Atara Stein cites lines 296-300 as an example of how Shelley sees Emily a potential rescuer from his relationship with Mary, a relationship that he sees as an imprisonment. He, according to Stein, "helplessly remains subject to her powerful influence" (36). Stein then compares these lines to the popular band U2's lyrics to "So Cruel," off of theirActung Baby album. First, here are the lines from Epipsychidion:
And all my being became bright or dim
As the Moon's image in a summer sea,
According as she smiled or frowned on me;
And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead. (296-300)
Stein observes: "Like Shelley's speaker, the singer of 'So Cruel' is frustrated by his lover's power over him: 'Then she makes you watch her from above / And you need her like a drug'" (36). But of course, by asking for Emily to rescue him, he is asking for a new form of imprisonment; he is under the illusion that it is not one, but later in the poem he comes to see even this relationship as his "annihilation" (587). I think comparing popular culture to Romanticism can be a useful way to engage students with the period. Although Jerome McGann--in Romantic Ideology--is very critical of the tendency to rely on general impressions of the romanticism, it is practical to extract certain generalizations that have resonance today. As Harold Bloom argues that poetic progression is dependent on "misreadings," so is critical ascertainment of a period. Criticism, after all, is a process; there needs to be a willingness among the critic to be an assertive and partially incorrect "strong poet," (both terms used in Bloom's Anxiety of Influence and Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) as Bloom and Richard Rorty would put it, realizing that critical correction will follow through the reprimand of scrupulous scholarship.
Stein, Atara. "Epipsychidion, Achtung Baby, and the Teaching of Romanticism." Popular Culture Review 6.1 (1995): 29-44.