2. Emily Brontë and Shelley

It seems likely that Emily Brontë had read Shelley's Complete Works which came out in 1839, and she probably first came in contact with him earlier. Both poets, in evolving their image of creativity, focus upon the boundary or tension (the ‘veil’) between sense and spirit, and the quest for a ‘real’ communication between poet and Spirit, or lost Beloved, or dead Poet (as in Adonais), the simultaneous gain and loss of identity through union with Eternity: ‘could we lift the veil … Thou would'st rejoice for those that live,/ Because they live to die’ (H.170). They have a similar contempt for worldly creeds, mass religion, the world's ‘withered weeds’; a similar rage against worldly injustice, though Shelley's led him in restless wandering and Emily's kept her moorlocked: hence dispersal of his words amongst mankind is characteristic of Shelley's image, while absorption of the self away from mankind is Emily's. Despite this difference, both have a similar underlying view of evil as ultimately unreal, with love being the only active force in the universe, and fear being the state of mind least conducive to a sense of ‘reality’ (in the Platonic sense).

The ‘Ode to the West Wind’ serves as a point of departure for both Shelley and Emily Brontë (who frequently echoes it), in terms of considering how inspiration relates to eternity. In the Ode, the poet — like Prometheus — is chained, by a ‘heavy weight of hours’; awaiting inspiration by the creating and destroying Spirit, through recognition of a correspondence (‘one too like thee, tameless and swift and proud’). The affinities present in boyhood, ‘when, to outstrip thy skiey speed/ Scarce seemed a vision’, are like those of the Wuthering Heights childhood (‘half savage and hardy and free’), which also requires recalling yet modifying as the creative process proceeds. The problem in both poets concerns how to expand, divide and multiply, the original primitive adhesive visionary state: