What they think about, of course, is the one they love. But in the Romantic tradition, I hope to show, thinking about the beloved other is attended with all kinds of questions. Love language effects a transference that is the condition of possibility for any relation, for intelligibility itself. Through romantic love, Romanticism rests its claims to have transcended an empiricist skepticism. We can perhaps begin to see them in Shelley's Epipsychidion , in its compulsive search to determine what or who the beloved object is , to name and rename her, a search that quickly reveals the structure of desire and the movement of figurative language to be one and the same.
Desire wages war with the desire to know.
What we might notice if we focused further on the role of thinking in Epipsychidion is that the poem seems worried about the possibility that thinking is a kind of zero-sum game or economy of scarcity whereby one person's thinking can only occur at the expense of another's. My examples will be drawn from Victorian sonnet sequences by women. Rather than seeing these sonnet sequences as quaint confluences of the Pre-Raphaelite revival of Dante and Petrarch with Victorian sentimentality and domesticity, I'd like to make some more ambitious claims about them. The sonnet is of course always about the problem of thinking, construing, hailing the other. Exteriorizing thought, the sonnet de-psychologizes it, materializes it, alienates it from the thinker as subject by placing any given sonnet about the beloved other in a syntagmatic relation to all other thoughts about other beloved others.