Mighty Harmonies: Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind

Abstract

Today, poetry and indeed serious literature enjoy less popularity than the undemanding alternatives of television and film, pop literature and pop culture, as if in realisation of the fear voiced by T. S. Eliot in his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948) that a ‘mass-culture will always be a substitute-culture’. Even many serious students of literature in sixth forms, universities and elsewhere sometimes regard it as little more than an intellectual exercise, or as useful documentation for historical, political or social matters. And, though poetry, of course, is still read, the immensely rewarding habit of reading it aloud, listening to it, experimenting with sound, stress and meaning, has somewhat declined.