SOURCE: "Shelley's 'Void Circumference': The Aesthetic of Nihilism, " English Studies in Canada, Vol. IX, No. 3, September, 1983, pp. 272-93.

In the following essay, Woodman analyzes Percy Bysshe Shelley's views regarding the relationship between artistic creativity and "divine insanity." Woodman demonstrates how Shelley's career reveals the poet's frustration with the inability of art to truly represent divinely inspired vision.

I

Since Plato banished the poets from his Republic many have rushed to their defence in an attempt to reinstate them. Among the English poets, Shelley remains the foremost apologist for the divine insanity of which Plato accused the poets and for which he sent them into exile as unfit for citizenship in a rational society governed by logos rather than mythos, philosophy rather than religion. Shelley in his apology, particularly his Defence of Poetry, meets Plato on his own ground. He too rejects the role of religion in society, substituting...