Epipsychidion



Epipsychidion is a major poetical work published in 1821 by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The work was subtitled: Verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia V—, now imprisoned in the convent of—. The title is Greek for "concerning or about a little soul", from epi, "around", "about"; and psychidion, "little soul".

Background
Countess Teresa Viviani, the daughter of the governor of Pisa, was nineteen years old. Her father had placed her in the Convent of Saint Anna. Shelley had visited her several times and had corresponded with her briefly. After the work was published by Charles and James Ollier in London, Shelley asked them to withdraw it. One possible concern was that readers would interpret the poem biographically. Shelley referred to it as "an idealized history of my life and feelings". The poem contains autobiographical elements, consisting of 604 lines written for Viviani, whom Shelley met while she was "imprisoned" in 1820.

The theme of the work is a meditation on the nature of ideal love. Shelley advocates free love, criticising conventional marriage, which he described as "the weariest and the longest journey". Epipsychidion opens with an invocation to Emilia as a spiritual sister of the speaker. He addresses her as a "captive bird" for whose nest his poem will be soft rose petals. He calls her an angel of light, the light of the moon seen through mortal clouds, a star beyond all storms.

In a letter of 18 June 1822, Shelley described the work:

"The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the Centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace. If you are curious, however, to hear what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."

Epipsychidion was composed at Pisa, in January and February 1821, and was published anonymously in 1821 by Charles and James Ollier, London. The poem was included by Mary Shelley in the Poetical Works in 1839, both editions. The Bodleian Library has a first draft of Epipsychidion, "consisting of three versions, more or less complete, of the 'Preface [Advertisement]'; a version in ink and pencil, much cancelled, of the last eighty lines of the poem; and some additional lines which did not appear in print".

Shelley informed his publisher Charles Ollier that he wanted Epipsychidion to be circulated only to the sunetoi, the initiated, the cognoscenti, the enlightened, the "esoteric few".

Legacy
E. M. Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey (1907), takes its title from a line from the poem.