Percy Shelley (1792-1822) is one of the greatest of the ‘second generation’ Romantic poets who also numbered John Keats and Lord Byron among them. And ‘To a Skylark’ is one of Shelley’s best-loved and most anthologised poems. But what is the meaning of this poem? Rather than offer the poem […]
Written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history – the Peterloo Massacre, which Percy Shelley (1792-1822) also wrote about in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet – ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of Shelley’s best-known poems. The west wind is the wind […]
‘To a Skylark’ is one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s best-loved poems. Shelley completed it in June 1820; the inspiration was an evening walk he had taken with his wife, Mary, in Livorno, in north-west Italy. Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a […]