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Updated: May 12, 2025
Nay, she was content that he should veer while she remained true; she companioned him intellectually, shared his views, entered into his aspirations, and yet yet, even at the date of Epipsychidion the foolish child, her husband, assigned her the part of moon to Emilia Viviani's sun, and lamented that he was barred from final, certain, irreversible happiness by a cold and callous society.
The Witch of Atlas , Epipsychidion , Adonais , and the exquisite lyrics, The Cloud, To a Skylark and Ode to the West Wind are the most beautiful of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet paints, in these works, lands
The result was the composition of "Epipsychidion," the most unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not assimilated the spirit of Plato's "Symposium" and Dante's "Vita Nuova". In it he apostrophizes Emilia Viviani as the incarnation of ideal beauty, the universal loveliness made visible in mortal flesh:
Their intrinsic merit is almost less than nothing, and no one could predict from their perusal the course which the future poet of "The Cenci" and "Epipsychidion" was to take. It might indeed be argued that the defects of his great qualities, the over-ideality, the haste, the incoherence, and the want of grasp on narrative, are glaringly apparent in these early works.
Impassioned letters passed between her and Shelley, in which he was her "dear brother" and she his "dearest sister"; but she was soon found to be a very ordinary creature, and is only remembered as the instrument chosen by chance to inspire 'Epipsychidion'. Finally there appeared, in January 1822, the truest-hearted and the most lovable of all Shelley's friends.
Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, and Prometheus Unbound, all breathe this insatiate craving for that "Spirit of Beauty," that "awful Loveliness." Many of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy and this ideal beauty are impalpable and obscure. It is difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, simple form.
Shelley did not publish "Epipsychidion" with his own name. He gave it to the world as a composition of a man who had "died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the Sporades," and he requested Ollier not to circulate it, except among a few intelligent readers. It may almost be said to have been never published, in such profound silence did it issue from the press.
In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together with Adonais, the lines Written in the Euganean Hills, Epipsychidion, Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, A Dream of the Unknown, and many others, Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer loveliness and a more faultless art than Byron's ever attained, though it lacks the directness and momentum of Byron.
In the letter of June 18, 1822, again he says: "The 'Epipsychidion' I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the Centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings.
Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in Epipsychidion, Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste The scene it would adorn. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take away his delight in song. In Markham's The Shoes of Happiness, only the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy.
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