they are the institutors of laws

Comments by Shelley echo the words of William Wordsworth in his discussion of the role of the poet in Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802. However, Shelley takes the duty of a poet a step further and encapsulates these institutions of laws and foundations of society as something a poet must write about. He gets these messages across by writing of nature in relation to poets differently than Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Shelley uses nature to describe the actions that poets must take themselves as they ?are the germs of the flowers?. His address to the common man is from a more educated perspective that is looking to warn citizens of the wicked ways of the government. This interaction with nature is recurring with Shelley. This, along with his declaration of political standpoints through poetry separates Shelley as a second generation poet. His approach to communication with the audience differs from that of Wordsworth and Coleridge in so far as he treats his interaction with nature differently than they do. He wishes to give himself up to nature and allow it to do with him as it may as he writes make me thy lyre in Ode to the West Wind. Shelley?s use of nature in the poems we have read thus far serves to show the ways in which Shelley hopes to work with nature, or be carried along with the wind in order to find an answer. ?Dehumanization? by Shelley in Ode to the West Wind serves to highlight this interaction. (see zmilner?s Be thou me, impetuous one!.