Discussion of Milton L. Miller's Article, Manic Depressive Cycles of the Poet Shelley

Dr. Miller has a valuable, creative and new idea in matching Shelley's imagery to psychoanalytic concepts. Students of literature know Shelley well; psychoanalysts know him too little. Miller makes a fresh start, by reaching back 150 years to the most impassioned and modern mind among English poets.

Did Shelley in truth have manic-depressive cycles? Did he have them in a pathological sense, or only to the extent that all of us do?

Shelley seems to lie outside the orbit of our psychiatric nomenclature. He was not a poet of escape like the other romantics who wrote perfect lyric poetry—Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. They fled into their verbal imagery, whereas Shelley fought back against the forces of evil with his every act. His great lyric poems are but one side of him. His long poems and his prose are founded on his lifelong study of the great writers of every period. His reason told him that the world was an unreasonable, imperfect place—that man was irrational, cruel, deceitful. He was no armchair philosopher. He fought the world, crying out for kindness, openness, generosity, order. His writings still inflame the minds of men today, more than Keats, and more than Wordsworth.

R. M. Smith, in The Skelley Legend (1945), noted that no definitive biography was possible, since vital source material was still being withheld from examination. In addition, he documented the many forgeries about the life of Shelley and felt there had been too much covering up and angelicizing of him. He recommended following the spirit of Shelley who all through his life wrote, “Let us see the truth, whatever that may be.”

In Flight of the Skylark (1954), Norman

wrote: “There was always activity where Shelley was … He was too bent on reforming evils and playing the knight-errant to unhappy souls for his life to take the quiet course of a conformer's. Wherever there is action, criticism follows.” He too says there is no way of determining whether Shelley was responsible for Harriet's drow