ABSTRACT
Stuart M. Sperry's account of Epipsychidion, draws on Freudian ideas about the splitting of the ego, exploring Shelley's struggle to confront the darker implications of the idealising that was, as Sperry reads the poem, tragically necessary for his art. Epipsychidion begins with the attempt to capture Emily and her significance for the poet through a series of abstract comparisons that derive their metaphoric power from the cosmos. 'Tithonus' is the most brilliant and moving of Tennyson's attempts to define the wellsprings of his own poetic temperament, and the imagery of its central section identifies it with Shelley's earlier endeavor. Shelley throughout his life consistently tended to imagine women in terms of these extremes. Epipsychidion is a hymn to love, an autobiography, a manifesto, a confession, an apology, a kind of prophecy, and, last, a prayer or entreaty. Above all it is the anatomy of a compulsion central to the poet's life and art.
