thus expressed in his Defence of Poetry (written in the same year as Adonais, 1821):  ’Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet; that is, the second poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it—­developing itself in correspondence with their development....Milton was the third epic poet.’  The poets whom Shelley admired most were probably Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespear, and Milton; he took high delight in the Book of Job, and presumably in some other poetical books of the Old Testament; Calderon also he prized greatly; and in his own time Goethe, Byron, and (on some grounds) Wordsworth and Coleridge.

+Stanza 5,+ 1. 2. Not all to that bright station dared to climb. The conception embodied in the diction of this stanza is not quite so clear as might be wished.  The first statement seems to amount to this—­That some poets, true poets though they were, did not aspire so high, nor were capable of reaching so high, as Homer, Dante, and Milton, the typical epic poets.  A statement so obviously true that it hardly extends, in itself, beyond a truism.  But it must be read as introductory to what follows.

1. 3. And happier they their happiness who knew. Clearly a recast of the phrase of Vergil,

’O fortunati nimium sua si bona norint
Agricolae.’

But Vergil speaks of men who did not adequately appreciate their own happiness; Shelley (apparently) of others who did so.  He seems to intimate that the poetical temperament is a happy one, in the case of those poets who, unconcerned with the greatest ideas and the most arduous schemes of work, pour forth their ‘native wood-notes wild.’  I think it possible however that Shelley intended, his phrase to be accepted with the same meaning as Vergil’s—­’happier they, supposing they had known their happiness.’  In that case, the only reason implied why these minor poets were the happier is that their works have endured the longer.

11. 4, 5. Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished. Shelley here appears to say that the minor poets have left works which survive, while some of the works of the very greatest poets have disappeared:  as, for instance, his own lyrical models in Adonais, Bion and Moschus, are still known by their writings, while many of the master-pieces of Aeschylus and Sophocles are lost.  Some tapers continue to burn; while some suns have perished.

11. 5-7. Others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime. These others include Keats (Adonais) himself, to whom the phrase, ’struck by the envious wrath of man,’ may be understood as more peculiarly appropriated.  And generally the ‘others’ may be regarded as nearly identical with ’the inheritors of unfulfilled renown’ who appear (some of them pointed out by name) in stanza 45.  The word God is printed in the Pisan edition with a capital letter:  it may be questioned whether Shelley meant to indicate anything more definite than ‘some higher power—­Fate.’