ABSTRACT
Musical women framed Shelley’s desire. Claire Clairmont, Sophia Stacey and Jane Williams possessed beautiful singing voices, which separated them from other women in Shelley’s experience. Shelley’s fantasy of integrating voice and word in order to achieve self-presence informs the poems he wrote for these women as pervasively as it does the narrative and dramatic poems, which feature fictional characters and scenarios. In these personal poems, however, the relationships and situations involve Shelley and the women whose voices fuelled his desire as positive objects directly. The poems achieve levels of tension, intensity and richness perhaps unparalleled anywhere else in Shelley’s writing, because they bear the marks of Shelley’s struggle to prosecute a phantasmic narrative within the confines of the symbolic system, permeated by the laws, protocols and strictures of a spectral “big Other.” The clash produces not pathological expression, but, rather, modes of correspondence revelatory of a “normal” individual forced to cope with the deadlocks and paradoxes that characterize human experience.
