SOURCE: Introduction to The Vision of “Love's Rare Universe”: A Study of Shelley's Epipsychidion, University Press of America, Inc., 1995, pp. 1-12.

[In the following introduction to a full-length interpretation of Shelley's Epipsychidion, Verma evaluates the poem in the context of Shelley's theory of the imagination.]

I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows it is divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine is mine,
All light of art or nature;—to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.

“Hymn of Apollo”

I

Epipsychidion, written in 1821, is a product of Shelley's mature years. Following the composition of his earlier poems, Shelley's thought had exhibited a rapid and dramatic growth, especially in terms of its capacity, power and magnitude. Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion, remarks Ghose, “show this turn of his [Shelley's] genius at its height; they are two of the three greatest things he has left to us on the larger scale.”¹ The latter Shelley had been thinking about the possibility of writing his own Symposium and Vita Nuova. He had recently translated Plato's Symposium, and was keenly aware of the poetic necessity of “a systematic form” that The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost had “conferred upon modern mythology” ([The Poetical Works of Shelley, hereafter] W, VII, 130). While attempting to grapple with the metaphysical issues, Shelley confronted the problem of the poetic form—of creating archetypal and mythic structures of reality. Baker rightly observes that Epipsychidion, Adonais, The Triumph of Life and the Defence “have a common frame of reference and to a certain extent share in the complex inner symbolic structure which was present to Shelley's mind when they were composed, but which cannot be understood until they are studied together.”² Shelley's imagination in these works, according to Baker, exhibits a keen sense of “cosmic unity” and the “vision of truth.” Admittedly, the Defence, a Platonic document,³ is one of the most profound statements on the function of poetry: it embodies Shelley's conception of “the eternal Forms,” and so does Epipsychidion. The poem, it has been said, is about making images, metaphors and symbols: in a bolder and more comprehensive sense, however, the poem deals with the embodiment of the Idea, and hence, with the metaphysics of Love, Truth and Beauty.

In one of the cancelled prefaces to the poem Shelley mentions his aborted plan of writing “a longer poem or a series of poems” (W, II, 377) to which Epipsychidion was intended to serve merely as an introductory poem. Although Shelley's remark inevitably reminds us of Wordsworth's grand design of a long poem, it is only more logical to think of its likely resemblance with the Dantean model. Epipsychidion, containing “the idealized history” of the poet's quest and the “hard matter,” was meant to be intelligible only to the “esoteric few.” Even if we were to put aside the critical problem of intentionality and consider Shelley's own statements about the poem at their face value, the matter of determining an exclusionary approach to the study of Epipsychidion will not be quite simple.

Amongst the Victorian readings of the poem, Rossetti's assessment of the poem is perhaps the most sensitive: “As a pure outpouring of poetry … Epipsychidion is beyond praise, and beyond description”; and it is “the most glowing and splendid idealization of the passion of love … ever produced in any language.”⁴ The twentieth-century criticism of the poem, like Shelley's overall standing, has presented several divergent positions. Leavis' moralist devaluation of Shelley and the poem draws its basic strength from Santayana's judgment that Shelley's “too intense a need of loving excludes the capacity for intelligent sympathy.” While asserting that Shelley's imagery generally shows strains of eroticism and voluptuousness, Leavis concludes: “The consequences of the need, or ‘love,’ of loving, combined, as it was, with a notable lack of self-knowledge and a capacity for ecstatic idealizing, are classically extant in Epipsychidion.”⁵ But the Santayana-Leavis position essentially suffers from a fundamental weakness of value-judgment and moral anxiety. Indeed, Ian Jack's discerning assessment of the poem in the Oxford History of English Literature points out the sustained unity of Shelley's vision. While noting the “remarkable resemblances between the style of Epipsychidion and that of many of Crashaw's poems,” Jack maintains that the poem “does not disintegrate”: “The inspiration outlasts the six hundred lines, and the result is a poem as particularly characteristic of Shelley as the Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable S. Teresa is of Crashaw.”⁶ It should, however, be readily admitted that despite a variety of critical responses to the poem, from Shelley's time to the modern time, Epipsychidion remains the most difficult and decidedly the most controversial of all of Shelley's poems.

While the biographical readings of the poem have focused on the history of Shelley's relationship with various women, the other category of criticism has concentrated on the poem as a statement of the theory of poetry and imagination.⁷ The two major responses in the latter category have treated the poem either in the tradition of Dante or in the light of Shelley's Platonism and Neoplatonism. C. S. Lewis' laudatory judgment of Shelley as being “the half of Dante”⁸ is actually based on Act IV of Prometheus Unbound and not on Epipsychidion. Epipsychidion gets low rating from Lewis, because the “thought implied in it [is] a dangerous delusion.” Shelley, according to Lewis, “is trying to stand on a particular rung of the Platonic ladder,” that is virtually non-existent. Lewis, to one's deep consternation, seems to be questioning Shelley's understanding of Plato—and of Dante: “There is an element of spiritual, and also of carnal, passion in it, each expressed with great energy and sensibility, and the whole is marred, but not completely, by the false mode (as Mr. Eliot and I would maintain) in which the poet tries to blend them.”⁹ But the very genesis, whether moral or philosophical, of determining a possibly true or acceptable “mode” of blending the sexual and the spiritual remains undefined. Although Lewis admits that Eliot, in his preoccupation with Epipsychidion, has attempted to read the poetic view in the poem—“ethics, metaphysics, or theology”—in terms of his personal beliefs, Lewis' own view of the poem, it must be recognized, is based on a set of moral predicates. Bloom, of course, believes that the Platonic ladder, set up not by “Shelley's poem but by its Platonizing interpreters,”¹⁰ must be demolished. But Shelley reiterates with unremitting firmness and clarity that “the love of woman which these verses express was but the form of that universal Love which Plato taught.”¹¹ Ironically, in his approach to the poem Bloom uses Buber's existential ethics of the I-Thou relationship, maintaining at the same time that “the poet Shelley was infinitely wiser and better than the philosopher Shelley or the man Shelley.”¹² Implicit in Bloom's outright rejection of Shelley's Platonism and Neoplatonism is his conviction that Shelley is a Humean sceptic and that the ethical framework of image-making in the poem is incompatible with the conception of the embodiment of the Idea. Although the long debate to classify Shelley's intellectual thought—Platonic, Lockean, Berkeleyan and Godwinian—has so far been inconclusive, some of the Shelley scholarship seems to have been dictated by a pre-predicated value-sense.¹³ If criticism as science is expected to create an objective and coherent body of knowledge, it must follow a course of disinterested and uncompromising intellectual inquiry, and it must recognize that a poem admits several meanings and approaches.

While characterizing Shelley's Platonism as natural Platonism, Notopoulos maintains that “Epipsychidion is the most Platonic of his [Shelley's] poems in intensity, Platonic emotion, joy, and ecstasy,” and that the poem in its configuration of Emily “fuses the Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Dantean as well as Petrarchan Platonism.”¹⁴ But Notopoulos adds that whereas the poem's vision is Shelley's own natural Platonism, he is indebted to Plato for “the symbol of language, thought, emotion and the dramatic technique,” and to Dante for “making woman incarnate, the most embracing and appealing of all of nature's phenomena and symbols, represent and foreshadow the ideal Reality of Heaven.”¹⁵ In the Defence, Shelley refers to Dante's “apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness” and his ascent “to the throne of the Supreme Cause” (W, VII, 128). Shelley had no doubt started seeing in the manner of Plato and Dante, but his idea of making woman the symbol of Reality may also have drawn its reinforcements from several other different sources.¹⁶ One might question Shelley's conflation of Dante, Milton and other poets and thinkers, but there is no reason to distrust his reading of Dante. In fact, Dante, maintains Shelley, “understands the secret things of love even more than Petrarch” (W, VII, 128). Shelley's avid interpretation of the Dantean analogy must be understood, with all its complex divagations, as an essential part of the syncretic poetic process in which the imagination sees unified and coherent structure of various other similar poetic mythologies and analogical metaphors. It is quite plain to Shelley's mind that the Commedia is “a perpetual hymn of everlasting Love” (W, VII, 128), that in Dante's exegetical model Beatrice is the controlling symbol of his metaphysics, religiosity and poetic vision and that Dante's initial love for Beatrice is transformed into spiritual ecstasy. Thus Shelley must have clearly seen in Dante the fusion of the Christian idea of love and the Platonic Eros. Of course, it would be utterly unfair to suggest that Shelley shares, much less endorses, Dante's theology and metaphysics.

Significantly, Baker talks about Shelley's gynecomorphism,¹⁷ and I. A. Richards describes Asia as Prometheus' “Shakti.”¹⁸ That Shelley never stopped contemplating the Absolute as a hypothesis and that he saw in the figure of woman the possibility of mediating and representing the Idea are not coincidental. Dante's Beatrice, Blake's emanation, Jung's anima, the Sheikina in Kabbalistic thought, the Virgin Sophia in Jacob Boehme, the Eternal Feminine in Goethe and the Shakti in Indian thought clearly suggest an extremely significant archetypal method of imagining in woman the symbol-idea of reality. Shelley exhibits a keen sense of tradition and continuity in noting a distinguishing characteristic of Dante's mind: “The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and the antient World” (W, VII, 129). The speedy and intrepid intellectual absorption of a large body of different images and ideas from several traditions enabled Shelley's encyclopedic mind to create, through a continuous process of subversion and transvaluation, mythic structures and archetypal symbols and images, thus situating modern intellectual progress in the context of tradition and the history of ideas.¹⁹ Emily is both an analogical metaphor and concrete universal in the myth Shelley's imagination has created in Epipsychidion. But while modern critical theory, especially the approach rooted in the sociology and philosophy of gender, may debate the basis of the choice of woman as the symbol-idea, it is clear that Shelley's imagination, by participating in the archetypal quest for the ideal, has linked itself with tradition. The alignment with tradition, as Bate points out, is the act of joining together or what Keats calls an “immortal free-masonry.”²⁰

The present study is an attempt to interpret and evaluate Shelley's Epipsychidion, assuming that although it is an individual whole, it is a manifestation of his poetic consciousness, centered around his conceptions of the imagination and of love. In my discussion of the poem, I propose to consider Shelley's theory of the imagination and the visionary process, giving special attention to the general and particular problems that arise from the poem. The primary focus of my discussion, however, is on the poem as a total verbal structure, from which there emerges the main poetic argument concerning the quality of vision and the artistic process. In this textual study of the poem, I plan to use the ideas of Plato and Plotinus, Dante's conception of Beatrice, Buber's Theory of I-Thou and Jung's idea of the anima archetype as possible approaches to the reading of the poem. The central subject of quest in Shelley's myth of reintegrated wholeness and spiritual transcendence is the woman, the epipsyche. Emily is the symbol of the envisioned reality and the medium of realizing the Absolute. The epipsyche is the emanation in the Neoplatonic sense, the anima archetype in the Jungian sense, and the Thou in Buber's sense. The woman figure in Shelley's imagination is the incarnate vision of Intellectual Beauty or of Love in the sense in which Diotima defines it in the Symposium. In a larger sense, the epipsyche, “a soul within the soul” ([Epipsychidion, 455), is the aesthetic-spiritual representation of all that the poet creates, the poem, his universe, his vision, his love, liberty and the community of being. In considering Epipsychidion, especially Shelley's conception of the epipsyche, in the light of Jung's anima archetype and the Indian idea of shakti, I have endeavored to provide a new focus for understanding the nature of the soul's struggle for psychic regeneration and completeness. My discussion of the poem and of the woman figure shows that Shelley not only anticipated Jung but also thought in terms of the archetypes. Towards the end of Epipsychidion, the metaphor of annihilation, as I have argued, suggests the annihilation of ego, the non-self, an act which the imagination performs for the recovery of the anima. Indeed, the archetypal pattern of progressive ascent of the human mind in Shelley is in the tradition of Plato, Dante and Jung.

II

The criticism of poetry requires not only a consideration of the nature and function of the imagination and poetry but also a formulation of some hypotheses and assumptions in the light of the poet's own donnée and the broad literary tradition of which he is a part. The study of Romantic poets like Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley posits a special challenge, because their deep concern with the function of the imagination and poetry has created a comprehensive Romantic aesthetic according to which poetry is conceived as the “highest activity of the human mind.”²¹ “A poem,” says Shelley in the Defence, “is the image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (W, VII, 115). Poetry, by creating universal and eternal forms of existence, enables the imagination to participate “in the eternal, the infinite, and the one” (W, VII, 112).²² Such a conception of a poem or poetry entails, in the most comprehensive sense, a kind of knowledge or wisdom through which the imagination perceives eternal forms of love, beauty, truth and good; and it, therefore, places poetry at the anagogic level of Dante. But since poetry is “the expression of the imagination” (W, VII, 109), and since “All things exist as they are perceived” (W, VII, 137),²³ the reality or truth that a poem embodies is that which the imagination perceives. Insofar as poetry or the imagination is concerned, this is the only reality or truth that exists. In the process of creating or imagining, poetry reveals universal, infinite and eternal wisdom. In fact, the creation of knowledge is one of the two functions of the poetical faculty, the other being the communication of pleasure (cf. W, VII, 134). But when Shelley says that poetry is “the centre and circumference of knowledge” (W, VII, 135), he means, as Coleridge does, that poetry is wisdom: it includes not only all other kinds of knowledge but also the vision of life and universe.²⁴

The verbal structure of the poem, therefore, contains images of eternal, infinite and unified wisdom or consciousness in relation to the total dream of man. These images in the universal and mythic sense, then, become what Frye calls monads or anagogic symbols.²⁵ This is the sense in which wisdom, Logos, according to Coleridge, becomes the poetic genius or the communicative intellect of “the infinite I Am.”²⁶ The perception of “the infinite I Am” in the self is higher consciousness that comprehends the subject and the object as a unity. This dynamic principle of reconciliation of the opposites, manifesting itself in “the Sum or I Am,” is the “spirit, self, and self-consciousness.” “In this, and in this alone,” adds Coleridge, “object and subject, being and knowing are identical, each involving, and supposing the other.” In this state of unified consciousness the images become symbols of identity.

The infinite consciousness of unity in Shelley—and in Blake and Coleridge—is the projected dream of the mind to experience ultimately the absolute telos and reality beyond the world of time and space. This desire of the imagination for infinite unity and identity with the absolute is eternal and apocalyptic.²⁷ Consequently, the structural pattern of imagery and symbolism and total meaning, the mythos and dianoia, communicate the infinite consciousness of totality imagined in the mind. As Frye observes:

When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the guest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. … Anagogically, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social action, with total dream, or unlimited individual thought. Its universe is infinite and boundless hypothesis: it cannot be contained within any actual civilization or set of moral values, for the same reason that no structure of imagery can be restricted to one allegorical interpretation. Here the dianoia of art is no longer a mimesis logou, but the Logos, the shaping word …²⁸

In the anagogic sense the mythos of the poem is the total dream which includes all that the imagination creates and desires to realize in “the infinite, the eternal, and the one.” But what gives ultimate dimension to this dream is the dianoia, the Logos.

“But the anagogic perspective,” adds Frye, “is not to be confined only to the works that seem to take in everything, for the principle of anagogy is not simply that everything is the subject of poetry, but that anything may be the subject of a poem.”²⁹ If the poem as an individual unit has the original acorn of wisdom, the sense of continuity and infinite unity of poetry will be implicit in the poem. Such a conception of continuity and infinite unity means that the poem, its mythos and dianoia, will relate to the total corpus of literature. Shelley defines this total, comprehensive and continuous form as “that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world” (W, VII, 124). The anagogic response, therefore, implies a comparative and morphological response, and the opening of the stubborn and still centre of wisdom. Hence, we may note Frye's view of the verbal universe of the poem and the nature of critical response:

Thus the center of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words. Anagogically, then, the symbol is a monad, all symbols being united in a single infinite and eternal verbal symbol which is, as dianoia, the Logos, and, as mythos, total creative act.³⁰

Considered from this view, Epipsychidion is an anagogic poem, embodying the infinite consciousness of unity with the absolute. The persona in Epipsychidion seeks ultimate unity with the epipsyche who is the daughter, bride, sister and soul as well as the universe, isle and paradise.

The “eternal truth” is the universal and total meaning that the imagination gives to mythos. In creating the “image of life … in its eternal truth,” the imagination experiences, both epistemologically and ontologically, the reality of existence. Since the poem is a representation of “eternal truth,” as opposed to the local, historical and temporal truth, it is one long metaphor of continuity, universality and permanence. The perception of “eternal truth” of existence, such as the one that Shelley proposes, implies a process of transcendence beyond the temporal-spatial reality. It is by this process of transcendence that the “eternal truth” is revealed in a moment of eternity.

III

The foregoing discussion has focused on the conception of poetry, the philosophy of knowledge and the theory of language and metaphor. The central issue in the history of Romantic thought is the intellectual perception of Reality and its embodiment as the symbol-Idea. Can that which is Infinite be finitized? Has Shelley's imagination perceived the essential identity of the world of sense and Intellectual Beauty? Since Reality in the Kantian aesthetic of Idealism is transcendent and inaccessible to Understanding (Verstand), Kant as an epistemologist was able to define the possible limits of knowledge. However, transcendent Reality, as Coleridge tried to assign his own meaning to Kant's ideas, is accessible to Reason (Vernunft) through moral consciousness.³¹ While Hegel departed from the Kantian metaphysics and defined beauty as “the sensuous semblance of the Idea,”³² he could not help the Romantic imagination in its search for the Absolute. Finally, it was Schelling who, as Abrams points out, had to go to the Plotinian idea of the One and the many.³³ Significantly, Kant, despite the inexorable limitations he placed on knowledge, did not succumb to Humean scepticism.³⁴ Scepticism, according to Hegel, recognizes “the dogmatism of common sense” and the “untruth of the finite,”³⁵ but Humean scepticism, as distinguished from Greek scepticism, is positivistic in nature. “Genuine scepticism,” like that of Plato, is a philosophical method of knowing Truth: understood in this context, most seekers of Truth would be considered sceptics. But negative truth, as Wasserman rightly observes in his discussion of Shelley's scepticism, leaves a perilous vacancy in the mind.³⁶ Coleridge's self-doubt in the Dejection Ode was merely a temporary phenomenon, and Coleridge, following his recovery, had appropriated new meaning to Kant's Verstand and Vernunft, thus giving the “‘primary imagination’ the dignity of being the ‘prime agent of all human perception.’”³⁷ Shelley, too, gives primacy to the imagination in perceiving the highest form of unity of consciousness, but without admitting any limits to the intellection of Truth. We may call Shelley a sceptic in the Platonic tradition,³⁸ especially since Shelley, like Plato, often employs the dialectical conflict between appearance and reality not only as a method of recognizing the impermanence and the “untruth of the world of sense” but also as a basis of dealing with the philosophical problems of expansiveness, penetrability and permanence. Frye identifies the imagination in Shelley with Vernunft,³⁹ probably because the redemptive vision of Intellectual Beauty is predicated by moral conscience. Insofar as the limits of knowledge are concerned, the Berkeleyan symbol of the veil and the metaphor of annihilation in Shelley firmly and clearly define the epistemology and the ontology of the Idea. The joy or ananda that the Romantic Image is supposed to communicate results from the illuminating and refulgent power of the Idea.

The theory of knowledge in Romantic aesthetic inevitably presupposes the identity of subject and object—somewhat after Schelling's doctrine of identity, that Coleridge calls “essentially pantheistic.”⁴⁰ The ability of the imagination to perceive the Absolute in appearance not only explains the nature of the Absolute but also posits a way for the freedom of the human mind. After all, to be able to perceive the Absolute in appearance is to achieve a corresponding degree of expansiveness of one's own mind. Even Hegel's conceptualization of the Absolute or Idea rests on its manifestation; thus art or beauty, according to Hegel, is the manifest sensuousness or supersensuousness.⁴¹ Northrop Frye maintains that when Shelley says that “‘The hypothesis of a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe’ remains unaltered,” he implies that “God, if he exists at all, can exist only as existence, an aspect of our own identity and not as a hypothesis attached to the natural order.”⁴² Apparently, Frye's Blakean elucidation of Shelley's statement focuses on the intellectual perception of Reality as existence and the projected correspondence between existence and perception. Insofar as art is concerned, the perception of Reality in terms of its manifestation either in appearance or in existence defines the nature of the poetic image. Shelley's notion of the protrusion of Reality centers on the aesthetic and spiritual vision of analogy, identity and unity—and, hence, of its representation in the poetic symbol. Significantly, Shelley, as one may construe from the metaphysics of symbol,⁴³ goes beyond the Kantian categories and the Hegelian conception of the Absolute or Idea.

Although the elevation of the object-existence to a level of animation or sensuousness may be deemed as philosophically illogical, the imaginative identity of subject and object, aesthetically speaking, implies a higher level of consciousness. This consciousness of the self may no doubt be characterized as ego, but the manifestation of consciousness means the perception of the other. Wasserman notes the paradox in Shelley's intellectual philosophy: “Although he [Shelley] aspires to escape appearances and to exist in the Absolute (in which case he would exist no longer), the Absolute would not exist were it not for its appearances.”⁴⁴ It may, however, be argued that since nothing would appear without Reality, any genuine quest for the Absolute must not mean an escape from or indifference to appearance. At the same time existence in the realm of Reality implies not only an unobtrusive acceptance of self-sufficiency and independence as attributes of each of the two realms but also a protracted denial of any authentic search for truth. In Shelley's imagination, the paradigmatic structure of reality envisages the identity of the world of sense and the world of spirit while retaining the dualism between appearance and reality as an integral part of the epistemology of truth. But in the felicitous state of heightened consciousness the mythopoeic and symbolist imagination of Shelley soars far beyond the search for identity with the object-world, seeking a “higher unity”⁴⁵ and harmony. In his incessant search for “eternal Forms,” Shelley often outreaches the conceivable limits of epistemology and crosses into the realm of ontology. The epistemological-ontological argument in Epipsychidion, especially the poetic vision of Emily, shows that Emily as the metaphysics of Idea is both the symbol and the discourse and that Emily as poem, art and Idea converges into the unity of mind and spirit.⁴⁶

Notes

1. Aurobindo Ghose, The Future Poetry (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953), p. 181.

2. Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of Vision (1948. New York: Russell, 1961), p. 217.

3. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953. New York: Norton, 1958), p. 126.

4. William Michael Rossetti, Memoirs of Shelley. With a Fresh Preface (1886. New York: AMS, 1971), p. 103.

5. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (1947. New York: Norton, 1963), p. 222.

6. Ian Jack, English Literature 1815-1832, Vol. X of The Oxford History of English Literature, ed. E. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), p. 90. Also see Edmund Blunden's perceptive estimate of the poem, in his Shelley: A Life Story (1946. London: Oxford UP, 1965): “For the pervading spirit of his poem, he found a prototype in Dante's Vita Nuova; and for the mysteriousness and its share in bringing his beloved's pre-eminence into the attention of posterity his model was Shakespeare's Sonnets” (p. 235).

7. See the headnote by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers in Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts and Criticism (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 372. Also see Donald H. Reiman's perceptive reading of the poem in his Percy Bysshe Shelley (Boston: Twayne, 1969), pp. 25-33. “The poem,” remarks Reiman, “explores the origin, nature, and function of the central core of meaning and value within the human psyche” (p. 125). Harold Bloom, in Shelley's Mythmaking (New Haven: Yale UP, 1959), notes that Epipsychidion “is a poem about poetry”; it “exists to record the struggle of image-making” (p. 210). Note Harold Bloom's observation in “The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction,” in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 394-95: Epipsychidion, “a bewilderingly problematical work,” “most directly concerns itself with the mind in creation.” Woodberry's important note on “Lines Connected With Epipsychidion,” in The Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Newell F. Ford (Boston: Houghton, 1975), is extremely relevant: “From these lines, and also from other fragments, it is to be inferred that a poem, substantially Epipsychidion, was in Shelley's mind before his meeting with Emilia Viviani, and that she was also the inspiration of it than the occasion of the form it took” (p. 446). In “Dante,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1964), T. S. Eliot characterizes Vita Nuova as “vision literature” and maintains that “the attitude of Dante to the fundamental experience of the Vita Nuova can only be understood by accustoming ourselves to find meaning in final causes rather in origins” (p. 234). “It is not, I believe,” adds Eliot, “meant as a description of what he consciously felt on his meeting with Beatrice, but rather as a description of what that meant on mature reflection upon it” (p. 234, emphasis added). But while Eliot sees in Dante's vision an incontestable conflation of sexual desire and religious ecstasy, he is critical of Shelley's design and sensibility in Epipsychidion. However, his suggestion about the critical approach to reading Vita Nuova is extremely helpful in understanding the significance or insignificance of Emilia Viviani. And there is Benjamin Kurtz's forceful reminder: “Read the Epipsychidion as a poem of prostitution, and its transportations become ridiculous exaggerations of the intoxications of lust” (The Pursuit of Death: A Study of Shelley's Poetry [New York: Oxford UP, 1933], pp. 262-263).

8. C. S. Lewis, “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot,” in English Romantic Poets, ed. M. H. Abrams (1960. New York: Oxford UP, 1965), p. 263.

9. Lewis, p. 262.

10. Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 205.

11. Cited in Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: John Hopkins P, 1971), p. 443. “The principle of authentic reading,” remarks Frye, “is particularly important in connection with the two chief poetic influences on Shelley.” These two poets Plato and Dante, adds Frye, “were for Shelley poets of Eros” (A Study of English Romanticism [New York: Random, 1968], p. 123). See the following observation by Herbert Read: “But there is nothing vulgar about the philosophy expounded in Epipsychidion. The only comparable work, by which it was much influenced, is Plato's Symposium, and the one is as pure and noble in conception as the other, though Shelley himself compared his poem to the Vita Nuova of Dante” (“Shelley's Philosophy,” in The Major English Romantic Poets: A Symposium in Reappraisal, ed. Clarence D. Thorpe et al. [1957. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970], pp. 210-11).

12. Shelley's Mythmaking, p. 206.

13. This is Northrop Frye's term, though not essentially his meaning, used by him in his essay “On Value-Judgments,” in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970), p. 70.

14. James A. Notopoulos, The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind (1949. New York: Octagon, 1969), pp. 276 and 278.

15. The Platonism of Shelley, p. 278.

16. Wasserman, in his Shelley: A Critical Reading, suggests Song of Songs as a possible source.

17. Carlos Baker, Introduction, Selected Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley (New York: ML, 1951), p. xv.

18. “The Mystical Element in Shelley's Poetry,” Part II, The Aryan Path, 30 (July 1959), 293. James H. Cousins, in his The Work Promethean (1938. Port Washington: Kennikat, 1970), suggests the significance of Prometheus and Asia along this line. According to Cousins, Prometheus and Asia are “the atman and buddhi (the essential ego and intuition)” (p. 31).

19. See, for example, Stuart Curran's enlightening approach to understanding Shelley's mind in his Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: HL, 1975). “Shelley,” remarks Curran, “is the last of the English Renaissance poets and among the first of its modern ones, and, like the Dante he venerated in the Defence of Poetry, his work has become a ‘bridge thrown over the stream of time’” (pp. xix-xx). Also see Stephen Spender's Introduction to A Choice of Shelley's Verse (London: Faber, 1971). “Like Goethe,” remarks Spender, “Shelley had sensibility and intellect capable of absorbing a great deal of theory, information, and philosophy, and transforming them into his imaginative language. It is when he does this that he … enters a stratosphere of ideas into which is absorbed Greek philosophy, Oriental mysticism, The Divine Comedy, Faust …” (p. 12).

20. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970. New York: Norton, 1972), p. 129.

21. My assumption that the Romantic aesthetic or Romanticism is a unified movement with some common fundamental literary objectives is, of course, contrary to Arthur O. Lovejoy's assertion, made in his essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (1948. New York: Putnam's, 1960), that there are “Romanticisms.” See René Wellek's two essays “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History” and “Romanticism Re-examined,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (1963. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971); and essays of Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams and Lionel Trilling in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (1963. New York: Columbia UP, 1968). However, we may note Geoffrey Hartman's interesting observation: “We still need an answer to Lovejoy's scepticism concerning the usefulness of the concept or term Romanticism. Wellek began answering some twenty years ago, but one sometimes feels that if Lovejoy had written Wellek's article Wellek would have countered with Lovejoy's. The debate is a twenty-year standoff” (“Theories on the Theory of Romanticism,” The Wordsworth Circle, 2 [1971], 51).

22. Cf. Wordworth's view of poetry as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” (Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads, in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, rev. ed., Ernest de Selincourt, ed. [London: Oxford UP, 1966], p. 738); Coleridge's conception of poetry in Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1907. London: Oxford UP, 1965), I, 160-202; II, 10-12. We may especially note Coleridge's elucidation of his conception of the imagination or poetry as the “Sum or I Am”: “But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal I Am, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum; I am, because I affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am” (Biographia Literaria, I, 183). As compared to the Romantic view of poetry, Tate and Ransom also identify poetry with a “kind of knowledge,” a limited and concrete knowledge. In The World's Body (New York: Scribner's, 1938), Ransom remarks that “poetry is the kind of knowledge by which we must know what we have arranged that we shall not know otherwise” (Preface, p. x). The views of several “new” critics on poetry have been summarized in Wilfred C. Barton, “Shelley and the New Criticism,” Diss. Tulane, 1967.

23. This important conception also occurs in “On Life” (W, VI, 196) and in “Speculations on Metaphysics” (W, VII, 59).

24. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957. New York: Atheneum, 1957), especially pp. 125-27. Note the following statement: “‘Poetry,’ said Coleridge, ‘is the identity of knowledge’” (p. 125).

25. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 121.

26. Biographia Literaria, I, 202. The unidentified quotations are from Chapter XII. “An idea, in the highest sense of that word,” maintains Coleridge, “cannot be conveyed but by a symbol” (Biographia Literaria, I, 100). See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942. New York: NAL, 1951), p. 173. Note Coleridge's definition of a symbol: “In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. These are the wheels which Ezekiel beheld … a symbol … is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in the unity of which it is the representative. The other are but empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily associates with apparitions of matter, less beautiful but not less shadowy than the sloping orchard or hill-side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below” (“The Statesman's Manual,” in The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd [1853. New York: Harper, 1884], I, 436-38).

27. See Frye, Anatomy, p. 119.

28. Anatomy, pp. 119-20.

29. Anatomy, p. 121.

30. Anatomy, p. 121.

31. See Basil Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 90. Also see Owen Barfield's discussion in What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1971), pp. 104-14. In his perceptive essay “Coleridge and Kant's Two World,” Arthur O. Lovejoy maintains that “the moral consciousness seemed to Kant, as to Coleridge, not merely to demand but logically to imply ‘freedom’” (Essays in the History of Ideas, p. 264).

32. Cited in Suresh Raval, Metacriticism (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981), p. 35.

33. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 223. Frank Kermode, in Romantic Image (1957. New York: Vintage, 1964), notes “that English poets—using the same ultimate sources, Boehme and Swedenborg, the Germans of the later eighteenth century—developed their own way of ‘recalling us to the truth of the image’” (p. 5).

34. See Ernst Cassirer's essay “Goethe and the Kantian Philosophy,” in Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays, trans. James Guttmann et al. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963), pp. 61-98.

35. Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (1965. New York: Anchor, 1966), p. 69. Kaufmann's commentary on Hegel's essay on scepticism, especially the references to Hegel's exposition of Hume's scepticism, is extremely relevant to our discussion.

36. See Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 151.

37. Willey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 89.

38. See C. E. Pulos' argument in his The Deep Truth: A Study of Shelley's Scepticism (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1954). But note Hegel's important differentiation between Humean scepticism and Greek scepticism: “Hume's assumes as basic the truth of the empirical, of feeling, of intuition, and from that base contests general determinations and laws—because they lack justification from sense perception. Ancient skepticism was so far from making feeling and intuition the principle of truth that, on the contrary, it turned first of all against the senses” (Cited by Kaufmann in Hegel, pp. 69-70). Thus for Plato and for Hegel scepticism was directed against the world of common sense, appearance and finitude. In the history of European philosophical thought, the word “scepticism,” including its blanket application to all modes of scepticism, is somewhat misleading. John W. Wright, in his Shelley's Myth and Metaphor (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1970), makes the following observation on Pulos' study of Shelley's scepticism: “Unfortunately he [Pulos] makes only three passing references to A Defence of Poetry and misses the evidence it offers of Shelley's synthesis of empiricism and platonism, skepticism and idealism” (p. 3). Significantly, Wright mentions Berkeley and Coleridge as possible sources in the transformation of Shelley's philosophical thought.

39. Note Frye's important observation about Shelley's imaginative universe: “Thus there appears in Shelley, as in his predecessors, the conception of a model world above the existing world. This model world for him, however, is associated not with the Christian unfallen world, not even with the Classical Golden Age, in spite of some allusions to the latter in the Defence, but rather with the higher reason, Vernunft as distinguished from Verstand, which so many Romantics identified with the imagination” (The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971], p. 95).

40. Editor's n11, Chapter IX, Biographia Literaria, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd, III, 270.

41. See Raval's discussion of Hegel's aesthetic in his Metacriticism, pp. 32-35.

42. A Study of English Romanticism, pp. 13-14.

43. I believe the matter of defining analogy, identity and unity must encompass, among other matters, broad and comprehensive questions of epistemology, ontology and metaphysics. See, for example, William F. Lynch's discussion of analogy in his Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of Literary Imagination (1960. Toronto: NAL, 1963), pp. 150 ff. It is important to remember that in de Man's critical theories there has been a concerted effort to seek reversal of “the opposition between symbol and allegory” (Raval, p. 190). “The traditional definition of symbol,” notes Raval in his discussion of de Man's philosophy, “is essentialist and represents what Sartre would call ‘bad faith’: it yearns for a condition of being that human beings cannot authentically acquire” (p. 190).

44. Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 149. Apparently, Wasserman's argument is based on Appearance and Reality by F. H. Bradley, a favorite of T. S. Eliot. I am indebted to Wasserman's observation about the similarity between Shelley and Bradley. Note Bradley's argument: “Appearance without reality would be impossible, for what then could appear? And reality without appearance would be nothing, for there certainly is nothing outside appearances. But on the other hand Reality (we must repeat this) is not the sum of things. It is the unity in which all things, coming together, are transmuted …” (Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2nd ed., Introd. by Richard Wollheim [London: Oxford UP, 1969], p. 432). Evidently, Bradley's philosophy attempts a modern articulation of the philosophies of Spinoza, Hume and Hegel; likewise, Shelley has tried to articulate the idealist philosophies of Plato and Berkeley and the empiricist thinking of Hume and Locke. After all, the philosophical debate on the metaphysics of Reality rests on the nature of consciousness and identity. Refer to Bradley's important note on the problem of “the human-divine self-consciousness” in the following lines from Shelley's “Hymn of Apollo”: “I am the eye with which the Universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine …” (n1, p. 396).

45. René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, 1963, p. 186. In his search for “a single Form of Forms,” Shelley, according to Abrams, “goes beyond Plato and approximates Plotinus, for whom all considerations had been drawn irresistibly into the vortex of the One” (The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 127).

46. See Frank Kermode's use of these two terms in Romantic Image, Chapter VIII.