Teddi Chichester Bonca notes that in certain passages of the poems the poet--Shelley--"feminizes" himself as a passive receptor. Moreover, the metaphors that he "receives" as a "passive earth: could represent three principle women in his life:
As a "passive Earth" ruled an ravished by a number of powerful female planets--Emily the Sun, Mary the Moon, Claire the fierce Comet--the poet strikes a posture that almost parodies the feminine stances that he has adopted and celebrated since his earliest writings. In fact, throughout the poem Shelley exploits for self-indulgent purposes the very traits--feminine receptivity and tenderness--that usually arm him in his battle against Selfhood. (121)
Shelley is in company with Keats, who also was interested in the "annihilation" of self in the midst of the poetic process. However, Keats also could not shake off the influence of the Wordsworth ian "egotistical sublime," and he even wrote a letter to Shelley that him to inject more "selfishness" into his poetry. Let us look at the advise that the dying Keats gives to Shelley on the 16 August 1820, about six months before Shelley completed Epipsychidion. Sharing with him his rather lukewarm opinion of Shelley's play, The Cenci, Keats writes:
I received a copy of the Cenci, as from yourself from Hunt. There is only one part of it I am to judge of; the Poetry, and dramatic effect, which by many spirits now a days is considered the mammon. A modern work it is said must have a purpose, which may be the God--an artist must serve Mammon--he must have "self concentration" selfishness perhaps. You I am sure will forgive me for sincerely remarking that you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist, and 'load every rift' of your subject with ore The thought of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who perhaps never sat with your wings furl'd for six Months together. (509)
What Keats means by "curb your magnanimity" was that Shelley should be more assertive with his individualistic ego. In Epipsychidion there is evidence that Shelley is less magnanimous--evidenced by the many metafictional , self-conscious moments. Although passivity is magnanimous, referring to one's self as passive is actually an assertive attempt to objectify the self, which is something Wordsworth did constantly.
And now that I think about it, I think it is useful to refer to chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge makes a distinction between the primary and secondary imagination. While the primary imagination is more passive, the secondary imagination is active and assertive:
The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinity I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all evens it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (par. 20)
While the primary imagination perceives, the secondary imagination acts upon the compulsion generated by the perception. The "magnanimity" of a work of art, however, can be thought about as the primary imagination's retracing the mimetic milieu of experience, while the secondary imagination is an egotistical reorganization of the milieu.
I think a passage from John Dewey's Art as Experience can complement what I am trying to say:
In short, art, in its form, unites the very relation of doing and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience to be an experience. Because of elimination of all that does not contribute to mutual organization of the factors of both action and reception into one another, and because of selection of just the aspects and traits that contribute to their interpenetration of each other, the product is a work of esthetic art. Man whittles, carves, sings, danes, gestures, molds, draws and paints. The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production. The act of producing that is directed by intent to produce something that is enjoyed in the immediate experience of perceiving has qualities that a spontaneous or uncontrolled activity does not have. The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works. (48)
In this passage, Dewey is arguing that the artistic process involves both passivity and activity and this passivity and activity are demonstrable in the work of art itself. I think it was Dylan Thomas who once said that all art is narrative. What he may have meant by this cryptic comment was that behind every act of the "secondary imagination" there is textual or subtextual evidence of the "primary imagination" working behind or within the scene. By imagining himself as "passive Earth," Shelley is, via the secondary imagination, projecting an objectified image of himself as a perceiver, employing his primary imagination as he views the artistic object of the comet, the moon, and the sun.
And, of course, Shelley has something to say about the role of passivity on the part of the artist in A Defence of Poetry:
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be "the expression of the imagination"; and poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre, which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being (and perhaps within all sentient beings) which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which excite them. (par. 2)
On another page within this matrix of bibliographic and personal criticism, I think I explain the difference between "melody" and "harmony." I will not do that again, but I will be able to work around these terms to simply say that this passage helps explain Coleridge's primary-secondary imagination dynamic. While a sensitive perceiver uses his or her primary imagination to recreate the artistic process, the poet is compelled by a spirit/compulsion of influence.
Bonca, Teddi Chichester. Shelley's Mirrors of Love : Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 1934.
Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Grahm Handley. New York: Pan Macmillan, 1991.