Michael O'Neill calls our attention to the following passage from Shelley's letter to Charles Ollier:
I send you three poems--"Ode to Naples", a sonnet, and a longer piece, entitled "Epipsychidion". The two former are my own; and you will be so obliging as to take the first opportunity of publishing according to your own discretion.
The longer poem, I desire, should not be considered as my own; indeed, in a certain sense, it is a production of a portion of me already dead; and in this sense the advertisements no fiction. It is to be published simply for the esoteric few; and I make its author a secret, to avoid the malignity of those who turn sweet food into poison; transforming all they touch into the corruption of their own natures. My wish with respect to it is, that it should be printed immediately in the simplest form, and merely one hundred copies: those who are capable of judging and feeling rightly with respect to a composition of so abstruse a nature, who would ever be excited to read an obscure and anonymous production; and it would give me no pleasure that the vulgar should read it. If you have any bookselling reason against publishing so small a number as a hundred, merely, distribute copies among those to whom you think the poetry would afford any pleasure, and send me, as soon as you can, a copy by the post. I have written it so as to give very little trouble, I hope, to the printer, or to the person who revises. I would be much obliged to you if you would take this office of yourself. (Letters 2:262-63)
O'Neill writes:
According to the advertisement the author had died and much of Epipsychidion's self-awareness focuses on the way that the poet's empirical self is transformed into a self inseparable from the life of the poem he has created: "I am not thine; I am a part of thee" (52) has as its explicit addressee Emilia Viviani, but it might also be directed at the poem itself. (139)
O'Neill's suggestion--that this line is a metafictional reference to his relationship with his poetry and the connection between himself and the poem--is fascinating. What are we to, though, make of the ending, when he claims his words are "chains of lead"? (590). Which moment is more metafictional? The one in which he addresses his poem and Emilia simultaneously, or the one in which he refers to the poem while addressing a figure within it? As Derrida has said, there are moments in which the writing calls attention to itself: in both instances, this is the case.
O'Neill, Michael. Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1997.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964.