Shelley and the Mutinous Flesh

Abstract

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