Manic Depressive Cycles of the Poet Shelley

Shelley recommended the study of dreams, and hoped one day to create a complete psychological theory. Without being explicit, Shelley, together with his paramour Mary Godwin who later became his second wife, often indicated that they had an important psychological contribution to offer. I believe they did, and that it was to expose certain imagery of manic-depressive cycles.

Shelley often thought of himself as a frail, innocent child, or else as an almost omnipotent force in nature, like the West Wind, or a star. He admitted being unable to identify himself with flesh-and-blood, everyday people. Although he was the father of many children and was preoccupied with infants and children in his imagery, fatherhood as experienced by ordinary men was alien to him. He felt, instead, a grandiose identity typified by Job, Prometheus, or Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew—all figures persecuted by God's tyranny. He feared not only his own father, but all priests, governments, man-made laws, customs and traditions. To fight back against these overwhelming adversaries, he identified with the omniscient, supreme force of good in perfected verbal imagery. He felt that poetry-must eventually conquer evil without doing evil. He very often solved his personal problem of non-aggression by considering that the conquest of the evils of life lay beyond death. He felt, while in his enthusiastic states, that he was a fountain of goodness with Messianic mission for mankind. The liquid character of musical sounds was often emphasized in his poetry.

He experienced heights and depths of emotion, sometimes in daily cycles. When depressed, he wrote, as in 1820, a two-line poem on “Torpor”:

The characters he created were frequently subject to madness, their psychosis due to lack of love, mistreatment, and persecution.

Through self-understanding, some of them regained sanity. In his own life, he repeatedly overcame gloom by mobil