On 17 December 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the world's first successful sustained powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA — a location chosen specifically for its reliable and strong coastal winds. The brothers' breakthrough depended critically on their home-built wind tunnel in Dayton, Ohio, in which they tested over 200 wing profiles to determine optimal aerodynamic shapes. The 12-second first flight, and the longer flights that followed the same day, began the age of powered aviation and fundamentally transformed human relationships with distance, speed, and the atmospheric environment.

The Wright Brothers' flight became one of the defining events in the cultural mythology of the twentieth century, inspiring an immediate wave of lyric poetry celebrating human conquest of the air — a theme with deep roots in Romantic wind poetry from Shelley to Hopkins. W.B. Yeats, writing in the same decade, used the symbolism of flight and wind extensively in his early poetry; the airplane age transformed literary metaphors of aspiration, freedom, and fragility. The physical science of wind that the Wright Brothers mastered also influenced the modernist poetics of precise physical description.