Shelley and Plato: Metaphysical Formulations

Jacqueline M. Starner English Honors Thesis 6 May 2008

2 Introduction In a letter to J. B. Pereira (September 16, 1815) Percy Bysshe Shelley highlights his commitment to philosophical study: “I have taken a house, & continue to employ myself in the cultivation of philosophic truth” (Jones Letters 431). Though Shelley studied many philosophers, Plato’s philosophy influenced him greatly, which is evident in his choice to translate Plato’s Ion and The Symposium (Cameron 302). Shelley was introduced to Plato by Dr. Lind, his professor at Eton. During this time, Plato was “still regarded in schools and universities as a subversive and corrupting author” (Holmes 26), which probably heightened Shelley’s interest in the philosopher. Although Shelley did not translate The Symposium until twelve years after his introduction to Plato (Stahmer), I believe that Shelley consciously incorporated Plato’s philosophy into his important works before that time, including Alastor and “Mont Blanc.” Shelley not only incorporated aspects of Plato’s philosophy, but he reworked Plato’s metaphysical ideas through his poetry to create his own unique metaphysical view. I have tracked Shelley’s use of Platonic ideas through five of his poetic works; these works in chronological order are Alastor, “Mont Blanc,” “To a Sky-Lark,” Adonais, and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. Shelley also wrote many prose works, and “On Life,” “On Love,” and A Defence of Poetry have helped to shed light upon his metaphysical views. In both his prose and poetry, Shelley unlike his fellow Romantic writers was drawn toward abstract language. This tendency of his is decidedly unRomantic and is rooted in Shelley’s pre-occupation with philosophy. Shelley could in fact be labeled a philosopher (though he would not approve of such a title) because through his poetry he seeks to formulate his metaphysical beliefs.

3 Shelley’s choice to partake in the tradition of writing a defense of poetry, shows his commitment to upholding poetry as a superior discipline to philosophy; however, this conviction did not stop him from steeping himself in philosophical works. In his study of Plato, he found a way around this contradiction by considering “Plato as ‘essentially a poet’” and rejecting “Plato’s rational formulations” (Woodman 550). However, despite his overt disapproval of philosophy, much of Shelley’s work addresses the metaphysical questions that concerned Plato, such as “In what space does Truth or divinity exist?” He would have bulked at identifying himself as a philosopher, and yet his work clearly illustrates the philosophical work he was undertaking. A very important component of Shelley’s philosophy was his conception of the divine. By “divine” I do not mean a Christian patriarchal God figure or any sort of religious belief. The divine as Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry is “the eternal, the infinite, and the one” (Norton 840). Divine is actually synonymous with a Platonic type of Truth because both are unchanging and beyond the experiential material world. I capitalize the word “Truth” throughout my analysis to signify its divinity; Truth is inherently divine because it shares the same qualities as divinity of being eternally present and beyond material existence. Shelley’s philosophy differs importantly from Plato’s in the way that Shelley constructs his idea of this Truth. Platonic Truth exists beyond the realm of experiential existence, and while Shelley believes in an ideal objective Truth, he situates his Truth within the phenomenological world. In perhaps his most famous poem “Mont Blanc,” Shelley embodies the Truth in the form of the mountain. This Truth he refers to as “the power” throughout the poem: “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:--the power is there/ The still and solemn power” (127-

4 8). The image of power residing within a formidable mountain which rises above the rest of the world is Platonic because the power or Truth exists separately. Shelley describes the truth as “still and solemn” because it resides above sensory experience and therefore does not become entangled in the mechanisms which drive everyday existence. However, though the mountain “pierc[es] the infinite sky” (60), Shelley’s Truth is not entirely Platonic because it resides in a form of the natural world. Mont Blanc is reminiscent of the Platonic realm of the forms, but Mont Blanc’s position within the natural world immediately makes its Truth more accessible. Shelley also emphasizes the earthliness of the mountain by referring to it as a masculine entity; he describes the glacier surrounding the summit: “Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down/ From the ice gulphs that gird his secret throne” (16-17). In his first major work Alastor Shelley also assigns gender to the entity which embodies the Truth. The main character, the Poet, in Alastor travels “[t]o seek strange truths in undiscovered lands” and receives a vision of a veiled maiden (77). “Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme” (158), and after the departure of the vision the poet becomes obsessed with uniting once again with this being of Truth. The poet’s encounter with the maiden is very un-Platonic because he receives her wisdom through a sexual encounter. 1In The Symposium Plato uses Socrates’ rejection of Alcibiades, a younger and more beautiful man, who wishes to be Socrates’ lover, to illustrate the need to reject the physical world in order to reach the Truth. Socrates rejects sexual contact because he knows that in order to reach the Truth he must move beyond the imperfect shadows of mortal existence. 1

Alcibiades relates the story of his rejection: “I threw my arms around this really god-like and amazing man, and lay there with him all night long[…] when I got up next morning I had no more slept with Socrates than if I’d been sleeping with my father or elder brother” (219c-d).

5 In his 1819 essay “On Life,” Shelley shifts to an extremely materialist view, seeming to reject any type of Platonic idealism. He writes, “I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers, who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived” (Reiman 476). This assertion is a direct contradiction of Plato’s belief that the objects perceived in the world are only shadows of the true forms; Shelley takes a skeptical position by stating that we cannot know anything except that which we experience through the senses. Shelley’s adopted materialism was short-lived because of the natural draw he felt toward an idealist philosophy like Plato’s. Shelley dabbled in both materialism and idealism, negotiating between the two extremes, because each caused him uneasiness. 2He did not want to trust in a world totally constructed by the senses, but his abhorrence of tyranny did not lend itself to idealism either. In A Defence of Poetry Shelley begins to really solidify his metaphysical beliefs by creating a compromise between strict materialism and strict idealism. Shelley describes poetry’s function: “it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Norton 847). This statement situates divinity within the material world; however, those objects we perceive daily are not themselves divine. Divinity is disguised beneath the mortal coverings of earthly objects, and the poet’s job is to reveal this hidden divinity to humanity. Shelley’s compromise occurs in the placement of his divinity; he moves Truth from the Platonic intelligible region into the world itself. Like the Truth of the higher Platonic realm,

2

Shelley’s first major work was Queen Mab, which was a political poem, and in my work I am consciously overlooking the political strand in Shelley’s poetry because I feel that his works, which are not overtly political, address his metaphysical beliefs to a greater extent. The works within this strand include but are not limited to The Revolt of Islam, The Mask of Anarchy, and Hellas.

6 Shelley’s divinity exists eternally, and the poet simply recognizes the existence of such Truth. Introduction of Criticism The critics whom I have incorporated into my analysis, situated Shelley’s Platonism as a central factor in their essays. These critics belong to a school of thought that is not without powerful opposition. In the opening paragraph of his essay “Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” Tracy Ware acknowledges the opposition: “Two prominent Shelley critics, Earl R. Wasserman and Harold Bloom, in emphasizing Shelley’s artistic and intellectual consistency, have explicitly denied the relevance of Plato for a proper study of his poetry and prose” (549). Ware affirms his belief in the relevance of Plato by stating that [w]hile these two critics agree in their opposition to the consideration of Platonism, that agreement obscures a long tradition in Shelley criticism, a tradition that has amassed a great deal of evidence to substantiate the claim that Shelley was profoundly influenced by Plato (549). The latter school of thought, which regards Shelley’s Platonism as critical to an understanding his work, is the one to which I also belong. Shelley’s Platonism is essential to a study of his work because Plato provides the foundation from which Shelley developed his metaphysical beliefs. Of all the philosophers whom Shelley read, Plato is the only whom he chose to translate, and the intense work of translation very probably caused Plato’s metaphysical beliefs to become embedded in Shelley’s own psyche. Even if Shelley did not consciously incorporate Plato’s ideas, although at times he definitely did, Plato’s ideas were part of Shelley’s consciousness. Though the ways in which Shelley agreed with Plato are interesting to note, Shelley’s divergences from Plato are far more interesting because these instances mark the points at which Shelley embarked on

7 his own metaphysical formulations. Shelley like Christ in Paradise Regain’d figures out what he is by recognizing what he is not. He absolutely cannot support Plato’s refutation of poetry, and this causes Shelley to formulate the reasons why he believes poetry benefits humanity. As a self-proclaimed atheist, Shelley was unwilling and unable to conform to philosophical doctrines; instead, his thinking was centered around the formulation of a metaphysical view to which he could subscribe. Ross G. Woodman in his essay “Shelley’s Changing Attitude to Plato” addresses the most obvious problem of Shelley’s affiliation with Plato, which was as mentioned previously that Plato excluded poets from his ideal Republic. Woodman describes Plato’s attitude toward poetry as “ambiguous” because “the poet on the one hand, is divinely inspired; poetry, on the other, is twice-removed from Reality.” Woodman goes on to explain that Plato believed poets had no place within an ideal society because “[w]hile the poet may have attained the object of knowledge in a state of supernatural possession, he can offer no more than a fictitious account of it which, when accepted as truth, breeds dogmatism and credulity” (497). Tracy Ware in his essay “Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” written twenty-three years after Woodman’s essay, also acknowledges the irony of Shelley’s use of Platonic ideas in his poetry, but he states that Plato “stresses the connection between the divine intuitions of the imagination and poetry, the medium in which these intuitions find their finest expression. Plato’s deepest influence on Shelley was as support for these divine intuitions” (550). Ware explains that Plato’s belief in the divine inspiration of poets influenced Shelley’s view of poetry as an expression of the divine.

8 Both Woodman and Ware discuss the ways in which Shelley addressed Plato’s conviction of the failure of poetry. Woodman believes that Shelley’s objective through poetry is to continuously “recreate the archetypal vision” (508); the particulars of this vision as defined by Woodman will be discussed later. The second way in which Woodman describes Shelley escaping Platonic doubt of poetry is by “moving beyond imagery altogether” (510). In The Triumph of Life, Woodman argues, Shelley presents Rousseau as a poet who has fallen “victim [to] his own vision” (508). Woodman writes, Rousseau “offers the poet a choice between being caught in the snare of his own image world or rejecting it” (508). Through Rousseau Woodman believes that Shelley rejects the image world of poetry: “[the poets] who drew/ New figures on its false and fragile glass” (243-248 qtd in Woodman 509). In Adonais Woodman explains that Shelley moves beyond the false world of images because “[t]he meaning of the poem resides ultimately outside of the poem, and is arrived at […] through dialectic pressing both the poet and audience beyond imagery altogether” (510). Ware’s explanation of how Shelley rectifies Plato’s view of poetry with his own is more convincing than Woodman’s. Ware writes, “Shelley adapts Plato’s mirror image, discriminating between two types of mimesis” (558). Plato views poetry as “an art which merely reflects phenomena,” but Shelley redefines poetry as “a corrective mirror, adjusting the phenomena according to the poet’s imagination of their highest potential” (558). This explanation is less vague than Woodman’s arguments of “archetypal image” or “dialectic” which are not as clearly supported with textual evidence. Ware explains that Shelley believes that the poet uses the imaginative faculty to transform phenomenological objects: “universe is modified by the ‘inward sight,’ or the

9 imagination, of the artist” (557). This phenomenon then logically causes divinity to be located “within the psyche for Shelley” (554), instead of in a Platonic ideal region. Joseph E. Baker in Shelley’s Platonic Answer to a Platonic Attack on Poetry (1965) also attributes significance to Shelley’s conception of the imagination: “Imagination does not merely create. What it perceives is real. Shelley carries this line of thought farther than most Platonists would. According to him, there is a truth of imagery” (27). While Woodman argues that Shelley moves beyond imagery, Baker claims that Shelley attaches a very non-Platonic importance to imagery. Imagery in fact can be observed and recreated as an expression of truth. The most modern evaluation of Shelley’s Platonism comes from Tim Milnes’ article “Centre and Circumference: Shelley’s Defence of Philosophy” (2004). Milnes assumes a dualistic view of Shelley’s relationship to Platonism: “like many modern ‘ordinary language’ philosophers [Shelley] maintained a patient indifference or doublemindedness concerning the relation between the fixed ‘centre’ of knowledge and an impermanent ‘circumference’ of experience” (5). The terms ‘centre’ and ‘circumference’ Milnes draws from Shelley’s essay “On Life” in which Shelley writes, “Each is at once the centre and circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained” (The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley vol. 6 194195 qtd in Milnes 3). ‘Centre’ Milnes associates with a Platonic centered view of knowledge and ‘circumference’ with transitory, phenomenological experience. Milnes argues that Shelley mediated between these opposing views: “Shelley’s interrogation of ‘knowledge’ never led him to reject outright the key assumptions underpinning

10 empiricism” (5). Shelley continued to seek a Platonic type of ultimate truth, while never devaluing the impressions and images of experience. The critics mentioned all discuss the ways in which Shelley negotiated Plato’s philosophy, accepting some doctrines and rejecting others as served his needs. One instance I noted of Shelley’s agreement with Plato occurs in A Defence of Poetry (A Defence), when Shelley describes poetic inspiration as transitory: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (Norton 846). This passage echoes Woodman’s description of Plato’s view of poetry which is that while the poet may have experienced the divine, once he begins to compose he is already out of contact with it. Plato and Shelley also situate the divine differently in relationship to the mortal world: Plato believes that in order for a poet to create he must come in contact with the objects of truth in the intelligible region, while Shelley’s description of poetic inspiration does not include this stipulation. Shelley writes in A Defence that “this power [the invisible influence] arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (846). 3Poetic inspiration to both Plato and Shelley is a result of the divine acting upon the mortal, but Plato situates the divine as existing firmly outside of the poet, while Shelley describes the divine as something already existing within the poet. The idea about which Plato and Shelley hold radically different views concerns their opinions about the products of poetic inspiration, poetry itself. As Woodman mentions, Plato believes that poets were twice removed from reality; the reasoning to 3

Shelley adopts an egalitarian view of divinity, which agrees with his political beliefs. Divinity is not only located in all earthly objects but within human beings as well. The poet possesses the unique power of recognizing the existence of this divinity of which most people are unaware.

11 support this conclusion stems from Plato’s view of poetry as mimetic of the physical world. If poets recreate the physical world, which is already a shadow of true reality, then it follows that the products of their creation will naturally be shadows of shadows or two levels removed from the Truth. Even those poets who have experienced the truth can only produce a “probable account” of the experience (Woodman 497). Plato views this “probable account” as potentially dangerous because one could mistake it for the actual Truth. Woodman uses an excerpt from Shelley’s Notes to Queen Mab to illustrate Shelley’s agreement with Plato’s doctrine: It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceive […] By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities (qtd in 508). Woodman explains that what Shelley describes as the “‘vulgar mistake’ of mistaking a metaphor for a real thing is the basis of Plato’s rejection of mythopoeic poets from his Republic” (508). However, Shelley offers a solution to the inherent problems Plato identifies in poetry. According to Woodman, this solution “lay in the perpetual recreation of the archetypal vision” (508). After stating what he believes to be Shelley’s answer to Plato, Woodman does not explain how Shelley recreates this archetypal vision through his poetry. Woodman does, however, provide a description of the archetypal vision which offers some insight into the work Shelley was trying to accomplish through poetry: This vision has its source in the poet’s response to the world about him. With time, the vision becomes separated from its source in ‘the invisible nature of man’ and takes on an independent existence of its own. Poetic vision thereby degenerates into dogma […] To recreate the archetypal vision is, then, to restore it to its source in man where it is renewed by the poet (508).

12 This description of the vision produced by poetic inspiration reflects Shelley’s affiliation with the Romantic school of thought; Shelley derived his answers to larger metaphysical questions by examining the world around him. As he states in the opening lines of “Mont Blanc,” “The everlasting universe of things/ Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,/ Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom” (1-3). Shelley in looking to the physical world for guidance differs from Plato who believed the shadows of this world could only mislead. Woodman’s description of the vision becoming disconnected from its source in the human mind and taking on an existence of its own, reflects both Plato’s and Shelley’s fears about the possible misunderstanding of poetry. One poem which no critics have analyzed through a Platonic lens is Shelley’s early poem Alastor. I noticed that in Alastor Shelley presents Woodman’s description of the archetypal vision through the Poet’s creation of the “veiled maid”(151). This maid visits the Poet in a vision and represents his own poetic vision as she possesses a “voice […] like the voice of his own soul” (153). After this visitation, the Poet’s only aim becomes his reunification with the vision, and his quest causes his “descen[t] to an untimely grave” (Preface). The Poet is driven to his demise by his unfortunate belief that the maid, whose origin is within his imagination, exists outside of his mind. In order to prevent readers and poets alike from falling victim to imaginative creations, Shelley must strive to present a true description of the Truth of his experience in his verse. If Shelley can present to the reader an accurate description of the truth, then the danger of “probable accounts” becoming dogma is erased. Shelley in even attempting to recreate the “archetypal vision” through his poetry differs from Plato who believed the intelligible region was beyond description.

13 Woodman quotes a passage from Plato’s Seventh Epistle : “I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way of putting it into words like other studies” (341C-341D qtd in 507). According to Woodman, Shelley’s objective in his poetry is to accomplish the very task Plato deems impossible. Another way in which Shelley avoids the risks of poetry, which Woodman does not consider, is through his redefinition of the role of poets within society. In his essay “Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry,” Ware outlines Plato’s stance on poetry as expressed by Socrates in the Republic; Socrates “mocks the artist by comparing his creations to the reflections in a mirror” (557). As discussed earlier, Ware explains how Shelley conceives of poetry’s function differently than Plato. Ware cites a passage from A Defence to show how Shelley changes Socrates’ mirror image to work in favor of the poet: “A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted” (p.281 qtd in 558). Shelley’s redefinition of poetry causes his poet to function as the philosopher kings do in Plato’s Republic. The philosopher kings are those who are meant to rule because they have experienced the intelligible region. Instead of remaining within that realm of truth, they must return to earth because of their responsibility to instruct humanity about how to reach that Truth. Shelley’s definition of the poet has evolved from Plato’s simplification of the poet as a facilitator of mimesis to a definition which classifies the poet as something encompassing both the roles of artist and philosopher.

14 Chapter 1: The Predominance of Fire in Alastor Shelley’s second major poem Alastor has not assumed a prominent place within Shelley criticism because of what have been interpreted by critics as its inconsistencies. By re-interpreting this poem through the lens of Shelley’s Platonism, which has not previously been done, I was able to make sense of the confusing status of the vision maiden. This maiden whom the Poet gives birth to through his mind seems to have an ambiguous relationship with the Poet because she imparts knowledge to him and then immediately disappears. I believe the vision’s ephemeral nature is caused by Shelley’s own anxieties over both materialist and idealist doctrines. Shelley provides the Poet with a form of Truth outside of the material world, which then causes the Poet’s demise, because the Poet’s devotion to the idealist vision causes him to lose touch with the material world. The entire poem is in fact an allegory for Shelley’s confusion over his metaphysical views. I have compared Alastor with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave because both works are the expressions of their authors’ metaphysical views. But Shelley’s formulations of his own views were in reaction to Plato’s idealism. For example, the attention Shelley pays to different forms of light in Alastor is reminiscent of the way Plato differentiates between the fire and the sun in the Allegory. I have also included a comparison of Alastor to sections of The Symposium because without this comparison the objective of the Poet’s journey remains mysterious. Aristophanes’ speech sheds light upon the Poet’s wanderings after his encounter with the vision. If Shelley’s poem is not interpreted through its connections with Plato’s dialogues, then it loses the important meanings which are only understood through such a comparison

15 In order to facilitate such a comparison, I will first begin with an overview of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s Allegory, the character Adeimantus explains to his brother Glaucon the nature of reality using the example of the cave. The men in the cave, “who have been prisoners there since they were children,” cannot see the figures of people passing on the road above the cave but can only see shadows because “their legs and necks [are] so fastened that they cannot turn their heads” (Plato 514b). The shadows of the figures are created by a fire burning behind the road that runs in front of the opening of the cave. Later in the dialogue Adeimantus explains what the fire and cave are meant to represent: “The realm revealed by sight corresponds to the prison, and the light of the fire in the prison to the power of the sun. And you won’t go wrong if you connect the ascent into the upper world and the sight of the objects there with the upward progress of the mind into the intelligible region” (517b). The fire in the allegory provides light as the sun does, which allows us to view our surroundings; however, the things we can view by the light of the sun are like the shadows in the cave because we cannot see the true nature of things in the visible region. In Alastor, as I will demonstrate in my paper, fire functions differently as a symbol than in the Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s Allegory fire represents a shadow of the Truth, while in Alastor the maid of the Poet’s vision, who embodies Truth, possesses fire, making fire symbolize not a shadow but the truth itself. However, the Truth embodied by the vision is a different Truth than the ultimate Truth in Plato’s dialogues because the vision’s Truth concerns love. Ultimately, the Poet, who already possesses that which Plato deems the highest type of knowledge, learns that there is a greater knowledge which can only be attained through spiritual communion with a partner.

16 The Poet in “Alastor” is immediately cast as different from the prisoners of the cave. While the prisoners believe that “the shadows of the objects […are] the whole truth” (515c), the Poet is described as having knowledge: […] Every sight And sound from the vast earth and ambient air, Sent to his heart its choicest impulses. The fountains of divine philosophy Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great Or good, or lovely, which sacred past In truth or fable consecrates, he felt And knew. When early youth had past, he left His cold fireside and alienated home To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands. (Norton 68-77) Shelley’s vocabulary in this passage echoes the Platonic vocabulary. He writes that the Poet knew “good” things. In the Allegory, Plato explains that “the final thing to be perceived in the intelligible region, and perceived only with difficulty, is the form of the good” (517b-c). The one who glimpses the form of the good has seen the ultimate truth because “in the intelligible region itself [the form of the good] is the controlling source of truth and intelligence” (517c). The intelligible region which Adeimantus mentions is the realm above the earthly, and this intelligible region contains the forms of which the things on earth are merely shadows. By writing “all of great/Or good/or lovely […] he felt/And knew,” Shelley implies that the Poet has glimpsed the form of the good. Shelley’s use of the word “knew” especially casts the Poet as someone with access to the Truth because Plato differentiates between having “right opinions” and having “knowledge.” In The Symposium, Socrates recalls a dialogue with the priestess Diotima in which she explains the nature of knowledge: Diotima asks, “Haven’t you realized that there’s

17 something between wisdom and ignorance?” Socrates replies, “What is it?” to which Diotima answers, “It’s having right opinions without being able to give reasons for having them. Don’t you realize that this isn’t knowing, because you don’t have knowledge unless you can give reasons” (Gill 202a). Not all people who have not gained access to the forms are ignorant; these people have limited access to the Truth which allows them to have “right opinions” without having knowledge of the ultimate Truth. In his poem Alastor, Shelley is working through his views about the relationship of the Truth to the material world. He differs importantly from Plato because he does not consider the senses or material existence to be completely devoid of Truth. In the Allegory, Plato uses the “prison” of the cave to represent the “realm revealed by sight” (517b). By “realm revealed by sight” Plato means earthly existence, so that all the things perceived through sight are only shadows like those in the cave. Shelley rejects this idea of Plato’s that material, earthly existence can only contain shadows of the divine because he writes that the Poet receives impulses from “[e]very sight/And sound from the vast earth and ambient air” (68-9). The external earthly environment grants the Poet access to the “fountains of divine philosophy” or in other words knowledge of the good. Shelley’s rejection of the Platonic idea that earthly things are only shadows of the truth reflects Shelley’s belief in the power of nature. Through his preoccupation with objects within nature not only in Alastor but also “Mont Blanc,” Shelley is exploring the ways in which the external environment can embody metaphysical truths. The invocation with which Shelley begins the poem before telling the story of the Poet proves his ultimately unshakable, though sometimes questioned, belief in the power of nature, which aligns him with the larger school of Romantic poetry. The first stanza of

18 the invocation is addressed to the “Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!” (1). Shelley recounts the offerings of nature: “sunset and its gorgeous ministers” (6), “autumn’s hollow sighs in the sere wood” (8), “spring’s voluptuous pantings when she breathes/ Her first sweet kisses” (11-12), “bright bird, insect, or gentle beast” (13). After listing those things in nature that have inspired him, he asks forgiveness from the elements: “forgive/ This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw/ No portion of your wonted favour now!” (15-17). The “boast” is the poem to follow about a Poet who initially rejects nature in search of truth. Though Shelley attributes the Poet’s untimely death to his “self-centered seclusion” in the Preface (746), the Poet’s lack of appreciation for the natural world might also have contributed to his demise. As the Poet wanders in search of his vision, he is carried within a small boat to a beautiful and secluded cove. The boughs of the trees weave together: “The oak,/ Expanding its immense and knotty arms,/ Embraces the light beech” (431-433); so that “the woven leaves/ Make net-work of the dark blue light of day” (445-446). However, this naturally sublime scene brings the Poet no solace because he remains self-centered. The first image Shelley describes the Poet as noticing is his own reflection: “His eyes beheld/ Their own wan light […] distinct in the dark depth/ Of that still fountain” (469-472). Nature fails to revive him because in his singleminded quest to reunite with the maiden he fails to notice nature’s beauty. In the invocation, Shelley reveals his fear of nature, which both giveth and taketh away, when he asks the elements to continue reaping their bounty upon him, though he will tell the story of one who did not appreciate their gifts.

19 In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato does not value the natural world because of course the aim of the Allegory is to exhibit the fallacy of nature. Plato’s character Adeimantus, who relates the story, differentiates between the natural world and the heavenly realm through the example of two different types of light, which are the light of the fire, rooted in the natural world, and the divine light of the sun. The first light that Adeimantus presents is that of the fire, which draws the prisoners from the cave: the prisoner is “suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire” (515c). The light of the fire is less intense than that of the sun, and Adeimantus relates that the “thing [the prisoner] would be able to do last would be to look directly at the sun itself” (516b). Becoming accustomed to the light of the fire is the prisoner’s first step in preparing himself to experience the intensity of the sun. Shelley also creates a hierarchy of fire within his poem, according to the levels of their intensity. Shelley’s first mention of light is of the Poet’s “cold fireside” (76), and this fireside which the Poet leaves to “seek strange truths” is comparable to the fire burning at the entrance of the cave in the Allegory (77). The fire presented as more intense than that of the Poet’s “cold fireside” is that of the Poet’s vision maiden: “Soon the solemn mood/ Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame/ A permeating fire” (161-163). Shelley’s description of the maid’s fire as “permeating,” consuming “all her frame” and threatening to overthrow its bounds, casts it as more intense than the Poet’s contained “cold fireside.” Shelley’s also describes of the maid’s light as “warm” (175), which also emphasizes its intensity as compared to the Poet’s “cold fireside.” When this hierarchy of fire is compared to the hierarchy of light within the Allegory, the Poet’s “cold fireside” corresponds to the fire outside of the cave which is only a shadow of the

20 sun, while the vision’s fire corresponds to the light of the sun. Within the Allegory the light of the sun represents the ultimate Truth, and Shelley also describes the maid’s fire as deriving from Truth because its source is “the solemn mood/ Of her pure mind.” Shelley illustrates the vision as embodying Truth through his description of her speech to the Poet: “[k]nowledge and truth and virtue were her theme/ And lofty hopes of divine liberty” (158-9). Like the Poet, Shelley describes the maid as having “knowledge,” which in Platonism entails having seen the forms. In Plato’s dialogues, the words “truth” and “divine” are also associated with the intelligible region; however, in creating a symbol of Truth whose source of light is a flame and not the sun Shelley radically departs from the symbolic meanings of light in the Allegory of the Cave. Plato associates Truth with the light of the sun and shadows with the light of the fire; therefore, if Shelley’s maid were to correspond with the symbolic structure of the Allegory then her source of light would necessarily be the sun. Shelley perhaps associates the flame with the Truth of the vision because she does not bring Truth to a being who is devoid of it like the prisoners of the cave. The Poet already possesses access to the divine; therefore, the vision’s flame imparts something different to him than the Truth which the light of the sun reveals on the prisoners of the cave. Shelley’s choice of fire as a symbol of truth also reflects his belief in the power of nature. While Plato chose the sun, which exists above the earth, Shelley chose an element which exists upon the earth. The very embodiment of truth within a feminine figure is an even more radical departure of Shelley’s from Plato. Plato believed the divine itself was beyond description, as Woodman illustrates using Plato’s Seventh Epistle: “I certainly have composed no work in regard to it, nor shall I ever do so in the future, for there is no way

21 of putting it into words like other studies” (341C-341D qtd in 507). Shelley not only attempts to describe the divine but also embodies it not only within a figure but a feminine figure! As Shelley notes in his “ A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love,” which served as the introduction to his translation of The Symposium, entitled The Banquet, the women of ancient Greece “possessed, except with extraordinary exceptions, the habits and qualities of slaves” (Notopoulos 408). 4Plato would never choose as Shelley does to inscribe the divine onto a mortal body because the objects of material existence are only shadows like those on the wall of the cave. Plato would especially not choose a female body because of the standard interpretation during his time of women as naturally closer to the earth and therefore farther than men from the divine. The Poet’s sexual interactions with the female vision would also not have been sanctioned by Plato. In his speech in The Symposium, Pausanias makes the famous differentiation between the two types of love: Uranian or Heavenly love and Pandemic or Common love (Gill 180d-e). Common love, he says, “is the kind of love that inferior people feel. People like this are attracted to women as much as boys, and to bodies rather than minds” (181b). Pausanias clearly pairs women with the body and men with the mind; therefore, loving a woman is no more than loving a body, while in order to love a mind one must love a man. Pausanias’ description of Heavenly love further degrades the status of women: “The other love derives from the Heavenly goddess, who has nothing of the female in her but only maleness; so this love is directed at boys” (181c). Though Pausanias identifies a “goddess” as the origin of Heavenly love, he qualifies the term by

4

The vision is of course not mortal, but Shelley presents her as resembling a mortal feminine figure. The form which she assumes to visit the Poet is similar to mortal body, though her nature is divine.

22 defining this “goddess” as completely male. Having a “goddess” as the origin of a higher form of love which can only be directed at males would have presented a problem had Pausanias not redefined the term “goddess.” Shelley completely rejects Plato’s belief in the natural inferiority of women by positioning a female figure importantly within the poem and having her impart knowledge to the Poet through a sexual act. The Poet’s experience with the vision culminates in this sexual embrace: “He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled/ His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet/ Her panting bosom” (Norton 182-184). The Poet’s love is not Common, though it is directed toward a female figure, and the physical way in which the Poet and vision express their mutual love is not in accordance with Platonic beliefs regarding love. Pausanias says of the goddess of Heavenly love that she “is also older, and so avoids abusive violence” (181c). 5By “abusive violence” he means penetration as would be done with a woman; the sexual act between men and boys does not include this violence. Shelley rejects Plato’s belief that the physical act of love between a man and woman cannot be divine by making this very act the means through which the Poet receives knowledge from the vision. While the maiden could be interpreted as a figure existing outside of the Poet, there is also evidence within the poem to suggest that she is an aspect of the Poet himself. Shelley’s description of the maid’s voice as “like the voice of [the Poet’s] own soul” provides the strongest evidence for this interpretation (153). Frederick L. Jones in his essay “The Inconsistency of Shelley’s Alastor” agrees that the “veiled maid is […] an ideal combination of all the loveliest and truest elements in the Poet’s vast knowledge”

5

In her lectures concerning ancient Greek customs, Dr. Sistare explains that men would only use the external surfaces of boys’ bodies for sexual acts.

23 (296). In the Preface to the poem, Shelley also describes the vision as an outward manifestation of the Poet: “He imagines to himself the Being whom he loves. Conversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures, the vision in which he embodies his own imaginations unites all of wonderful, or wise, or beautiful, which the poet, the philosopher, or the lover could depicture” (Norton 746). Shelley’s description of the vision in his Preface also supports the interpretation of the vision as the embodiment of Truth because if the Poet is “[c]onversant with speculations of the sublimest and most perfect natures” or in other words has access to the divine, then it follows that the outward manifestation of his mind would itself be divine. If the Poet already possesses knowledge, then he creates the vision not to gain knowledge but because “[h]is mind awakened and thirst[ed] for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself” (Preface pg. 746). As stated previously, the vision grants the Poet something different than the knowledge which the sun imparts to the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave, and an understanding of the purpose of the vision may lie in Plato’s dialogue The Symposium. Though Shelley states that the Poet “seek[s] strange truths” (77), the quest of the Poet seems to be the “pursuit of wholeness” described by Aristophanes in The Symposium (Gill 193a). Though Plato ultimately rejects the importance Aristophanes places on unity, Shelley rejects “Plato’s rational formulations” (Woodman 550). By regarding Plato’s dialogues as poetry, Shelley interpreted them in his own way, which was not necessarily the way Plato designed them to be understood. In The Symposium, Aristophanes explains using a fantastical tale why human beings desire to share love with another person. He claims that human beings in earlier times “had four hands and the

24 same number of legs, and two identical faces on a circular neck” (Gill 189e-190a). These, what would now be considered double humans, were cut in half by Zeus to prevent them from becoming too powerful and overthrowing the gods (190d). Aristophanes’ main point is that each halved human “longed for its own other half” (191a), and the vision in Alastor seems to function as the Poet’s other half. While Shelley describes the vision as a manifestation of the Poet, an inconsistency with this conception can be seen through the Poet’s reaction to the vision’s departure. Through intercourse with the Poet the vision passes her flame to him, and this flame serves as the force which drives the Poet to his early demise. Shelley describes the wandering of the Poet which follows his experience of the vision: “Day after day, a weary waste of hours,/Bearing within his life the brooding care/That ever fed on its decaying flame” (245-7). As the Poet wanders searching to reunite with his vision, the flame which she instilled in him consumes him; however, it does not follow logically from an interpretation of the vision as a manifestation of the Poet that the power of the vision, symbolized by the flame, could consume him. If the vision’s power derives from the Poet’s mind, then her power could not be too much for him to bear because her power and his would be equivalent. Even after describing the vision as imagined by the Poet in the Preface, Shelley complicates the role of the vision: “The intellectual faculties, the imagination, the functions of sense, have their respective requisitions on the sympathy of corresponding powers in other human beings. The Poet is represented as uniting these requisitions, and attaching them to a single image” (Preface 746). This passage occurs soon after Shelley’s previous statement that the Poet’s mind “thirsts for intercourse with an

25 intelligence similar to itself”; however, the being whom the Poet imagines is not only similar to himself but surpasses him because the Poet instills in her all that is beautiful and perfect within the world (this beauty and perfection surpasses that possessed by the Poet). Shelley’s description of the flame of the vision within the poem illustrates the point at which the vision takes on a life of its own separate from the Poet: “Soon the solemn mood/ Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame/ A permeating fire: wild numbers then/ She raised” (161-164). The mind which produces the flame is “her pure mind” and not the Poets. The vision, like the flame, which will soon surpass the boundaries of her shape, is surpassing the boundaries of the Poet’s mind. Once she begins to compose her own verse, “wild numbers,” she has become her own entity. The sexual intercourse between Poet and vision which follows only becomes possible after the two are completely separated. Though the Poet’s experience with the vision culminates in a sexual embrace, their intercourse begins with a deep mental embrace that like the vision takes on a life of its own. Before describing the physical interaction between the vision and Poet, Shelley describes the mental one: Her voice was like the voice of his own soul Heard in the calm of thought; its music long, Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held His inmost sense suspended in its web Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues (153-157). The Poet is hypnotized by the voice of the vision, which echoes and then surpasses all that is greatest within his mind. Shelley translates the purely mental interaction into a visceral experience through his imagery. The interaction beginning within the Poet’s mind takes on a psychedelic quality “[o]f many coloured woof and shifting hues,” and as

26 the imagery becomes more intense the vision begins to take on actual physical qualities. The power of her voice progresses from spoken words to musical imitations of nature, “music long,/ Like woven sounds of streams and breezes,” until it can be seen and felt by the Poet. The imagery Shelley uses to illustrate the development of the vision is of weaving. The strands of her words weave together to form the complex sounds of “streams and breezes,” and the strands of this music which are twice as powerful as her words alone form a “web” which holds the Poet’s “inmost sense suspended,” though she is not yet powerful enough to physically hold the Poet. The moment at which the mental embrace becomes a physical one is when the power of “her pure mind kindled through all her frame/ A permeating fire” (161-162). She literally bursts into physical existence through the combustion of her woven power which has become too powerful to remain a metaphysical entity. After the vision becomes a physical entity separate from the Poet, the force of the vision’s fire, which she implants within the Poet, drives him forward in the same way that the prisoners of the cave are drawn from the darkness by the fire outside of the cave. Plato hypothesizes in his dialogue what would happen if “one of [the prisoners] were let loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire” (515c). If the prisoners could turn their heads, they would be drawn out of the cave by the light of the fire. The Poet’s vision causes him to move into an unfamiliar realm just as the prisoners who venture outside of the cave toward the fire. Before the vision the Poet could “only look straight ahead” like the prisoners because he had knowledge but not the higher form of knowledge granted to him by the vision. Unlike the prisoners who are dealing only with shadows of the Truth, the Poet has access to the

27 divine, and yet the vision accords him a higher Truth than that embodied by the sun in the Allegory. Once he glimpses the vision, the Poet is compelled to unite eternally with the Truth of the vision; however, his quest is doomed from the start. Shelley writes in the Preface, “He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave” (Norton 746), explaining the inevitability of the Poet’s death by the end of the poem. The vision, who is born from his mind but takes on a life of her own much like the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost, cannot be found anywhere else within nature, though the Poet searches far and wide. She is inimitable and like Plato’s intelligible region exists outside of the material world. Her only contact with the material world is through the Poet, who like Plato’s philosopher kings, accesses the divine while still existing within the mortal realm. The Truth of the vision, which in Alastor ranks above the realm of the forms, is Shelley’s addition to Plato’s theory of the forms. Based on the relationship between the Poet and his vision, the Truth of the vision seems to relate to the need for shared love in grasping the true nature of reality. The second paragraph of Shelley’s Preface to the poem mentions the need for love: “Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt.” This statement echoes Aristophanes definition of love, which states that “‘love’ is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness” (The Symposium 193a). The impetus for the Poet’s journey is not to find Truth because he has already attained knowledge, but to fill the “vacancy” of his spirit with the half from which he has been separated.

28 As he wanders the Poet encounters a swan and as the bird flies away he addresses it: Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird; thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in lustre of their own fond joy” (280-284) He wishes to reunite with his mate as he imagines the bird will do upon return to its nest. Interestingly, he only describes the physical embrace between the two birds, but this physical embrace is only the superficial evidence of the link between the mates. As the swan in the nest welcomes the wandering bird home, she does so with her eyes, which radiate with the light of her joy at seeing her mate. This light echoes the light shining from the Poet’s eyes, except the light from the Poet’s eyes is quickly consuming him because it finds no reflection in the eyes of another. The light shining from the swan’s eyes as she looks into the eyes of her mate is not a consuming fire like the one raging within the Poet, but a calm, controlled light which seems like the light which would shine in Plato’s intelligible region. The light of the intelligible region does not fluctuate as the ever-growing fire shining from the Poet’s eyes, but remains constantly bright like the light from the eyes of the swan who is united with her other half. Only the reflection of the Poet’s fire in the flame of the vision can tame the Poet’s flame and translate it into the calm bright light of Truth; a Truth reached only by uniting with his other half. After the Poet experiences the vision, the flame the vision implants within the Poet consumes him because like the prisoner who first glimpses the fire the Poet is “so dazzled by the glare of [the light]” that he cannot see (Plato 516a). When the prisoners of the cave first come out of the darkness, the light of the fire causes them to not “be able to

29 see a single one of the things” of which only shadows are reflected in the cave (516a). By moving in too direct a path toward Truth, the prisoners are completely blinded; they can see even less than the shadows viewed within the cave. In The Symposium Plato presents Diotima’s ladder as a gradual and therefore safer way of apprehending the Truth. If a person prepares himself gradually for experiencing the full light of Truth, then he will not be blinded by its brightness as the prisoners of the cave are when they look immediately at the fire. The Poet too is temporarily blinded by the brightness of the vision; Shelley describes the Poet after the vision’s departure: “Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night/ Involved and swallowed up the vision” (188-9). By not preparing properly for his encounter with the dazzling light of truth, the Poet suffers from the encounter. Though the Poet regains his sight, he does not completely recover because the vision’s fire remains within him “sho[wing]/ As in a furnace burning secretly/ From his dark eyes alone” (252-4). The fire of the vision’s truth continues to affect the Poet’s sight, and the result is that he becomes blinded to all of nature. The Poet finds himself surrounded by sublime imagery, and yet he sees nothing because he can only apprehend those things which reflect the vision he carries within his mind. As he addresses the parting swan, the Poet acknowledges that he can find no match for his thoughts within his external environment. He asks the swan, And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers In deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?” (285-290).

30 The Poet believes his power to apprehend beauty is wasted on the earth; he even belittles the animal which he is addressing. He asserts his superiority over the bird, while recognizing that the bird lives happily united with its other half. He cannot comprehend why an inferior being has attained the communion with another that eludes him; what he fails to recognize is that the bird’s entrenchment within nature has allowed it to achieve fulfillment. Finding no reflections of his interior life, which revolves around the vision, within nature causes the Poet to feel alienated from nature. This alienation stems from his intense experience with the divine through the vision for which he was not sufficiently prepared. Plato writes in the Allegory that the prisoner “made to look directly at the light of the fire, […] would hurt his eyes and he would turn back and retreat to the things he could see properly” (515d); however, the Poet, unlike the prisoners does not retreat. He stumbles blindly on after the fire of the vision, and his blindness to everything but his quest causes the fire to consume him. Another interesting complication which Shelley applies to Plato’s metaphor of the sun as Truth is that he describes the sun in Alastor as a less intense light. The sun, described as “cold white light of morning” (Norton 193), grants the Poet sight after the radiance of the vision blinds him. The other light described earlier as “cold” within the poem is the Poet’s “cold fireside” (76). In both cases “cold” is used to signify a lack of intensity when juxtaposed against the “warm light” of the vision (175). If the fireside is interpreted as “cold” because it is a shadow of the vision, then the sun with its “cold white light” is also merely a shadow. In Plato’s Allegory, the sun represents the ultimate truth. This is Shelley’s manipulation of the symbolic status of the sun which indicates his

31 shifting views within the poem about the status of nature. He places Truth not within an object of the universe, whose presence is always felt upon the earth, but places Truth instead in a being located outside of material existence. By reversing the hierarchy of types of light in the Allegory and making the sun a shadow of the fire of the vision, Shelley makes fire becomes the dominant symbol in Alastor. Shelley uses fire as his symbol of ultimate Truth because his ultimate Truth is different than that which Plato symbolizes using the sun. Shelley’s main character in Alastor discovers that Truth can only be reached by uniting with a kindred spirit, a soul like that of his vision which both reflects and enriches the soul which it augments.

32 Chapter 2: Shelley’s Negotiations between Skepticism and Idealism The vision in Alastor is the first of many instances in Shelley’s poetry and prose in which Shelley’s negotiations between the competing ideologies of skepticism and idealism become apparent. The vision is an anthropomorphic representation of Shelley’s internal turmoil, but in Shelley’s essays “On Life,” “On Love,” and A Defence of Poetry he directly addresses his philosophical beliefs. In these essays Shelley is deeply concerned with formulating a metaphysical view that straddles the abyss between skepticism and idealism. He is also concerned, as have been many poets including his fellow Romantics, with defending poetry as equal to philosophical pursuits. Shelley, especially, must resurrect poetry from Plato’s disparagement of it as “twice-Removed from Reality” (Woodman 497). In his 1819 essay “On Life” Shelley quotes the Italian epic poet Tasso: “No merita nome di creatore, sennon Iddio ed il Poeta” (“None deserves the name of creator except God and the Poet”) (Reiman 475). The idea of the Poet as a creator pervades Shelley’s poetry and prose and is even evident in his translation of Plato’s The Symposium, entitled The Banquet. In his 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry (A Defence), Shelley enumerates his beliefs about the function of the poet and poetry within society. In this essay, Shelley states that “to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word the good which exists in the relation, subsisting first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression” (Norton 840). This statement is not in agreement with the passage from Tasso, which depicts the poet as a God-like figure. The poet which Shelley portrays in A Defence is a being who perceives Truth in the world through his unique perception and then expresses that truth. This poet

33 is not the creator of that Truth, but simply “participates in the eternal” (840). In The Banquet, translated by Shelley in June 1818, Shelley writes that “God is a wise poet” (Notopolous 436), once again likening the poet to a divine creator; however, in A Defence Shelley’s idea of the poet has matured from that represented in The Banquet to the idea represented by H.D.’s lines in her poem “Tribute to the Angels”: “but he that sat upon the throne said,/ I make all things new” (H.D. 65). The figure H.D. describes as sitting “on the throne” in her poem, acts as Shelley’s version of the poet in A Defence because both “make all things new.” The poet Shelley presents in A Defence recognizes the eternal element existing within earthly objects and uses poetry to reveal this element to others. In A Defence Shelley defines Truth not in a Platonic sense, existing in a realm above the earthly, but as part of the material world: “The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn” (Norton 843). All objects of experiential existence wear a disguise which veils their “spirit” or eternal essence. The poet perceives the Truth which is muddled by earthly “vesture[s]” because the spirit of the objects informs their masks. Shelley uses the metaphor of the veil throughout his essay, and the idea of the truth being unveiled occurs in his poetry as well. According to Shelley, “[poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (847). The poet does not create the beauty which he perceives but reveals it, and he does this through an act of creation, that of writing verse. While he does not possess creative power

34 equivalent to God’s, the poet still participates in an act of creation because he “make[s] all things new” by changing the common perception of familiar objects. In Plato’s dialogues The Republic (specifically the Allegory of the Cave) and The Symposium, the divine and human are strictly separated. Plato posits the divine as existing above and not within the world. Through the Allegory of the Cave, Plato illustrates his theory that earthly objects are imperfect shadows of the forms in the “intelligible region” (Plato 517b). The Symposium, his translation of which Shelley entitled The Banquet, provides a means for these strictly separated worlds to communicate. Diotima explains to Socrates in The Banquet that “[t]he divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love” (Notopolous 442). Love is a “great Daemon,” meaning Love links the eternal of the intelligible region to the imperfect beings of the world (441). Shelley’s definition of poetry gives poetry a daemonical nature like Love because poetry communicates the divine to the mortal; however, Shelley’s daemon functions differently from Love. Due to Shelley’s conception of the divine as not above but within everything, poetry must penetrate the mortal coverings of objects to reach their eternal essences. Diotima describes Love as “fill[ing] up that intermediate space between these two classes of beings [the divine and mortal], so as to bind together by his own power, the whole universe of things” (442). Plato envisions the intermediate space as existing between a lower and higher world, but in Shelley’s philosophy the intermediate space exists within a single object. The mortal coverings or guises are what separate the divine

35 essences of objects from humanity. The movement of Shelley’s daemonical poetry is therefore horizontal since the divine and mortal exist on the same plane. Plato’s daemon of Love conversely moves in a vertical fashion because the divine and mortal are arranged into a hierarchy, much like the Christian heaven, earth, and hell. The purpose of poetry as explained by Shelley in A Defence is to penetrate the mortal barriers surrounding divine essences and communicate this divinity to humanity. In his essay “On Love,” written at the same time that he translated The Symposium, Shelley attributes a daemonical nature to Love just as Plato did in The Symposium. However, in this essay Shelley is beginning to form the metaphysical view, which he elucidates in A Defence. Shelley writes, Thou demandest what is Love. It is the powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves (Reiman 473). In this passage, Shelley identifies a chasm between the external environment and his internal nature, which is characteristic of Romantic poetry. This chasm is similar to the one Plato identifies in The Symposium as existing between the divine and the mortal, and in both Shelley’s essay and Plato’s dialogue Love acts as the intermediary between the two realms separated the chasm. The difference between this chasm and Plato’s though is that one of Shelley’s realms is located within the mind. Ware explains that the realm which Shelley locates within the mind is equivalent to Plato’s divine realm because “the paradigm for studying Shelley’s adaptation of Platonism [is] locating the Ideal Form within the human psyche” (552). Shelley internalizes the work of Love by having Love fill up the space which separates his mind from the external environment. When this essay is interpreted in conjunction with Shelley’s later essay A Defence then the work of

36 Love can be more fully understood as connecting the divine essences within external objects to the divinity existing within the mind. This divinity within the mind is essential to the production of poetry, but Shelley believes that poetry can only be produced through the mind’s recognition of the divinity within the external environment. Shelley’s describes poetry in A Defence as “reproduce[ing] all that it represents” (847), and the use of the word “reproduce” echoes Diotima’s explanation of the creative power of Love in The Banquet. Diotima informs Socrates that “Love is the desire of generation in the beautiful, both with relation to the body and the soul” (Notopolous 445). The beautiful to which Diotima refers is the beauty of the good, not external beauty, but beauty originating from Truth. The beauty of Truth produces a fertile environment in which people can produce, but human nature cannot generate “in what is deformed” says Diotima (445). Shelley likewise describes the production of poetry as only being possible when the poet is exposed to the beauty of Truth: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (Norton 846). The “invisible influence” grants the poet access to the divine thriving pandemically within mortal objects, and only through this clear perception of the Truth can the poet generate his verse. The mortal forms deform the divine essence of the objects which they veil, and just as Diotima states that people cannot produce “in what is deformed” so the poet cannot receive inspiration from objects marred by mortality. Though both Shelley and Plato believe that poetry can only be produced through direct contact with the divine, they each conceive of a different relationship between the divine and mortal and between poetry and Truth. Plato’s conception of the beautiful is

37 best symbolized by the sun, which serves as his symbol of the good in the Allegory of the Cave; the sun sheds light upon the planet which allows all species to flourish, and though the effects of the sun can be felt the sun itself is always beyond mortal reach. Shelley agrees with Diotima’s doctrine in The Banquet that generation can only occur within the beautiful, but to him the beautiful is within everything existing upon the earth. The beauty of the mortal world is not caused by an outside force but by a force existing within it, within reach. The existence of this force within all objects is the reason why Shelley describes poetry in A Defence as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (842). Poetry expresses life’s eternal Truth by stripping earthly objects of their mortal coverings to reveal their divine essences. Poetry’s action of revealing immortality within the mortal world is reminiscent of Diotima’s explanation in The Banquet of how humans can achieve immortality through reproduction: “The intercourse of male and female in generation, a divine work, through pregnancy and production, is, as it were, something immortal in mortality” (Notopolous 445). Though the creators will eventually die, they will live on in some way through their progeny. In this way, through continued reproduction humans can become immortal. In her speech, Diotima reveals the hidden immortality of humans just as Shelley believes poetry reveals the world’s hidden immortality. In A Defence Shelley also states that poetry itself, not just the objects of its inspiration, is immortal: “Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stript of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of Poetry, and for ever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it

38 contains” (842). Time affects both men and poetry in the same manner. In men offspring replace their creators, and this same cycle of reproduction occurs in poetry as a new form of the poem replaces the outdated one. This new form is similar to what Woodman calls the “archetypal vision” (508). According to Woodman, Shelley’s “solution to the problem” of poetry being mistaken for Truth is through “the perpetual recreation of the archetypal vision” (508). Plato held a skeptical opinion of poetry because he did not believe that poet’s could accurately express their experience of the divine. Shelley conversely defends the poet’s ability to express the divine and believes that poetry remains true to its initial inspirations by constantly regenerating itself. Poetry’s universal as opposed to particular nature may be responsible for its immunity to time. The “story of particular facts” is ravaged by time precisely because it is particular and not universal. 6Diotima’s speech in The Symposium in which she explains that one must move from particular to universal beauty in order to reach the divine can be applied to Shelley’s comparison of the “story of particular facts” to poetry. Shelley differs greatly from Plato in his opinion of poetry because Shelley believes that poetry contains “universal beauty” (Notopolus 449), while Plato believes that poetry is mimetic of particular beauty, what Diotima calls “beautiful forms” (448). Plato’s opinion of poetry is caused by his metaphysical belief that any divinity or Truth exists outside of the material world. If poets write of their material surroundings, then their poetry will necessarily be as fallacious as those earthly forms. Shelley upholds poetry as expressing 6

Diotima informs Socrates how to move from particular to universal beauty: “He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms, and first to make a single form the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual excellencies. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides in is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form, it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference towards one” (Notopoulos 448). This passage is commonly referred to as Diotima’s ladder.

39 “the science of this universal beauty” because he places divinity within the material world (449). Shelley believes that the poet’s ability to perceive the underlying universal beauty of the material world causes poetry’s immunity to time. The “story of particular facts” falls prey to time because particular unlike universal beauty is ephemeral. Shelley’s disdain for the particular and implied favor of the universal could very well have resulted from his study of Plato; however, a common theory in Shelley criticism is that Shelley was strongly influenced by empiricism rather than idealism. The critic Milnes writes that “Shelley’s relation to [the] broader tradition of empiricism has largely been overlooked by scholars” (4), but he also qualifies his this statement by pointing out that “[a]t the same time, a picture has emerged of Shelley as a ‘divided’ thinker; one of the leading ideas of Shelley scholarship over the past thirty years” (4). The division Milnes explains is between Shelley’s attraction to both skepticism and Platonic idealism. As a student of Plato, Shelley was drawn to Plato’s conception of the intelligible region, but he could not remove himself completely from the natural world, descriptions of which permeate his poetry. Shelley’s inability to disregard the material world led him to place the divine within the earthly rather than creating a Platonic hierarchical structure. In his essay “On Life,” Shelley expresses a purely skeptical, empirical philosophy when he writes, “Nothing exists but as it is perceived” (Reiman 477); however, within the same essay he also expresses idealist beliefs. While skeptical philosophy is actually a renunciation of philosophy because skepticism holds that only that perceived through the senses can be known, Shelley defends philosophy in “On Life”: The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life which, though startling to the apprehension, is in fact that which the habitual sense of its

40 repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from the scene of things (476). Shelley’s statement about philosophy is identical to his statement about poetry in A Defence that “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (Norton 844). Even the metaphor of Truth being revealed, in one case by lifting a veil in another by stripping a curtain, is similar. Though Milnes feels that Shelley’s empiricism is an important aspect of the poet’s philosophy, in this single essay Shelley demonstrates his dualistic philosophical approach. In another section of “On Life” Shelley addresses his discontent with empiricism and his need for a more idealist philosophy: The shocking absurdities of the popular philosophy of mind and matter, and its fatal consequences in morals, their violent dogmatism concerning the source of all things, had early conducted me to materialism. […] But I was discontented with such a view of things as it afforded; man is a being of high aspirations “looking both before and after,” whose “thoughts that wander through eternity,” disclaim alliance with transcience and decay (Reiman 476). Religious dogma caused by idealism initially drew Shelley to empiricism, but he soon realized that empiricism limits the circumference of one’s existence to the present moment. By aligning oneself with material objects, one is constantly confronted with the reality of mortality, and without a system of knowledge in which the eternal location of Truth is known, a centered system, there is no divinity to abate the effects of mortality. Milnes concludes that Shelley “like many modern ‘ordinary language philosophers […] maintained a patient indifference or double-mindedness concerning the relation between the fixed ‘centre’ of knowledge and an impermanent ‘circumference’ of experience” (5).

41 Milnes draws the terms “centre” and “circumference” from Shelley’s own line in “On Life”: “Each is at once the centre and circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line to which all things are contained” (476). Though Milnes claims that Shelley balances an empirical and idealist perspective, the passage from which Milnes receives his terms reflects a centered view of knowledge. All objects are compared to the Ideal forms, which Shelley situates within the mind, and around this center of knowledge a circumference is drawn, which contains all experience. Though experience exists outside of the center, the center is still used to organize the material commodities. Shelley never claims that truth exists in the intermediate region between the center and circumference; instead, the center draws all things towards itself, and the circumference functions as a means of containing experience. Through his poetry Shelley explores evidences for both the empirical and idealist systems. His prolonged descriptions of natural objects function as exploration into the divinity within the material world. In this way Shelley performs the function of both poet and philosopher simultaneously. In “On Life” Shelley describes a person who apprehends that not perceived by others similarly to how he describes poets in A Defence. The passage from “On Life” states, “But now these things are looked on with little wonder and to be conscious of them with intense delight is esteemed to be the distinguishing mark of a refined and extraordinary person” (Reiman 475). The “things” to which Shelley refers are phenomenal objects which human beings perceive less clearly as the objects become familiar. In A Defence, written the year after “On Life” in 1820, Shelley again describes people with this special perception but this time he defines these people as poets:

42 Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or nature upon their minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community (Norton 839). The sharpening of Shelley’s ideas is demonstrated by his identification of those people he describes in “On Life” as poets in the later essay. By clearly defining the role of the poet and the function of poetry, Shelley rejected Plato’s skepticism of poetry by affirming his faith in it. Despite Shelley’s affirmation of the genius of the poet in A Defence, Ware argues that “Shelley’s ambivalent attitude toward the poet reflects the Platonic distrust of inspiration” (550). Shelley’s statement in A Defence that a “Poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one” or that the poet “discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered” (Norton 840), hardly reflect ambivalence about the status of poetic inspiration. Shelley states clearly in A Defence that the poet has access to the eternal. Ware argues that Shelley’s skepticism is a Platonic skepticism toward the products of poetic inspiration: “For Shelley, insofar as ‘poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man’ (p. 295), it is to be highly respected; insofar as poetry is but a ‘feeble shadow’ of the poet’s inspired conceptions (p. 294), it must be regarded with skepticism” (551). Ware takes the phrase “feeble shadow” out of the context of a longer passage in A Defence about poetic inspiration, and when the passage is analyzed as a whole it does not entirely reflect the skepticism Ware attributes to it. In this passage Shelley describes the nature of poetic inspiration: Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness […] Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the

43 greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet (Norton 846). Though Ware is not incorrect in interpreting this passage as reflective of Plato’s claim that poets are only capable of “probable accounts,” Shelley’s main point seems to be to illustrate the fleeting nature of inspiration. Shelley conceives of poetic genius as entirely different from reason, which can be called forth at will, and through the metaphor of the fading coal he explains how divinity visits man. Though the poet cannot entirely express his experience of the divine, Shelley only writes that the product is less divine than it would have been otherwise. If the aforementioned passage occurred in isolation from the entirety of A Defence, then Ware’s argument about Shelley’s ambivalence toward poetry would be feasible. However, Shelley affirms the divinity of poetry over and over again in his essay. The first sentence of the paragraph from which the passage was excerpted is “Poetry is indeed something divine” (846). Though Shelley does regard poetry as an imperfect reflection of the divine, he unlike Plato believes that poets are the most fit to be legislators. Woodman summarizes Plato’s opinion of poets: “Poets, therefore, delude listeners by presenting the ‘probable account’ as if it were the true account. For this reason Plato rejects the myth-makers from his Republic” (507). Plato rejects poetry because he fears people will be misled by “probable account[s]” of divinity. Shelley is not wary of poetry, and in fact writes that poets are “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society” (Norton 840); Shelley’s poets become the philosopher kings of Plato’s republic. If Shelley regarded poetry with a Platonic skepticism, then he would not

44 situate poets within a position of power. By characterizing poets as those fit to rule Shelley refigures Plato’s societal structure laid out in The Republic. Shelley’s unique perception of Plato as “essentially a poet” (A Defence qtd. in Woodman 503), precipitated the specific ways in which he reworked Plato’s philosophy. Ware writes, “Regarding Plato as ‘essentially a poet’ (p. 280), Shelley accepts the truth of the experiences recorded in the dialogues, but he rejects as a ‘probable account’ the details of Plato’s rational formulations” (550). Ware’s argument that Shelley could be influenced by Plato’s philosophy while not being indoctrinated into Plato’s specific system is sound. By saying that Shelley accepts the dialogues as Truth because of their poetic nature, Ware implies that Shelley accepts all poetry as Truth. Ware’s accidental contradiction of his earlier statement about Shelley’s skepticism of poetry is a more accurate reading of Shelley’s opinions regarding poetry. Also if what Shelley labels “probable accounts” are rational formulations, then Shelley’s definition of poetry as divinely inspired causes poetry to fall outside the realm of rational formulation. In the opening paragraph of A Defence, Shelley defines the “two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination” (Norton 838). Reason or rational formulation is the quality which Ware claims that Shelley rejects in Plato as the cause of “probable accounts;” however, Shelley defines both qualities as necessary for the production of poetry: “Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance” (838). Though both are necessary, Imagination is for Shelley the way to the ultimate Truth. Shelley’s use of the Platonic terms “shadow” and “substance” supports Ware’s argument that Shelley views Plato’s rational formulations as only “probable accounts”; Imagination provides access to the

45 divine “substance” while the additional mental process of reason removes one from direct access. If Shelley only provided the final simile of the passage, then he would be rejecting reason altogether. But the first two similes seem to be affirmations by Shelley of the necessity of reason in the process of understanding the divine. Due to the transitory nature of poetic inspiration, humans must employ more than Imagination. Reason as the “instrument to the agent” provides a means for the poet to translate that perceived through his imagination. Of course, the addition of reason causes the experience of the imagination to lose truth through translation, but Shelley asserts in A Defence that poetry is indeed divine because the truth is merely diminished not removed. Woodman in his essay quotes the longer passage from A Defence from which Ware only references briefly: Plato was essentially a poet—the truth and splendour of his imagery, the melody of his language, are the most intense it is possible to conceive. He rejected the measure of the epic, the dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses in his style…His language has a sweet majestic rhythm, which satisfies the intellect: it is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the reader’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy (503-504). Again Shelley returns to the term “circumference” which he employed so famously in “On Life;” however, in the later essay A Defence Shelley’s conception of the function of the mind’s circumference has changed. In “On Life” the “circumference” was “the line in which all things are contained” (Reiman 476); however, in A Defence Plato’s poetry causes the mind to become so full that it “bursts the circumference” and flows out into a reality beyond the mind. While Ware contends that Shelley’s Truth exists within the mind, this passage proves that Shelley moved beyond the closed realm of the mind to a

46 conception of reality that included the outside world. In fact, in this passage the “circumference” of the mind from “On Life”, which housed the Ideal forms, is replaced by a “universal element” outside of the mind. In the year which passed between the production of these two essays, Shelley’s metaphysical views seem to have drastically changed. His use of a centered model of knowledge in “On Life” is very Platonic, while his movement to a “‘decentered’” model in A Defence reflects a more Romantic sensibility concerning the positioning of the divine (Milnes 5). While Shelley does not totally decenter knowledge by claiming that Truth does not exist, he restructures Plato’s notion of Truth by placing Truth in the material world.

47 Chapter 3: The Daemons of “To a Sky-Lark” and “Mont Blanc” The poems “To a Sky-Lark” and “Mont Blanc” were written four years apart: “To a Sky-Lark” in 1820 and “Mont Blanc” in 1816; however, both poems deal with similar issues. Both are concerned, like much of Shelley’s work, with the nature of divinity, and both lean toward a Platonic hierarchical structure of the divine. The poems seem at first to assume an idealist philosophy, but Shelley’s inability to subscribe to strict idealism causes him to depart from Plato in interesting ways. The earth for instance in “To a SkyLark” hums in sympathy to the bird’s song because the earth recognizes itself as the object of inspiration. In “Mont Blanc,” while the precipice is quite separate from the mortal world, divinity extends downward from this highest place in the form of the glacier. Shelley’s objective in these poems is the same as the objective of his work previously discussed; through the creation of poetry he is formulating his unique metaphysical views. Shelley’s poem “To a Sky-Lark” is Platonic in the sense that it posits the divine as existing above the mortal world. Shelley identifies the sky-lark as divine in the opening lines of the poem: “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!/ Bird thou never wert” (Norton 1-2). This divine bird flies so high that it cannot be seen from the ground, but Shelley knows it exists because he can hear its song: “Thou art unseen,--but yet I hear thy shrill delight” (20). Shelley’s praise of the bird as a “Scorner of the ground” (100), seems to indicate Shelley’s Platonic anti-materialist philosophy within the poem; however, Shelley is still negotiating his position between Platonic idealism and materialism. While on one level Shelley describes the bird as above the earth: “Higher still and higher” (6); he modifies this description to connect the bird to the ground: “From the earth thou springest” (7). By

48 linking this divine symbol with the earth, Shelley modifies Plato’s conception of divinity. For Shelley divinity has earthly origins from which it develops to eventually exist in a higher realm. While being a symbol of divinity, the skylark is also a symbol of the poet. Shelley compares the bird directly to a poet--“Like a Poet hidden/ In the light of thought” (36-37)--and frequently references the song or poetry of the skylark. While the bird itself does not touch the ground, it draws its poetic inspiration from earthly objects. Shelley writes, What objects are the fountains Of thy happy strain? What fields or waves or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? (71-74). Earthly objects are used by the skylark to create divine poetry. The skylark performs an act of transfiguration on these objects, and their journey is similar to the skylark’s own since the origin of the skylark is also the earth. The poetry created by the skylark is a separate entity, perhaps even more divine than the skylark itself. Shelley compares the skylark to a series of natural objects: “a glow-worm golden” (46), “a rose embowered/ In its own green leaves” (51-52), “Sound of vernal showers/ On the twinkling grass” (56-57), “Rain-awakened flowers” (58). But after making all these comparisons, Shelley declares, “All that ever was/ Joyous, and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass” (59-60). The skylark’s music and not the bird itself surpasses the earthly and becomes divine. In fact, Shelley’s descriptions of the objects to which the skylark compares all have something removed from them just as the song leaves the skylark. “Scattering unbeholden/ Its aerial hue” (48-49), the glow-worms light passes from the animal’s possession. The rose is “[b]y warm winds deflowered--/

49 Till the scent it gives/ Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves” (5355); the winds steal the rose’s scent and disperse it. The song of the skylark takes on a life of its own beyond the bird, and Shelley likewise views poetry as taking on a higher form of existence beyond the poet. The transformation of poetry into something divine relates to Shelley’s ideas in A Defence about poetry’s function within society. Shelley writes in A Defence, “the pleasure resulting from the manner in which [poets] express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from that community” (p. 839). In “To a Sky-Lark,” Shelley describes the results of the bird’s song in a similar manner: “All the earth and air/ With thy voice is loud” (26-27). The bird like the poet in A Defence expresses its impressions of the external world, and when this poetry meets the objects which inspired it, these objects become enhanced. The “reduplication,” which Shelley describes in A Defence, is the reverberation of the natural world in response to the bird’s song in “To a Sky-Lark.” The bird’s poetry causes this effect because the divinity in the natural world is enhanced by the divinity in the poem. As discussed in chapter two, Shelley believes that mortal objects contain divine essences, and the poem duplicates the divinity in the natural world and then reflects it back upon nature. “All the earth and the air […] is loud” because the material world’s divinity becomes amplified through this process. The power of the divinity existing in the natural world is multiplied two-fold because the poem duplicates the divinity within nature and then a “re-duplication” occurs when the natural world is exposed to its divinity within the poem.

50 The poetry or song of the skylark is disembodied because the “skylark is a small bird that sings only in flight, often when it is too high to be visible” (note 817). Shelley describes this phenomenon in the poem similarly to how he describes the work of the poet in A Defence. In “To a Sky-Lark” Shelley compares the bird to a Poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not (36-40). The similarities of this stanza to his description of the poet in A Defence are evident: “A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (p. 843). The skylark’s songs are “unbidden,” and so the bird sings for its own purposes and not for an audience. The poet in A Defence also does not create with the objective of gaining an audience. Yet despite the imperviousness of the bird and poet to an audience, both the bird and poet gain an audience which is transformed through their poetry. The skylark and poet, working unseen, act in the same way as Love in Plato’s The Symposium. Diotima describes Love’s daemonical nature to Socrates: “The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love” (Notopolus 442). Like the skylark and poet, Love communicates divinity to mortals without their knowledge. The daemon Love’s function, like that of the poet of which the skylark is one, is to undetectably raise mortal awareness of the divine in order to improve the human condition. The comparison of

51 Shelley’s conception of the poet to the daemon Love causes the true function of the poet to become clear. Through this comparison, the positioning of the bird between the earth and heaven in “To a Sky-Lark” takes on new meaning because the bird’s flight is within an “intermediate space” (442). This “intermediate space” between mortals and the divine is the one which Diotima describes love as “fill[ing] up” (442), and the skylark, who is a poet, performs a daemonical function like Love. Diotima explains in The Symposium that “he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely happy, and participates in the daemonical nature; whilst he who is wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave” (442). The intercourse to which Diotima refers is that between mortals, Love, and the divine. Through Diotima’s speech, Plato asserts that the only path of mortals to happiness is through consciousness of the intervention of Love; once mortals become conscious of Love’s actions, they function as daemons as well. The other sciences and arts which Plato identifies as lesser because they do not lead to enlightenment include poetry; Plato believes that the only path to the divine is through philosophy. Diotima explains that “Love is of necessity a philosopher, philosophy being the intermediate state between ignorance and wisdom” (443). If mortals take on Love’s daemonical nature, then they are by transitive logic also philosophers like Love. Shelley diverges from Plato by asserting that poetry can enlighten mortals as well. He transfers the properties that Plato associates solely with philosophy to poetry. The skylark as a philosopher uncovers the true nature of reality, but because he is a poet the bird communicates the Truth of reality through verse. Shelley describes the skylark’s poetic perception of the hidden divinity in all things:

52 Waking or asleep, Thou of death must deem Things more true and deep Than we mortals dream, Or how could thy notes flow in such a chrystal steam? (Norton 81-85). The skylark as a poet in “deem[ing]/ Things more true and deep” sees through the mortal exterior into the objects’ divine essences. Only by perceiving this divinity can the skylark compose the “chrystal stream” of its song/poem. Though Shelley separates the skylark from mortals in this stanza, he does not argue like Plato that mortals can only reach the divine by abandoning the earthly. Near the end of the poem, Shelley identifies mortal emotions as necessary for comprehension of the skylark’s song: Yet if we could scorn Hate and pride and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near (91-95). Just as Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost can only have knowledge of good by gaining knowledge of evil, so Shelley argues mortals can only ascend to the joy of the skylark by having knowledge of other less pleasant emotions. Since the song of the skylark is poetry and therefore a representation of the divine, then mortals can only recognize the divine by recognizing the earthly as its opposite. Plato claims that the mortal world serves no purpose but to confuse humans into believing that the shadows of the forms are reality. Shelley, on the other hand, advocates for the use of the earthly as a means to reach the divine. Shelley’s use of the earthly as a means of ascension occurs not only in this work but in others previously discussed. In Alastor, the subject of the first chapter, Shelley

53 creates an anthropomorphic representation of the Truth. The vision not only has a somewhat human body but a female body as well. Shelley was, of course, aware of the long tradition of associating the feminine with the earth, and so through his representation connects the Truth to the earth. The origin of the vision’s light is also fire, which is an element of the earth; however, fire is a fitting symbol for the vision because it is an intermediate element. Fire is neither a solid, liquid, or gas and like the vision exists in a liminal realm which is between two states of being. In other poems, including “Mont Blanc,” Shelley studies the external landscape in order to determine the true nature of reality. In this way, Shelley is part of long tradition in lyric poetry, which began with the metaphysical poets who studied nature in order to determine God’s will. The other Romantic poets were also part of this tradition, but by this period the aim of reading nature became to understand one’s own internal nature. Shelley differs from his fellow Romantics because he is not so much interested in his individual psyche but in the universal Truths of reality, though unlike the metaphysical poets he does not associate these Truths with a God. In “Mont Blanc” Shelley upholds the natural world not only through his imagery but through his belief in the ability of the senses to perceive Truth. Shelley describes the manner in which he perceives the world, which is through the senses: My own, my human mind, which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around (37-40). His description of the constant interchange he has with his external environment is not in agreement with a Platonic distrust of the senses. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato highlights the way in which the senses limit perception by describing the prisoners as

54 only being able to look straight ahead because they cannot turn their heads (Plato 514ab). Shelley paints a very different picture of the senses, describing his mind as a sieve which receives influences freely. His use of the adjective “clear” to describe the universe also indicates the extent of his understanding; the workings of the universe are not opaque but transparent or obvious to him. After describing his experience of the external, Shelley continues to describe his process of perception: One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where that or thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy (41-44). The perception of the beginning lines of the passage leads to creation by the end, which is in Shelley’s case the creation of poetry. Shelley’s desire to create after an intense sensory experience recalls Diotima’s definition of Love in The Symposium as “the desire for generation in the beautiful” (Notopolus 445). After experiencing the sublime landscape of Mont Blanc and the Ravine of Arve, Shelley’s mind produces something of its own volition. The beauty of nature causes this procreation. Shelley’s description of the product of his mind as a separate entity with “wandering wings” seems to be a reference to the Poet’s vision in Alastor. The Poet of that work produced an entity which took on human form, while Shelley’s description of his mind’s creation is more figurative in “Mont Blanc.” The “legion of wild thoughts” is not anthropomorphic but remains an abstract entity. Both the vision in Alastor and the bird-like thoughts, raise the poet out of the figurative darkness of mortality. By describing the thought entity as floating above darkness, Shelley is referencing Plato’s binary in the Allegory of the Cave of mortality as darkness and Truth as light. Poetic creation raises the poet out of darkness into the light

55 of Truth; however, Shelley also manipulates Plato’s Allegory by having his thoughts rest in “the still cave of the witch Poesy.” The cave in Shelley’s poem becomes a place of access to the divine rather than a place devoid of truth. Shelley’s manipulation of the cave metaphor indicates his divergence from Plato. Shelley locates Truth within the cave, which Plato used to represent the mortal world, because Shelley here views sensory experience as a means of reaching the Truth. Another important aspect of the cave is that it belongs to a feminine being, “the witch Poesy.” The “witch Poesy” strongly resembles the vision in Alastor, whom Shelley identifies as “[h]erself a poet” (161). In Alastor the Poet’s thoughts gave birth to the feminine being, but in “Mont Blanc” the “still cave of the witch Poesy” provides a resting place for Shelley’s thoughts. The Poet’s vision ultimately leads to his demise, but in “Mont Blanc” Shelley revises the role of poetry so that it performs a restorative function. Poetry becomes the means by which Shelley can still his thoughts in order to make sense of his perceptions. Shelley’s finishes his description of perception by describing a phenomenon that is similar to Plato’s doctrine of Reminiscence: In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast From which they fled recalls them, thou art there! (45-49). Shelley is still addressing the Ravine of Arve, and he describes the Ravine as searching within his mind for its own image (note 764). The “cave of the witch Poesy” represents Shelley’s mind, and this fits with Plato’s use of the cave to represent mortal existence because Plato’s cave is a metaphor for the way in which the restrictive senses separate

56 humans from the Truth. As mentioned previously, Shelley re-imagines the cave of the mind as site of access to the truth. The phenomenon Shelley describes is one of recollection: the object reunites itself with its own image in the poet’s mind and when this happens the poet recalls the object. Plato’s doctrine of Reminiscence describes a similar process: The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, had knowledge of them all, and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew (Baker 32). Plato explains that the soul possesses all the knowledge gleaned from its past lives, but when the soul is reborn each time it is not conscious of this knowledge. The process which humans perceive as learning is actually only recollection of subconscious knowledge. In his own version of Reminiscence, Shelley replaces Platonic knowledge with images of the natural world, thus raising the status of nature from shadow to Truth. Images replace the knowledge Plato situates within the mind because Shelley values these images as a source of knowledge in a way which Plato does not. While Shelley diverges from Plato, he simultaneously creates a Platonic model of the universe through his imagery of Mont Blanc. Mont Blanc is separated from the rest of the natural world much like Plato’s intelligible region. Mont Blanc’s “Power dwells apart in its tranquility/ Remote, serene, and inaccessible” (Norton 96-97). However, unlike Plato’s intelligible region which is immutable and does not communicate directly to mortals, Mont Blanc affects the mortal world. Shelley describes the glacier which extends downward from the precipice: Frost and Sun in scorn of mortal power Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower

57 And wall impregnable with beaming ice. Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky Rolls its perpetual stream (103-109). Mont Blanc’s communication with the poet is much different from the imagery which “[f]lows through the mind” (2). Mont Blanc causes destruction as its immortal power extends through the glacier into the mortal world. The origin of the glacier is Mont Blanc’s precipice, and so as the glacier moves down the mountain it represents the movement of the “Power” from the precipice. The glacier is in some ways like the daemonical bird in “To a Sky-Lark”: both the bird and glacier transmit communication from the divine to the mortal region. However, the skylark is as benign as the glacier is dangerous. The skylark functions as the daemon Love does in The Symposium because Love carries messages from the divine in order to enlighten humans. The glacier functions differently; it serves not as an intermediary, but as a direct extension of the “Power” of the precipice. While Love and the bird are not divine themselves, the glacier is like the finger of God extending into the world. This extension of the Power causes ruin in the same way that Icarus brought about his own ruin by flying too close to the sun. Icarus as mortal could not handle the sun’s sublime power, and likewise the mortal world is destroyed by the power of the precipice. By making Mont Blanc’s power an active force within the mortal world, Shelley reworks Plato’s model. The divine forms of the intelligible region cannot reach down into the mortal world because they are static, and mortals can only attain knowledge by traveling upwards. Shelley’s conception of the divine power as active is similar to his model of nature’s interaction with the mind. Objects of the external environment reach into the poet’s mind to find their corresponding images within, and so the divine takes on

58 a similarly active role by reaching into the mortal world. Plato’s conception of perception and divinity is much less tumultuous than Shelley’s because Plato views the universe as fixed. If Shelley’s model were to exactly imitate Plato’s, then the power, “still, snowy, and serene” (61), would remain at the precipice, unchanging, unaffected. The power necessarily overflows from the precipice because this divine region is active and not static. Shelley describes the activity at the precipice: the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the star-beams dart through them:--Winds contend Silently there, and heap the snow with breath Rapid and strong, but silently! (131-136). This activity is divine because the precipice, which “pierce[s] the infinite sky” (60), is a place existing like the intelligible region above the earth. However, the activity of this region is similar to the activity in the mortal world, but it is also set apart because “none beholds them there.” The precipice is divine because its activities are mysterious and also strangely silent. The creation and destruction of the mortal world occurs, but these natural processes have a peacefulness reflected in their silence. Once the glacier extends the divine power into the mortal world the process of destruction becomes violent because the process loses the divinity it had at the precipice. Shelley’s conception of the divine region is more like Milton’s conception of Heaven and Hell in which activities such as wars occur which will later be recreated upon the earth. The creation and destruction upon the precipice are the prototypical processes which are then repeated within nature. Shelley replaces Plato’s divine static forms with divine processes.

59 Chapter 4: The Last Word In Shelley’s final two works, Adonais and The Triumph of Life, Shelley continues to search for those metaphysical Truths around which his earlier works revolve. These two poems also return to imagery first introduced in Alastor. In Adonais, Shelley describes Adonais as being visited by female figures, who resemble the Poet’s vision in Alastor. In The Triumph of Life, Shelley’s speaker receives a vision in a similar locale to where the Poet in Alastor finally succumbs to death. These works do not depart from Shelley’s earlier work, but revisit and revise his earlier conclusions. They are not fragments of an unfinished life but the culmination of a brief yet fruitful poetic career. Shelley’s Adonais, an elegy for his fellow English poet John Keats, is an affirmation of the supreme power of poetry, outlined in A Defence of Poetry (A Defence). Written only two months before Adonias, A Defence presents Shelley’s beliefs about the function of poetry, which Shelley draws upon in order to honor a fellow poet. In stanza twenty-nine, Urania praises the departed Adonais: “So it is in the world of living men:/ A godlike mind sours forth, in its delight/ Making earth bare and veiling heaven” (Norton 257-259). Shelley describes the function of poetry in A Defence, using the same adjective “bare”: “it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms” (Norton 847). Shelley describes Keats’ function in Adonais as similar to the function of poetry itself in A Defence because both reveal the hidden divinity within mortal objects. However, Shelley amends the function of Keats as a poet by adding that Keats “veil[s] heaven.” At first, this addition appears problematic because by “veiling heaven” Keats is hiding the divine. One could conclude that Keats must hide true divinity in order to give mortal objects the appearance

60 of divinity, but the note is helpful in deciphering the meaning of this passage. The note informs the reader that Keats acts “as the sun reveal[ing] the earth but veil[ing] the other stars” (829). The brightness of Keats as the sun necessarily blots out the other less bright heavenly bodies. Keats makes the “earth bare,” revealing its divinity, not through an act of deception (hiding true divinity), but due to his status as possessor of the Truth. Keats is represented in the poem as possessing Truth because of his association with the sun. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the sun functions as the symbol of Truth, and Shelley uses this association to assert Keats’ superiority. 7Also like the sun in Plato’s Allegory, Keats as the sun has “shadows” which possess only a fraction of his power. These shadows are the stars, whose light is much less bright than the sun’s; and the relationship of the stars to the sun is the same as the relationship of fire to the sun in the Allegory. Urania, who is speaking in stanza twenty-nine, continues by describing the effect of the setting sun: “and when/ It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light/ Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit’s awful night” (259-261). The sun of course sets with Adonais’ death. The “swarms” are the earthly objects whose divinity was revealed through the sun’s brilliance, and the light of the sun represents Adonais’ poetic mind. Once Adonais’ mind is extinguished through his death, the less brilliant stars, which represent other minds, cannot perform the function of the sun. The setting sun causes “the spirit’s awful night” because divinity is once again hidden by the mortal coverings of objects whose essences are divine.

7

By “shadows” I mean the shapes which the prisoners see on the cave wall. These “shadows” are lesser representations of the Ideal forms.

61 Adonais’ mind functions in a similar way to Love as described by Diotima in The Symposium. Socrates summarizes one of Diotima’s definitions of Love: “Love, then, is collectively the desire in men that good should be forever present to them” (Notopoulos 445). Just as Diotima describes men as being impelled to surround themselves with what is good, so “living men” in Adonais want to be exposed to the divine (Norton 257). Love in The Symposium is the means by which men come into contact with the good, and Adonais through his poetic powers performs the same function as Love because he reveals divinity to those who would otherwise not apprehend it. Earlier in the poem, Shelley describes the specific manner in which Adonais’ poetry functions. Shelley writes, “All he had loved, and moulded into thought,/ From shape, and hue, and odour, and sweet sound,/ Lamented Adonais” (118-120). Adonais’ raw materials were his sensory perceptions, and he used these materials to create a new object through the power of the mind. In his essay “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode,” Wasserman uses an excerpt from A Defence to explain the relationships between objects and the poetry inspired by them: The difference between reason and imagination, he held, is that ‘the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another however produced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity’ (Defense of Poetry). That is, the materials of poetry are already more than twice removed from the physical world: they are not merely what Hume called ‘impressions,’ but have been fully naturalized in the country of the mind as ‘ideas’ and exist in a conceptual context, having already been prepared for their artistic duty by being stamped with the qualities of the mind possessing them (276). Keats obviously performs an act of imagination through the creation of poetry because he translates or “mould[s]” objects into thoughts. In the excerpt Wasserman cites from A

62 Defence, Shelley describes these thoughts as “containing within [themselves] the principle of [their] own integrity,” meaning that the thoughts borne from sensory objects become separate entities. This process is similar to the birth of the vision from the Poet’s mind in Alastor. The thought like the vision has a legitimacy of its own separate from its object of inspiration. Wasserman describes the product of the creative process, poetry, using language that recalls a Platonic view of poetry. Plato excludes poets from his ideal Republic because “they imitate only the phenomena of the mutable world” (Ware 556). Since “[p]henoma, for Plato, are themselves imitations of the Ideal Forms” (556), poetry is twice removed from reality because it is the imitation of imitations. Wasserman explains the process by which poets appropriate objects through poetic composition, therefore removing them from the external world. The first step of removal is through sensory perception, and after this has occurred the object metamorphosizes in the mind into an idea. These newly minted ideas are the materials of poetry, not the initial perception of objects. Wasserman writes that “the materials of poetry are already more than twice removed from the physical world” because in order for the objects to become ideas they are influenced by the qualities of their perceiver’s mind; Wasserman considers this a half or intermediary step of removal. Unlike Plato, Shelley does not view this process of removal as problematic. In fact, this process is necessary in order for poetry to express the eternal. Plato was skeptical of any means of expression because expression necessitates the process of removal: objects of the external environment are translated through the power of the perceiver’s mind into new products. Shelley embraces this process because he

63 “conceives of the artist as an imitator of reality, not of appearance” (556). If Plato considered mortal objects to be imitations, then any expression of them could not produce an idea which was itself divine, having not been inspired by divine objects. Shelley must place divinity within the mortal world because he considers poetic expressions of this realm to be expressions of the eternal. The process of removal described by Wasserman is necessary for a “Poet to participat[e] in the eternal” (Norton 840) because an “artist sees through the confusion of appearances to the essence of things” (Ware 557). The poetic or creative process is essential to humanity because only through this process can the hidden divinity within mortality be revealed. Shelley mourns Keats in Adonais because of Keats’ exceptional ability to strip divine essences of their mortal coverings. In the ninth stanza of the poem, Shelley anthropomorphizes the products of Adonais’ poetic inspiration; the ideas become “The quick Dreams/ The passion-winged Ministers of thought,/ Who were his flocks” (Norton 73-75). After these ideas are brought to life, one breaks away from the crowd to embrace the dead poet: And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; ‘Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead; See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies A tear some Dream has loosened from his brain.’ Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not ’twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain (82-90). The Dream or idea laments the death of the poet, not realizing that his demise equals her own. The narrator exclaims of the Dream’s fate,“Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise!” because he recognizes that without a mind in which to reside the idea will cease to exist. Shelley’s reference to Adonais’ mind as “a ruined Paradise” supports Ware’s argument

64 that Shelley’s “noumenal realm is located within the imagination” (557). Ware writes that Shelley “does not postulate the existence of a transcendent realm” because of his placement of the noumenal or beyond phenomenal realm within the imagination. Shelley conceives of the true, the beautiful existing within the mind rather than in a distant region, which is Plato’s conception. The mind does not automatically contain the Truth but must give birth to it through the creative process through which the divinity of mortality is revealed. Plato’s conception of truth is static within the intelligible region; the forms exist within a vacuum unaffected by human activity. While Shelley’s metaphysical views share some commonalities with Plato’s, Shelley ultimately differs in his representation of divinity. The “spirit” or “internal nature” of mortal objects, which Ware refers to as “essence” in his essay, is not manipulated physically by the actions of the poet’s mind. The essences remain unchanged like the forms of Plato’s intelligible region; however, the poetic mind performs important manipulations which occur through a process of duplication. The object is perceived by the poet, and this initial impression is a duplication. The job of the poet is not to express this duplication but to “colour [the impression] with [his] own light” (Wasserman 276). Divinity, therefore, becomes active through the mental processes of the poet. Plato too recognized the mental faculty but did not consider its products legitimate. To Shelley the product of the poet is the ideal form of the object. While the divinity exists physically within nature, divinity also resides within the poet’s mind because only through the workings of imagination can it be revealed.

65 Interestingly, the Dream of Shelley’s later work resembles the vision in his second major work Alastor. Once again Shelley represents the divine within a feminine figure, except the circumstances of Alastor are reversed in Adonais. In Alastor the Poet mourns the loss of the vision, which departs first shortly followed by the Poet through his death. In Adonais the Dream mourns the loss of the poet, who has died first, and his death causes hers just as the vision’s departure causes the Poet’s death in Alastor. The movement from a product of mind, the vision, which vanishes, to a product of mind, the Dream, which outlives her creator, demonstrates a development in Shelley’s conception of divinity. Ware describes Shelley as “[f]undamentally a skeptic” because “Shelley refuses to accept any dogmatic formulation of the truths of the imagination” (550). Ware’s classification of Shelley as a skeptic, explains Shelley’s representation of the divine in Alastor as a fickle character who quickly departs. The Poet in Alastor briefly unites with the divine, but she slips through his grasp. Shelley’s belief in the transient nature of divinity is present in A Defence, written two months before Adonais, in Shelley’s description of poetic inspiration as like a fading coal: “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (Norton 846). The vision like the “invisible influence” enlightens the human mind briefly but does not remain there. In Adonais, the Dream is a constant divinity existing within the mind of the poet. The Dream is the solidified version of the vision in Alastor because the Dream is a product of the mind that dies only with the death of the mind in which it resides.

66 The Dream represents an “idea” because it depends upon its creator to exist, but later in the poem Shelley introduces another character Urania, who exists independently of the dead poet. Urania grieves over the lifeless body of Adonais: ‘Stay yet awhile! Speak to me once again; Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live; And in my heartless breast and burning brain That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive With food of saddest memory kept alive, Now thou art dead, as if it were a part Of thee, my Adonais! I would give All that I am to be as thou now art! But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart! (226-234). She like the vision in Alastor with “parted lips/ Outstretched […] and quivering eagerly” longs for a kiss (179-180). However, the longing of Urania for the poet is a reversal of the situation in Alastor. In that earlier poem, the divine feminine figure abandons the Poet, and he mourns her loss. The figure in Alastor departs because she is the representation of Shelley’s earlier transient conception of divinity. The figure of Urania endures because she is a permanent truth, much like that existing in Plato’s intelligible region. While in Alastor the Poet is deprived of the vision due to his mortality, Urania is deprived of Adonais due to her immortality. She says to him, “I would give/ All that I am to be as thou now art!/ But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!” (232234). Usually being tied to “Time” means an entanglement with the mortal dilemma described by Wasserman: “all Nature moves in time to its own annihilation” (281). Urania’s speech presents the reader with a shift in the perception of time. Both mortal and immortal characters in the poem are governed by Time, but instead of experiencing the inevitability of death the immortal characters are “chained to Time” because they

67 must exist as long as Time exists. Urania cannot pursue Adonais, and her grief over his departure indicates an imperfection in immortality itself. Her immortal, divine nature is not like the divinity of Plato’s intelligible region because Plato’s ideal forms are static and unaffected by mortal activity. Urania, like the vision in Alastor, entangles herself with the mortal poet. However, unlike the vision, Urania is affected by Adonais’ verse. In the six years between the two poems, Shelley’s conception of poetry’s function and power has evolved. While in Alastor the Poet’s powers cannot save him from his inevitable demise, in Adonais the poet’s power is revered by an immortal figure. Urania reveres Adonais almost out of necessity because she is tormented like the Poet in Alastor by his departure: “And in my heartless breast and burning brain/ That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive” (228-229). Urania’s situation and the Poet of Alastor’s are identical because both Urania and the Poet mourn the physical embrace and the “word.” Adonais and the vision in Alastor both light a fire within their lovers’ brains through their poetry; Shelley describes the vision as “[h]erself a poet” (160). After the vision’s visitation, Shelley describes the Poet in Alastor: “Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone/ As in a furnace burning secretly/ From his dark eyes alone” (252254). This description is echoed in Urania’s complaint over her “burning brain.” The fact that Urania can be affected by Adonais’ poetry means that there is an imperfection in her immortality, which his poetry fulfills. She is imperfect because she is not a poet, and poetry reveals the divine in a way that even enlightens a seemingly divine figure like Urania.

68 While Urania does outlive nature’s annihilation, she is not divine in the same way as the vision in Alastor because the vision is a creation of the poetic mind. The Poet actually gives birth to the vision, and she takes on a life of her own outside of him in the same way that poetry does. While Urania too is a separate entity, she is not the product of Adonais’ mind, which is why his poetry instills a fire within her mind. The hierarchy that Shelley establishes through the creation of these two divine yet feminine figures is one of poetry above a divinity not produced by the poet. Wasserman writes that to “Shelley man’s interpretations of the phenomenal world have a validity the world itself does not” (277). This statement applies to the relationship between the Poet and vision because the vision instills knowledge within the Poet even though she is a creation of his earthly mind. She has a higher status than him within the poem because she is the poetry and he the creator. Ironically, the poetic creation has a higher status than her creator because poetry is a revelation of the divine that becomes more powerful than its creator. Poetry takes on a life of its own just like the vision in Alastor. While Wasserman’s statement clarifies the relationship between the Poet and his vision, it is problematic because it undercuts Shelley’s materialism. By implying that the world is not valid, Wasserman posits Shelley as an idealist. Ware expresses a more accurate view of Shelley when he writes that in Shelley’s philosophy the “artist does not so much create an imaginative order as discover a potential order that is not apparent to those who lack his perceptivity” (557). Ware’s statement reflects Shelley’s description of poetry in A Defence: It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which

69 flow from death to life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms (Norton 847). Poetry does not create divinity, but accurately expresses a divinity already present within the material world. Urania is captivated by Adonais’ ability to make immortal that which seems mortal, but his poetry is not more valid than its inspirations within the material world. Poetry is valid because it is an expression of that which is already divine. The poet’s special power comes not from his ability to make divine that which is not but to recognize divinity within the mortal realm. Shelley’s metaphor for the transformative power of poetry in the passage cited above is of the alchemical process “aimed to produce a drinkable (‘potable’) form of gold that would be an elixir of life, curing all diseases” (note 847). This process by which the “poisonous waters” of life which cause death are changed into an elixir which protects the human being from the strains of mortality is the same process which Keats undergoes in Adonais. While Adonais’ physical body passes away, his spirit becomes immortal. Plato also believed in the immortality of the soul. Socrates explains to Glaucon in Part XI of The Republic that “the soul remains quite unaffected by fever or disease or injury” (Lee 610b). While the immortality of the soul is also a Christian doctrine, Shelley ties his discussion to Plato’s conception of the afterlife through his reference to the doctrine of Reminiscience: “Awake him not! Surely he takes his fill/ Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill” (Norton 62-63). According to Baker, “[o]ne of the first things that interested Shelley in Plato was evidently the doctrine of Reminiscience” (32). Baker summarizes this doctrine by writing that “knowledge is simply recollection” (32). Souls enter another realm after their existence on earth and are only born again after drinking from the river Lethe or

70 “the Forgetful River” (Lee X 621). After drinking from the river the beings forget heaven and their past lives and are ready to be born again. Shelley clearly alludes to the river Lethe when he writes of “deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.” The fact that Shelley references Plato’s conception of the afterlife causes Shelley’s belief in the immortality of the soul to be a result of his Platonism and not only dependent upon the influence of the Christian culture in which he lived. Shelley’s elegy about Keats’ death and imagined Platonic afterlife highlights Keats’ superiority above other poets, even Shelley himself. While listing the mourners who pay homage to Adonais, Shelley includes a portrait of the Poet in Alastor, who is a version of himself (Norton note 830): Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness, Actaen-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness, As his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey (271-279). Shelley presents the inherent danger in poetic creation, which Woodman attributes to the fallacious nature of poetry: “There is, then, for the poet the danger of becoming the victim of his own vision, of mistaking the ‘probable account’ for Reality itself” (508). However, Shelley advocates poetry in A Defence as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth” (Norton 842). The danger for the poet is not the danger which Woodman identifies; instead, the Poet in Alastor is pursued by the creation of his own mind because he has not overcome the mortal world.

71 Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, the Poet cannot withstand the power of the divine. His poetic creation, the vision, instills divine knowledge within him, and this knowledge consumes him because of his earthliness. Adonais’ poetic creations did not cause his demise because Adonais ascended sufficiently above the mortal realm. As Shelley describes Adonais, he compares Adonais to those poets like the Poet of Alastor who met their ruin: Not all to that bright station dared to climb And happier they their happiness who knew, Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time In which suns perished; others more sublime, Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime; And yet some live, treading the thorny road, Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame’s serene abode (38-45). This stanza presents the danger of poetic creation, which Wasserman recognizes, but “other more sublime” are not extinguished by the fallacious nature of their poetry. Some do not continue to burn immortally as Adonais because their projects have been foiled by the “envious wrath of man or God.” Adonais succeeds and becomes immortal because he survives “the thorny road,/ Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame’s serene abode.” Shelley illustrates the danger of the poetic path, and represents Adonais as a heroic figure who conquers many obstacles to reach a place of safety beyond the mortal world. The place Shelley refers to as “Fame’s serene abode” in Adonais is much like the pinnacle of Mont Blanc in Shelley’s poem of the same name. Shelley describes Mont Blanc: “Far, far above piercing the infinite sky,/ Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene” (60-61). Mont Blanc’s pinnacle resembles Plato’s intelligible region because of the separateness of its divinity. Within this place, unaffected by the mortal world, what Shelley deems the “power” exists. This “still and solemn power of many sights,/ And

72 many sounds and much of life and death” is also described within nature in Adonais (128-129). The “Power” in Adonais assimilates Keats’ spirit into itself: He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where’er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own (373-376). The place Keats reaches that removes him from the danger which caused demise to the Poet in Alastor is ultimately a place within nature; however, like the “essences” mentioned by Ware, the power is at once within and above nature. Adonais “is made one with Nature” (370), but he becomes part of the power of nature which is the divinity revealed through poetry. Interestingly, the Poet in Alastor also reaches the precipice of a mountain, but this is the place where he finally dies after his unsuccessful search for the vision. The Poet like Adonais is described in relationship to nature: “the Poet’s blood/ That ever beat in mystic sympathy/ With nature’s ebb and flow, grew feebler still” (651-653). Unlike Adonais, the Poet is not described as one with nature; the Poet’s mere sympathy toward nature cannot grant him the immortality than can Adonais’ assimilation into nature itself. Adonais is a poet of greater merit than Shelley’s semi-autobiographical Poet, because Adonais merges with the divinity of nature, while the Poet only recognizes this divinity. In Plato, the philosopher can recognize Truth but cannot merge with the intelligible region. According to an editorial note on Adonais, Shelley “adopts for this poem the Neoplatonic view that all life and all forms emanate from the Absolute, the eternal One” (831). Six years before writing Adonais, at the time that he wrote Alastor, Shelley held a more materialistic metaphysical view. The Poet in Alastor only glancingly encounters divinity, and then meets his demise due to the absence of this divinity within his earthly

73 sphere. Adonais is saved from the Poet’s fate because Shelley comes to believe definitely in some eternal force. This eternal force absorbs Adonais after his death, saving him from the utter dissolution experienced by the Poet. Shelley describes the Poet upon his death as “that wondrous frame--/ No sense, no motion, no divinity” (665-666). In Shelley’s final poem The Triumph of Life, which he was still writing when he died, Shelley returns a scene from his early work Alastor. The site of the Poet’s death in Alastor is much more like the site where the speaker rests in The Triumph of Life than Mont Blanc. In Alastor, Shelley describes the pinnacle of the mountain where the Poet finally dies: Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine And torrent were not all;--one silent nook Was there. Even on the edge of that vast mountain, Upheld by knotty roots (571-574). The speaker in The Triumph of Life also rests within the roots of a large tree: “Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem/ Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep/ Of a green Apennine” (24-26). Though these locations are very similar, they occur at opposite points in time within each respective poem. In Alastor, the Poet dies on the secluded cliff at the end of the poem, while in The Triumph of Life, the speaker settles into that place a the beginning. The Triumph of Life seems to begin where Alastor left off because the speaker of the later poem receives his vision in a place very similar to where the Poet in Alastor died. When the Poet in Alastor reaches the cliff, he has already received his vision, and conversely, the speaker in The Triumph of Life settles into a similar spot in order to receive a vision. The speaker in The Triumph of Life describes the coming of his vision: […] a strange trance over my fancy grew

74 Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread Was so transparent that the scene came through As clear as when a veil of light is drawn O’er the evening hills they glimmer (29-33). The nature of the two visions is also different: the Poet in Alastor receives his vision “on his sleep” (149), while the speaker in The Triumph of Life clarifies that his vision does not occur in sleep. This important difference suggests that the vision in the later poem is a more accurate representation of the Truth because it is not a dream produced by the speaker’s mind. The content of the speaker’s vision includes Rousseau as the speaker’s guide, who shows him the reality of life. This reality is represented by a chariot passing through that instantly ages all who remain in its wake. Interestingly, the speaker describes the coming of this vision as a “veil of light” descending. Usually in Shelley’s work, the metaphor of Truth being revealed is of a veil being removed. However, the veil that descends is of the light of Truth. Through this metaphor, Shelley returns to the Platonic symbology of light from the Allegory of the Cave by using the light of the sun to represent the light of Truth. The light that descends upon the speaker is of the sun because he describes it as acting upon “evening hills.” By returning to the sun as a representation of Truth, Shelley moves towards the Platonic idealism that he was moving away from in Alastor. Though Shelley death was due to a sudden storm that came upon his boat, the final stanza of Adonais suggests that he had some premonition of his death: […] my spirit’s bark is driven, Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am born darkly, fearfully, afar (488-492).

75 Shelley also partially orchestrated his death by sea because when the storm came upon the ship a larger boat nearby offered to save Shelley and his crew, but Shelley rebuffed this offer. If when writing The Triumph of Life Shelley knew that his death was imminent, then it makes sense that he would revert towards Platonic idealism because materialism does not provide any comfort in death. Even at the very end of his life, Shelley remained concerned with the search for Truth addressed in Alastor. He wavered throughout his poetic career between materialism and idealism, never subjecting himself strictly to either philosophy. It was not in Shelley’s nature to accept another person’s views as absolute Truth; instead, he worked to find his own Truth. He was very much like the Greek philosophers in this way because the Greek philosophers were obsessed with the nature of reality. He was also very much a Romantic poet because he employed nature to a great extent in his search for Truth. In the end, it seems that the only thing Shelley knew for sure was that “all Nature moves in time to its own annihilation” (Wasserman 281). However, in his lifetime he formulated important ways of viewing the world, which could satisfy both the materialist and idealist philosophies. He also remained true to his belief in the power of poetry to transform humanity. Though he engaged in much philosophical thought, he never degraded poetry as the lesser discipline; instead, he firmly believed that only through the poetic process could Truth be revealed.

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Works Cited Baker, Joseph E. Shelley’s platonic answer to a platonic attack on poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1965. Cameron, Kenneth Neil. Shelley: The Golden Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1975. Jones, Frederick L. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley in England. Vol I. Oxford at Clarendon Press, 1964. Jones, Frederick L. “The Inconsistency in Shelley’s Alastor.” ELH 1946 Dec; 13 (4): 291-98. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 21 May 2007. . Milnes, Tim. “Centre and Circumference: Shelley’s Defence of Philosophy.” European Romantic Review 2004 Mar; 15 (1) : 3-22. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 21 May 2007. . Notopoulos, James A. The Platonism of Shelley. Durham: Duke University Press, 1949. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Sir Desmond Lee. New York: Penguin Classics, 1987. Plato. The Symposium. Trans. Christopher Gill. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999.

77 Reiman, Donald H. and Sharon B. Powers, eds. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1977. Greenblatt, Stephen ed. The Norton Anthology: The Romantic Period. 8th ed. New York: 2006. Shelley, Percy B. “Adonais.” Greenblatt 822-835. -- “Alastor; or; The Spirit of Solitude.” Greenblatt 745-762. -- “From A Defence of Poetry.” Greenblatt 837-850. -- “Mont Blanc.” Greenblatt 762-766. -- “On Life.” Reiman and Powers 473-474. -- “On Love.” Reiman and Powers 474-478. -- “To a Sky-Lark.” Greenblatt 817-819. Stahmer, Carl. “The Shelley Chronology.” Romantic Circles: Scholarly Resources. University of Maryland. 30 August 2007. . Ware, Tracy. “Shelley’s Platonism in A Defence of Poetry.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Autumn 1983; 23 (4): 549-566. JStor. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 11 Feb. 2008. . Wasserman, Earl R. “Adonais: Progressive Revelation as a Poetic Mode.” ELH 1954 Dec; 21 (4): 274-326. JStor. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 20 April 2008. . Woodman, Ross G. “Shelley’s Changing Attitude Toward Plato.” Journal of the History of Ideas 1960 Oct-Dec; 21 (4): 497-510. JStor. Muhlenberg College Trexler Lib., Allentown, PA. 11 February 2008. .

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