Epipsychidion : Shelley’s poem (1821), inspired by Emila Viviani (known as Pisa); it is part spiritual autobiography, part praise of ideal love.
... vision and its hints and images, but the thought seems almost to disappear from the concrete grasp of the intelligence into a wonder of light and a music of marvellous sound. The Prometheus and Epipsychidion show this turn of his genius at its height; they are two of the three greatest things he has left to us on the larger scale. Here he does come near to something like the natural speech of his strange ...
... to lift it out of the coarseness of life into a vital-mental idealism", and it tried "to resuscitate the attitude of chivalry and the troubadours". But there was much more in it for Shelley. Epipsychidion, that apostrophe to Emilia Viviani which, together with Prometheus Unbound and Adonais , is considered by Sri Aurobindo 30 as the most typical work of Shelley's of long breath, is not just ...
... underneath a cloud of dew Embodied in the windless heaven of June, Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon Bums inextinguishably beautiful. But such passages are rare in Epipsychidion: most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic ...
... underneath a cloud of dew Embodied in the windless heaven of June, Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon Burns inextinguishably beautiful. But such passages are rare in Epipsychidion: most of the poem is idealistically romantic rather than mystically Platonic. And even in the exceptional places the mysticism is not what I have designated as direct. The language is of the poetic ...
... winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly", Sri Aurobindo 3 contended in a letter: "Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life - he tried to find it there wherever ...
... of their own that sustains the lyric and makes it a faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas ; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life—he tried to find it there wherever ...
... behind the veil became to Thompson the Hound of Heaven, a tremendous Lover with a grip as of flesh. What in a more personal mood Shelley had pictured, in the colourful transports running through Epipsychidion , as his all-consummating Archetype come down on earth, Thompson saw at a more authentic pitch of mysticism as the resplendent face of a Divine Virginity whom the child in him called Mother and ...
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