What Shelley thought he detected in the language of the eyes was the measure of a person’s soul.
Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (1979) p. 15
Nathaniel Brown writes about Shelley’s conception of love, but he clearly also loves Shelley – if “love” is the right word for a stance that is soothingly generous even when Shelley is at his most objectionable (for instance, arguing that women who do not have “soul-inwoven” eyes are not worthy of being loved).
Even in a more precise sense, what other than love can motivate a critic to so carefully reconstruct the philosophical and historical contexts of another person’s writing as Brown does Shelley’s? And if Brown loves Shelley, do we not have it in common – this love?
This is why the question that Brown’s book inadvertently poses makes me fear for myself: are critical evaluation and love-struck affirmation always mutually exclusive? And is this the reason why we as critics have to hide our passion behind “methodological rigour” and impenetrable prose? Why we are too afraid to love our work, openly.
The phrase “extraordinary ocular endowment” is Brown’s; how not to love a writer who chooses such an innuendoed circumlocution to state that Shelley had big eyes? Which is also a reminder that the language of the eyes is not something we learn by looking at someone’s iris; rather, its medium is the written page – this is whence words enter our eyes, this is where we can take the measure of a writer’s soul.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 