Jerome J. McGann draws a connection between lines 186-89 of Epipsychion and Shelley's letter to Thomas Love Peacock, written in March of 1820. Here is the passage that McGann quotes from:
I see with deep regret in today's Papers the attempt to assassinate the Ministry. Everything seems to conspire against Reform.--How Cobbet must laugh at the "resumption of gold payments." I long to see him. I have a motto on a ring in Italian--"Il buon tempo verra."--There is a tide both in public & in private affairs, which awaits both men & nations. (qtd. in McGann 118)
McGann also claims that lines 186-89 "are perfectly congruent with the polemic in A Philosophic View of Reform, with the aesthetic of A Defence of Poetry, and with the famous 'Preface' to Prometheus Unbound where Shelley sets a futuristic stamp upon his poetic work" (119).
Here is the passage from the "Preface" which McGann quotes from:
My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear harvest of his happiness. (qtd. in McGann 119)
Again, love is for Shelley the imaginations's means of resistance towards a world of strife and political unrest. As McGann puts it, "Eroticism [...] is the imagination's last line of human resistance against what he elsewhere called 'Anarchy': political despotism and moral righteousness on the one hand, and on the other selfishness, calculation, and social indifference" (118).
McGann uses the above-quoted passages to illustrate his point that Shelley's ideology "is time and space specific"; as the passage from his letter indicates, Shelley's poetry is frequently an aesthetical response to contemporary events. Shelley's longing for displacement, as seen in Epipsychidion, can be viewed as a political statement of disparagement. McGann couples Shelley with Byron as being "escapist" for political reasons. He is critical of many politically-minded scholars' avoidance of Shelley's and Byron's escapism: "Consequently, some critics have been reluctant to associate their work with 'escapist' moves and tendencies, which seem to them critical characterizations that betray or ignore the poets' activist commitments. I wish to argue here, however, that Byron and Shelley are most deeply engaged (in a socialist-activist sense) when they have moved furthest along the paths of displacement and escape" (124).
McGann, Jerome. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.