Abstract

In the collection of poems entitled Psychodia Platonica, and in particular in the poem entitled Psychozoia, Henry More laid the groundwork for his life-long inquiry into the nature of the human self. He provided a poetic commentary of Plotinus’s Enneads in which three ontological dimensions – the life of nature, animal perception and the intellect – created an allegorical background against which one could articulate a systematic analysis of the individual human self in its relationships with God and created reality. Psychozoia ended with a conversion, in which the soul of a Platonic pilgrim was released from its condition of ‘autaesthesia’ so that it was finally able to reach a state of ‘anautoaesthesia’. Significantly, More characterized this crucial shift from self-perception to the annihilation of the individual self as a motion towards ‘self-senslessnesse’ and ‘self-deadnesse’. Regardless of its aesthetic merits, More’s poem dramatizes key philosophical notions, while bringing to the fore the prodigious effervescence of his linguistic skills. In this sense, Psychozoia remains an important document to understand the evolution of More’s thought.