M. H. Abrams may help us explain Shelley's platonism--"shadow of that idol of my thought"--, which he believes is part of a binary. Commenting on Shelley's platonic influences while writing A Defence of Poetry, Abrams writes:
Shelley happened to be reading Plato's Ion when he received Peacock's article, and had only recently translated the Symposium, as well as portions of some others of the more mythic dialogues. There is more of Plato in the "Defence" than in any earlier piece of English criticism, even though it is a Plato who has obviously been seen through a vista of Neoplatonic and Renaissance commentators and interpreters. But Shelley was also familiar with the poetic theory of Wordsworth and other contemporaries, had been a close student of the English sensational psychologists, and continued to support the benevolent ethics that Godwin had adopted from his English predecessors. In the "Defence" these various traditions remain imperfectly assimilated, so that one can discriminate two planes of thought in Shelley's aesthetics--one Platonistic and mimetic, the other psychological and expressive--applied alternately, as it were, to each of the major topics under discussion. The combination effected a loosely articulated critical theory, no doubt, but resulted also in a set of magnificent passages on the power and the glory of art unmatched by the other apologists for poetry who have succumbed to the allure of the Platonic world-picture, with its radiant Essences behind the fleeting shadows of this world of becoming.
On the level of Platonism, we find Shelley proposing a mimetic theory of the origin of art, in rebuttal to Peacock's unflattering speculation that it is a commodity invented by the bard who is "always ready to celebrate the strength of [the king's] arm, being first duly inspired by that of his liquor." "In the youth of the world," says Shelley, "men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order." This order originates in man's "faculty of approximation to the beautiful," and may itself " be called the beautiful and the good." The objects imitated by the great poet are the eternal Forms discerned through veil of fact and particularity. (126-27)
We can also make our way through the "Defence of Poetry" on another level of discussion; one on which Shelley comes closer to the characteristics and ideas and idiom of the critics of his own time. Like the Neoplatonists, Shelley implies that the Ideas have a double subsistence, both behind the veil of the material world and in the minds of men; and this view, we remember, had, in earlier criticism, sometimes resulted in statements that poetry is an expression, as well as an imitation of Ideas. But in Shelley's version of these opinions, the poet sometimes turns out to express not only Platonic Ideas, but also human passions, and other mental materials, which he describes in the alien psychology of English empiricism. (128)
Shelley's forays into the description of his own "human passions" in Epipsychidion appear to work against the mimetic-Platonic ideal. However, he also makes the attempt to deny personal expression while imagining a Platonic utopia. The expressive frustration in various places may confirm the poet's inability to remain on a plateau of higher understanding, but the message-logos for some readers is less interesting than the pathos that arises out of the experience. Moreover, the fact that Shelley's is chasing the "shadow of the idol of [his] thought" complicates matters. The attempt to annihilate self through a sexual union with Emily can be viewed paradoxically, in fact, as merely an attempt to obtain a sense of a lost self. While poetic language is frequently blamed for Shelley's failure, another possible explanation is that the poet's egotism gets in the way.
Plato's Phaedrus raises issues concerning the danger of writing. Socrates objects to it for several reasons. One of the reasons is that it "will create forgetfulness in the learners' should, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves" (158-59). Another reason is that once thoughts are written down, "they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not" (139). It is interesting to note that Shelley wanted only 100 copies of Epipsychidion to be distributed to the public: "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" (Letters 2: 263).
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Oxford UP, 1953.
The Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 7. Ed Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964.