Love, Writing and Scepticism in Epipsychidion

Abstract

Romantic love is not a central preoccupation of the Romantic poets. By comparison with the Elizabethans or the Victorians, the English Romantics wrote very few poems about that influx of inspirational feeling which attends upon the long-drawn-out courtship of the beloved. The sustained, urbane intellectualisation of love which the courtly tradition requires is at odds with the essentially pantheistic and political concerns of the Romantics. Shelley’s Epipsychidion, with its fervent Platonism and declamatory rhetoric, is thus something of an anomaly, even by comparison with his other works. The fact of finding a beautiful woman, captive in a convent in Italy in 1821, anachronistically inspires in him a passion from the antique, and a poetry well versed in courtly formulations. Perhaps the very medieval reality of Emilia’s life encouraged in her admirer an infatuation which sounds bookish, and a passion which feels passé. Certainly the spirit of another poet and of another book makes itself strongly felt throughout Shelley’s love poem. Dante’s life-long devotion to the figure of Beatrice, as critics have shown (see Webb, 1976; Schulze, 1982), is the model against which Shelley measures the strength of his own love, and composes the story of his own Vita Nuova. Epipsychidion is thus, like many romances after Dante’s, a poem in the grip of an imagination and an experience which precede its own.