Conclusion
This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the most unacknowledged legislators of the world."
Read more about this topic: Ode To The West Wind
Famous quotes containing the word conclusion:
“Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known. This was the sound conclusion of the Academic sceptics, who were the least surly of philosophers.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536)
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)
“of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness
of the flesh.
Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep
his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.”
—Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes (l. XII, 13)