a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains.” (Wu, 859) His notebooks show the meticulous level of observation with which Shelley studied this scene; one page of preliminary notes contains a drawing of a winged seed, a natural entity with the potential to be moved across the earth by the spring wind, as his own words from the poem would move, could Shelley achieve the highest form of transmission available to the seed.

The manuscripts and notebooks reveal the evolution of structure and content that occurred before Shelley composed his ode in its finalized five-sonnet form. The original notebook copy of “Ode to the West Wind” is particularly difficult to decipher due to the Italian writing, entitled Una Favola, running horizontally from top to bottom of the page underneath the drafts of the poem. Of the variations to the text which transpired, the reconfiguration of the final line, and the terms of address indicating an audience, stand out as some of the most significant. The concluding line of the poem in its initial form read, “When Winter comes Spring lags not far behind.” (Rodgers, 228) By the final draft that Shelley sent to his publisher, the line had morphed into, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Ending the poem with a question instead of a statement has the affect of incorporating the reader into the poem more by making him consider how to answer the question based on the image of the Wind presented in earlier stanzas. The rhetorical nature of the question also adds a closing element of optimism to the poem.

An additional significant compositional change occurred with the omission of the terms “Oh friends,” and “Dear friends” in the final draft. Study of Shelley’s notebooks show that in the preliminary drafts of “Ode to the West Wind” Shelley wrote, “Oh friends, if when my ___ has ebbed away/ One spark be unextinguished of that hearth/ Kindled in…” (Forman, 172) The finalized version has no trace of Shelley addressing an audience referred to as “friends.” The result is a much more personal poem for the poet/narrator wherein Shelley is addressing the divine force on his own, and the reading audience becomes a collective witness of a poet’s desperate, private moment. “Ode to the West Wind” was never published on its own, but in August of 1820 was first published in London, as part of larger volume entitled Prometheus Unbound. The feature poem of this volume was a four-act play for which the larger collection of poems was named. The volume led off with “Prometheus Unbound,” and “Ode to the West Wind” and other poems followed. Information contained at the end of a letter Shelley wrote on May 14th, 1820 in Pisa, to one of his editors, Edmund Ollier, indicates that Shelley cared more about “Prometheus” than the other poems included in the volume. He wrote, “I ought to say that I send you poems in a few posts, to print at the end of ‘Prometheus,’ better fitted for that purpose than any in your possession.” (Garnett, 138) The offhanded nature of this statement gives the impression that Shelley’s aspirations for the reception of this collection of poems, including “Ode to the West Wind,” were to a lesser degree than those voiced within “Ode to the West Wind,” the poem of the collection that directly addresses transmission.

While “Ode to the West Wind” took a seat of secondary importance in its publication alongside “Prometheus Unbound,” there is evidence to suggest that Shelley expected some audience for “Ode to the West Wind.” As Stephen Curran points out in his essay, “Adonais in Context,” the last line of Shelley’s poem “Adonais” reads, “The breath whose might I have invoked in song/Decends on me,” and is a direct reference to “Ode to the West Wind.” It is the only instance is all of Shelley’s published work in which Shelley references his own writing. Curran comments, “For Shelley to invoke his “Ode to the West Wind” is both a measure of his confidence in the artistic achievement of his elegy and a challenge to the knowledgeable in his contemporary audience.” In other words, Shelley could reference “Ode to the West Wind” in “Adonais” because he knew the strength of his own work in “Ode to the West Wind,” and knew that the readership for one would read the other. (Curran, 176)

Despite this example, further letters speaking to Shelley’s limited expectations for the transmission of Prometheus Unbound exist. On February 16, 1821, from Pisa Shelley wrote to Edmund Ollier, “For ‘Prometheus; I expect and desire no great sale.”(Garnett, 154) A little over a year later, in April of 1822, while writing to a friend John Gisborne, Shelley commented, “ You know I don’t think much about reviews, nor of the fame they give, nor that they take away. It is absurd in any to criticize ‘Adonais,’ and still more to pretend that the verses are bad. ‘Prometheus’ was never intended for more than five or six persons.” (Garnett, 208) Whether Shelley truly meant this, or was responding defensively to less than optimal sale of his work is unknown. Shelley’s current day notoriety, and “Ode to the West Wind” show that, regardless, Shelley far exceeded the expectations voiced here.

Because Shelley was living in Italy in 1819, but was writing for an English audience, he had little control over the transmission of his poem once it left for publication, and the technical aspects of moving his poem out to an audience proved challenging. Outside the realm of Shelley’s poetic mind, the dissemination of the words contained in “Ode to the West Wind” fell in the hands of Charles and Edmund Ollier, Shelley’s publishers, in London whose operation had only begun in 1817. The Olliers worked in conjunction with magazine editor William Blackwood to promote Prometheus Unbound. To increase publicity for Shelley, Charles Ollier convince Blackwood to review Prometheus Unbound immediately after its publication in order to include the review in the next month’s issure of Blackwood’s Magazine.

Letters exchanged in 1820, reveal that despite the efforts of the Olliers and Blackwood, Shelley was concerned about the transmission of his poems. “I am afraid,” Shelley wrote, “that I to a certain degree am in (Ollier’s) power; there being no other bookseller, upon whom I can depend for publishing any of my work.” (Robinson, 200) In another letter which quickly followed, Shelley expressed similar concern for the publishing mode to which he was confined, writing, “I wish to talk to you about Ollier- It seems that I have no other alternative but to keep in with him, he having so many of my writings in his possession.” (Robinson, 200) For a poet who had envisioned a divine life force swooping up his words and carrying them across creation, the confines of an earthly publishing company were distasteful.

An 1832 publication of Prometheus Unbound proves the legitimacy of Shelley’s concerns about misprinting and erroneous transmission of his poetry. In 1823, the Olliers, along with the publishers Simpkin and Marshall, attempted to capitalize on the potential allure of Shelley’s death by printing a new ‘collected edition’ of Shelley’s works. However, this edition consists of nothing new from other collections the Olliers had printed than new title page, which reads in part, “POETICAL PIECES,/ BY THE LATE/ PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY;/ CONTAINING/ PROMETHEUS UNMASKED (sic), A LYRICAL DRAMA;/ WITH OTHER POEMS.” (Robinson, 210) This volume is merely a reproduction of the original Prometheus Unbound, with a new, though faulty, title page.

The dissemination of Shelley’s poems took a drastic turn in 1822, when, only two years after the publication of “Ode to the West Wind” in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley drowned in a storm while sailing on his schooner, the Don Juan. The publication history of most of Shelley’s work, including “Ode to the West Wind,” from this point on revolves around his wife, Mary Shelley, who played a crucial role in delivering the work of her late husband to a greater audience. Her words contained in a private letter to Mrs. Gisborne, written on August 15, 1822, reveal her desire to advance Shelley’s name and fame even after his death: “All that might have been bright in my life is now despoiled. I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child, and myself worthy to join him.” (Garnett, 240) In 1824, Mary issued the production of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and in 1839 Mary coordinated the four-volume collection entitled, The Poetical Works of P.B.S.

The importance of Mary’s work to the transmission of Shelley’s poems is explained by H. Buxton Forman, a member of the Bibliophile Society who deciphered and transcribed the notebooks of Shelley from their originals kept in the W. K. Bixby Library. Forman comments, “In 1839, the poet’s widow gave us her first collected edition of his poems. It was a heroic task to read his manuscripts and Note Books in the confused state in which he left them.” (Forman, 172)

Today, “Ode to the West Wind” is regarded as one of Shelley’s best poems. It has been repeatedly anthologized, and modern visual representations of the poem exist on the Internet. One such example has the text of the poem written over a red and orange glowing photograph of a sunset over the ocean. (http://www.terravista.pt/Bilene/8167/pbs/gallery/) This combination of text and modern artistic technology assists the dissemination of the poem to a larger audience. One no longer needs to be able to afford a volume printed by a London based publisher in order to read the words of Shelley.

One might conclude that Shelley’s West Wind manifested itself in the corporeal form of his wife, Mary. She is chiefly responsible for scattering Shelley’s words among mankind, and without her commitment to furthering Shelley’s audience, Shelley might have remained in poetic obscurity. The incongruity between what Shelley wanted to happen with his poetic works and what actually happened is conclusion is ironic. Shelley’s poem addressed the movement of his words by a natural and divine force, yet in reality the most significant movement of his words occurred because of the dedication of his wife who included “Ode to the West Wind” in many collections of Shelley’s work. Unanswerable now is the question of whether the level notoriety, which reached Shelley and “Ode to the West Wind” posthumously, would have emerged without the assistance of Mary, and her high expectations for all of Shelley's poem, even the ones he himself doubted would be carried far by the earthly powers of transmission.

Bibliography:

Electronic sources:

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/psbodleian/tokoo-home.html

http://www.terravista.pt/Bilene/8167/pbs/gallery/

Printed sources:

Forman, H. Buxton, Note Books of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, MCMXI., Vol. 1.

Fuller, Jean Overton, Shelley: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape Limited. 1968.

Garnett, Richard, ed. Select Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co. MDCCCLXXXIIII

Robinson, Charles E., “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Ollier, and William Blackwood: the contexts of early nineteenth-century publishing.” Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference. Ed. Kelvin Everest. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Nobles Books, 1983. 183-227.

Rogers, Nelville, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1956.

Tomalin, Claire, Shelley and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd. 1980.