Synopses & Reviews
This book is a study of Shelley's poetry at its most "romantic." It uses concepts of Freud and such later psychoanalytic writers as Geza Roheim, Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Margaret Mahler, together with comparisons to such authors as Blake, Wordsworth, and Rousseau, to analyze Shelley's imaginings of eros and paradise. Discussing "Alastor," Prometheus Unbound, "The Triumph of Life," and a wide variety of other Shelley writings, the book brings out the cross-currents of anxiety, rage, competitive ambition, and conflicting desires in those imaginings. At the center of his poetic thinking it finds an interplay of aggressive and regressive impulses, and it also develops psychological interpretations of such recurrent motifs in his poetry as the double; the voyage to the source; solitude; visionary and hallucinatory experience; incest; gaps, secrets, and negatives; and the quest for self-knowledge. Above all, while studying Shelley's attraction to the "oceanic feeling" of infancy, the book also emphasizes the importance to him of the mature ego and its shaping of unconscious conflict and fantasy. In general, this book suggests that what is still most moving in Shelley and the Romantics is the power and beauty of the most visionary imaginings.