7 - Dispersoning Emily: drafting as plot in Epipsychidion

Summary

Almost fifty years ago, Daniel Hughes argued that the apparent formlessness of Shelley's poetry was a deliberate artistic choice, the representation of the mind's process in the act of creation. “I would suggest,” Hughes writes, “a method of reading Shelley, and particularly Epipsychidion, which sees calculated coherence and calculated collapse, the whole to mirror in its progress the process of mind as it creates the poem.” Hughes argues that these collapses are deliberate and artistically controlled for thematic purposes. The theme, he says, is to show the mind – Shelley's own mind, yet also all minds, considered more universally – in the process of creation. Using Epipsychidion as Hughes did, in this chapter I will pursue the relationship, sometimes a gap or abyss, between rhetoric and history in the poem. Using the draft notebooks as well as the final printed text, I will argue that Shelley's conversion of Teresa Viviani from an actual person to a rhetorical personification, a process that he represents as his discovery that the actual person fulfils his dreamed-of ideal, leads in the draft notebooks not only to the insufficiency of the speaker's language to represent, but also to the power of the writer's metaphor to create. I will also argue that the drafts redefine what we might call compositional impasses, collapses in the actual writing process, as several different kinds of rhetorical collapses.