It is obvious that the poet is idealizing the young woman. Horst Hohne writes In Pursuit of Love: The Short and Troublesome Life and Work of Percy Bysshe Shelley that she "becomes the prototype of Platonic ideality in the sensuous shape of woman" (264). Yet, as we will see as we continue to read through the entire poem, Shelley may have been attempting to collapse the dualisms of empiricism (experience) and Platonism. It is by way of love and imagination that these dualisms can collapse. Consider the following two passages from Kathleen M. Wheeler's book, Romanticism, Pragmatism, and Deconstruction, where she argues that Shelley's work is a continuation of Coleridge's philosophical writings--namely, Biographia Literaria and The Friend:
Coleridge, much like Kant, remained somewhat encumbered by confusing terms in his metaphysical meditations, though he freed himself more completely in his criticism and in his aesthetic, psychological explorations. These latter writings (The Friend, the Biographia Literaria) may have provided Shelley with the stimulus he needed to reformulate correspondences between Platonism and empiricism into a synthetic and compositional theory of experience. Coleridge, and later Hegel, had provided Shelley with a Berkeleyan solution to both overt and disguised dualisms, by radicalizing the conception of the nature of perception to show perception as itself essentially active and creative, as Berkeley had (so futilely) tried to do decades earlier. The senses do not receive passively an already constituted, independent material (however primitive) which the reason then orders, formulates, and qualifies. According to Coleridge and Shelley, the senses themselves are imbued with reason, actively producing 'material' which is itself saturated with connections and relations, as Dewey also later maintained. Coleridge was not making an idealist assumption in his theory of perception as itself the most primary, imaginative activity; nor did he adopt a semi-idealist notion that an already constituted, independent mind set up against an objective, material manifold creates the secondary nature of that manifold. He meant, as Shelley did shortly after him, that to conceive of a subject-mind outside the world constitutes the basis of a dualism which leads to precious "philosophical problems." Like Heidegger, he understood mind to be in and of the world, its powers congruent with, indeed one with, the powers of nature. Or, as scientists argue today, the observer is a crucial part of the observed. (7)
And, "Shelley's own elaboration of a theory of experience, perception, and poetry can be said to have gone beyond Coleridge's account, in Shelley's crucial and systematic emphasis, in both the prose and poetry, upon metaphor as the central focus for his speculations on language, art, and human experience" (7).
Two fascinating passages. We cannot, however, deny the Platonic influences in Shelley's work: they are everywhere. But, perhaps we can view Epipsychidion as an expression of Shelley's ultimate dissatisfaction with Platonic thought because it puts limits on the power of the imagination and on language. Obviously, the poet admits that his words are insufficient in articulating his vision of a world in which the divine and mortal intermingle, and are, in fact, one of the same.
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Hohne, Horst. In Pursuit of Love: The Short and Troublesome Life and Work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.