SHELLEY'S QUEST POEMS.
Item
-
Title
-
SHELLEY'S QUEST POEMS.
-
Identifier
-
AAI8023692
-
identifier
-
8023692
-
Creator
-
CAPELLA, BARRY JOHN.
-
Contributor
-
George M. Ridenour
-
Date
-
1980
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Literature, English
-
Abstract
-
In both his personal and artistic life, Percy Bysshe Shelley longed to unite with an Ideal Love. That longing dominates much of his prose and poetry, and one of his most interesting treatments of that theme occurs in three poems which I prefer to call the quest poems: Alastor, Prince Athanase, and Epipsychidion.;What unites each of these works is the tale of a poet who becomes obsessed by the desire for an Ideal Love, seeks that Love relentlessly, and ultimately dies. In the failures of the youth in Alastor and the good prince in Prince Athanase, we see Shelley confronting the major difficulty of finding a feminine poetic counterpart to the poet's vision of a dream maiden. For the hero in Alastor, pursuit of his vision isolates him from both Nature and Mankind and also necessitates his death when he fails in his quest. The poet's death may be interpreted as the spiritual death of a portion of Shelley's own aspirations and yearnings.;But Shelley's nature was such that he could never quite surrender the hope that union with his vision might be possible. Once again, he attempted to work out his theme in Prince Athanase, a transitional work whose hero is certainly more social than the solipsistic youth of Alastor. In addition, Shelley assigned specific physical attributes to the object of the poet's quest. Finally, he had intended to have Urania, the prince's Ideal Love, appear on his deathbed. Had he finished the poem, Shelley would have been able to define the relationship between love and death--so ambiguous in Alastor--more precisely.;Such a mature treatment of that relationship occurs in Epipsychidion, the most complex consideration of the quest theme. No longer do a mood of despondency and a feeling of futility about the poet's efforts pervade. Instead, this poem is a celebration of the hero's--and Shelley's--successful consummation of his longing for union with an Ideal Love. Part of the celebration is possible because Shelley had learned from the process of composing the earlier quest poems and from his own life that an ideal feminine counterpart could not be found in this world. This recognition led to a refinement of his concept of Love, and the Emily of Epipsychidion is more profitably associated with Love and Poetry than with La Viviani. Read in this way, we can better appreciate the importance of death in the poem--not as a force of extinction (as in Alastor) but as a force of liberation delivering the poet from this world to Eternity with Emily. Of the three quest poems, only the triumphant Epipsychidion celebrates the poet's death--in its glorious poetic Liebestod.;After the death of the poet, the speaker eagerly awaits his own destruction, one which will allow him to dwell "where the Eternal are.".
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
English
