Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley's Prefaces

Abstract

The prefaces to Shelley's poems are generally seen as an important addendum to understanding the complex narratorial personae in the poems they accompany; to pull these textual edges into the centre of enquiry allows for consideration of the unique perspectives on ethics and aesthetics that they offer. I argue that Shelley's prefaces conflate Sympathy conceived of as a personal and morally accountable emotional reflex, such as found in the thought of Adam Smith, and sympathy conceived as the abstract, disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant's Critique of Judgment. This conflation casts the sensitivity of the poet as both a faculty of judgment which forges an only indirect relationship to moral concerns, and, paradoxically, as something requiring explicitly moral behaviour. This tension engenders a psychological trauma which makes the idea of ‘the self’ a contested, liminal space that marks the edges of Shelley's understanding of the mental operations that occur in aesthetic experience.