Shelley and the Mutinous Flesh

Abstract

It has been, and still is, the tendency of Shelley scholars to insist that in Epipsychidion and the later love lyrics Shelley is celebrating an idea or spiritual love which must be sharply distinguished from what White calls ‘the biological and sensational function of love’ found ‘on a far different, and inferior, plane of living’.¹ This kind of distinction between spiritual and physical love, which is presented always as if it were Shelley’s own, is one of the main reasons why growing numbers of modem readers have turned against his poetry. They have been repelled by what they consider with Rampion in Point Counter Point ‘that dreadful lie in the soul’, the hypocritical pretense that his love is sexless. Yet neither the poetry considered in itself nor Shelley’s prose speculations on love warrant any such over-simplified distinction as his apologists have made for him. An examination of one of Shelley’s own statements on the matter suggests that the love poetry may be more honestly and more meaningfully interpreted than it has been in the past.

Shelley’s sex life has cost him many admirers. The details of his marriages and love affairs seem to point to some inadequacy of personality that constantly needed to project its longings onto some woman. Herbert Read diagnosed the weakness as stemming from an unconscious homosexuality. The threat of trying to discover a correspondent alter-ego (and aspects of this appear in most of the major poems) is voiced in the early essay fragment, ‘On Love’, with its passionate description of how the other person will have ‘an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret, with a frame, whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own’. But whatever the theory, Shelley did need the physical presence, a fact too often overlooked in the presentation of his love poetry.