Essay 2
One Supreme Being
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry shares a common element that is evident throughout most of his poems. His neo-Platonist views of religion and a supreme being are a common thread through his poems. One example is in his poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” This was also a trait with many other neo-Platonist such as William Wordsworth. In his poems “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth uses the same techniques as Shelley does in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”
Neo-Platonism played an important role in Shelley’s poetry. This was also common for many other writers. “A number of 19th- and 20th-century thinkers and writers have been influenced by Neo-Platonism; among them were several of the most important British romantic poets, including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.” (Microsoft Encarta) The doctrines of Neo-Platonism were simple and easy to follow. “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” depicts this belief throughout its stanzas. In the first two stanzas, Shelley talks about nature and an unseen force that surrounds everything around him. The Neo-Platonist doctrine it states that, “the ultimate reality of the universe is held to be an infinite, unknowable, perfect One.” (Microsoft Encarta) This one Supreme Being is the unseen force in the poem. The next two stanzas, stanzas three and four, describe how religions try to put a name on this supreme being. The narrator is explaining his confusion and disdain for religion and their quest to understand everything. The soul is allowed to choose its own path of sin, but then it must correct itself; this is the second stage of Neo-Platonism. In order to fix the wrong that it created, “the soul must reverse that course, tracing in the opposite direction the successive steps of its degeneration, until it is again united with the fountainhead of its being.” (Microsoft Encarta) Once this happens the narrator goes back to his younger days in stanza five. He depicts a time when he was outside in nature and how, “Sudden, thy shadow fell on me; I shriek'd, and clasp'd my hands in ecstasy!”(59-60) This great bliss that the narrator feels is due to the last part of the Neo-Platonism doctrine: “The actual reunion is accomplished through a mystical experience in which the soul knows an all-pervading ecstasy.” (Microsoft Encarta) Shelley’s views on Neo-Platonism influenced his poem greatly. It is an exact depiction of the doctrine and the different stages that a person travels through to reach enlightenment.
This view of religion and a supreme being is evident throughout most of the works of authors who supported it. Wordsworth and Shelley were not only friends; they also shared the same views of an unreachable supreme being. “As Wordsworth does in ‘Tintern Abbey,’ Shelley in the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ suggests how his imagination and poetic sensitivity were formed by nature, and more significantly, by visitations from the shadowy power of intellectual beauty and how, in turn, he dedicated his poetic powers to intellectual beauty.” (Gale Research) In the poem “Tintern Abbey” the shadow appears to the narrator when he is alone in the woods, “A presence that disturbs me with the joy/ Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused”. (94-96) In “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” the spirit is depicted as “"The awful shadow of some unseen force/ Floats though unseen among us; visiting/ This various world with as inconstant wing/ As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.” (1-4). Both men describe the spirit, in the poem, as a being that encompasses their surroundings in nature. The similarity between “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” is that “Shelley laments his feeling that the presence of this power was stronger in his youth.” (Gale Research) In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, Wordsworth describes his losses as: “By night or day. The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” (8-9), “But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth.” (17-18), and “At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.” (75-76) They all describe the decrease of the spirit around the narrator. The bond shared between Wordsworth’s poems and Shelley’s poem is evident through their depictions and losses of the spirit.
“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” is a depiction of Neo-Platonism views shared by Shelley with and other neo-Platonists. The similarities and influences from William Wordsworth were due to Shelley’s their shared ideas on a non-namable supreme being. This views played a very important role in Shelley’s poetry and helped define him as a poet.
Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 3: Writers of the Romantic Period, 1789-1832. Gale Research, 1992.