Forest Pyle uses lines 164-68 to demonstrate how Shelley views the imagination as "legislation," conceiving it "as the source of an explosive illumination that liberates us from the imposed darknes of theological and political ideology, releasing us from 'false consciousness' to the process of historical truth-making" (94). So for Shelley the imagination "works in the itnerest not of enshrining what Wordsworth would call the singular 'Mighty scheme of Truth' but of legislating what Shelley in Epipsychidion identifies as the plurality of 'many truths.' The corrosive and performative power of the poetic imagination is enlisted to inform 'an education of error,' an education that undertakes the destruction of 'error' and 'the roots of error'" (94-95).
John Dewey--an American pragmatist philosopher that the artist should be an experimenter, "unsatisfied with what is established as is a geographic explorer or a scientific inquirer" (144). He is critical of this "museum" conception of art which ignores the fact that great art stems from lived experience. "Classic" art "was produced bore the marks of adventure," and
[t]is fact is ignored by classicists in their protest against romantics who undertake who undertake the development of new values, often without possessing means for their creation. That which is now classic is so because of completion of adventure, not because of its absence. The one who perceives and enjoys esthetically always has the sense of adventure in reading any classic that Keats had in reading Chapman's "Homer." (144)
Dewey was a big fan of the Romantics, believing that they held similar beliefs about art production as his own. And Dewey, a major social and political philosopher, believed in the importance of "excitement" as being a catalyst to social change. The study of the past is incredibly important for pragmatists as long as it is instrumental in producing change. Shelley's aesthetical, "trial-and-error" method of experimentation in art, which is evident by, for example, the several apostrophes he uses in an attempt to "name" Emily--"Spouse!", "Sister," "Angel," is admitted to be inaccurate depictions of her, yet he sees value in the attempt because it at least opens up biological pathways between himself and the "other."
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capicorn, 1958.
Pyle, Forest. The ideology of Imagination : Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.