Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’
- Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts
- 1 ‘Painted fancy's unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab
- 2 ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna
- 3 ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook
- 4 ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo
- 5 ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci
- 6 ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry
- 7 ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems
- 8 ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of Life
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘A poem is the very image of life’
- Standard Abbreviations and Note on Texts
- 1 ‘Painted fancy's unsuspected scope’: The Esdaile Notebook, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, and Queen Mab
- 2 ‘These transient meetings’: Alastor and Laon and Cythna
- 3 ‘All that is majestic’: The Scrope Davies Notebook
- 4 ‘That such a man should be such a poet!’: ‘To Wordsworth’, ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine in a Letter from England’, and Julian and Maddalo
- 5 ‘In a style very different’: Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci
- 6 ‘The sacred talisman of language’: The Witch of Atlas and A Defence of Poetry
- 7 ‘One is always in love with something or other’: Epipsychidion and the Jane Poems
- 8 ‘The right road to Paradise’: Adonais and The Triumph of Life
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Epipsychidion and Shelley's poems to Jane Williams show him poeticise his conception of love. These poems construct and deconstruct idealised states in his work with a self-consciousness that never undercuts the emotional intensity of the poetry. Shelley's letter to John Gisborne of 18 June 1822 shows him moving from a discussion of domestic affairs to poetry, to a discussion of the Gisbornes’ arrangements, and beyond, as he seamlessly moves from idea to idea in an attempt to lessen the distance between himself and his friend. Shelley underscores his loneliness in the letter: ‘I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not’ (Letters: PBS II . p. 435). The isolation, discussion of art, and his desire to unite with those ‘who can feel, and understand me’ are the central unifiers of the Epipsychidion and the Jane poems as Shelley, despite his ironic remarks—‘As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles,—you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect any thing human or earthly from me’ (Letters: PBS II . p. 363)—retains a consciousness of the difficulty, the nigh impossibility, of the ideal in Epipsychidion and the gap between the real and poetic version of Jane Williams in the letter and the poems. Shelley's multitonal performances echo from his prose to his poetry as he creates and dispels his own poetic fantasies. The Jane poems reveal, just as much as Epipsychidion, of the shifting and evasive quality of Shelley's presentation of desire. Shelley remains continually alert to the dynamics of desire and restraint, longing and impossibility that create the delicately woven poetry which longs for unity even as it admits to isolation. The poetry ascends far beyond merely biographical interest in a manner that Shelley seems to hope for as he dismisses the importance of Teresa Viviani to Epipsychidion in his letter to John Gisborne (Letters: PBS II . p. 434). In the letter Shelley reveals that the Jane poems and Epipsychidion are ‘neither entirely figurative poem[s] about inspiration, nor entirely biographical poem[s] about the women Shelley loved’.
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- Information
- Shelley’s Living ArtistryLetters, Poems, Plays, pp. 201 - 235Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2017