Atara Stein discusses the importance of engaging her students' interest on the subject of Romanticism by encouraging them to make the natural connections between it and popular culture: "In my classes, my students and I seem to be able to find an endless series of examples of popular works which incarnate, in contemporary form, the very themes and concerns we are considering in class" (29). After making several justifications to the reader for making popular-culture connections to Romanticism, she provides us with a case study: U2's Actung Baby and Epipsychidion. She writes: "Like Epipsychidion, Actung Baby expresses a highly idealistic notion of love as a type of transcendent experience, in which the lovers attempt to escape human mortality and frailties" (34).
For instance, "[j]ust as the speaker of the poem exhorts Emily to 'fly' with him and to 'sail with' him to an island paradise, the singer of 'Even Better Than the Real Thing' enthuses, 'We're free to fly the crimson sky / The sun won't melt our wings tonight'" (34). Interesting connection! I find the final three stanzas of this song could also be used to help us understand one of Epipsychidion's themes:
Take me higher
Take me higher
Can you take me higher?
Will you take me higher?
You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing
Even better than the real thing
Even better than the real thing
For the poet, Emily certainly is not "the real thing," for she becomes too much of a symbolic figure, a rather formless specter. Stein is arguing that many of the songs on U2's album reverberate one of the themes of Epipsychidion, which is that true love cannot last because the imagination--which the concept of love is reliant on,--is eventually dissatisfied with its choice of referents to the concept of love. Stein writes:
The singer of the final song asserts that 'Love is blindness' and asks his lover, 'Won't you wrap the night / Around me,' as if willing himself to be deceived. When relationships prove deeply disillusioning, most notably in his symbolic imprisonment by the Moon, or Mary Shelley, he falls in love with Emily, a woman who is utterly inaccessible to him. She can embody his ideal because he has no opportunity to become disillusioned with her or she with him. (35)
Stein's approach is an important one because it helps makes the poem more accessible to the average student. By using references from popular culture, Stein is preparing her students to become interested in critical scholarship, an engagement of energies that must come from a genuine interest in the subject. Another way of putting it is that Stein is, in John Dewey's terms, stimulating an "impulsion" in the mind of the students to have a full, enriching experience with romantic literature (in this case, Epipsychidion). Consider the following two passage from Dewey:
Every experience, of slight or tremendous import, begins with an impulsion, rather as an impulsion. I say 'impulsion' rather than 'impulse.' An impulse is specialized and particular; it is, even when instinctive, simply a part of the mechanism involved in a more complete adaptation with the environment. "Impulsion" designates a movement outward and forward of tech whole organism to which special impulses are auxiliary. (58)
Impulsions are the beginnings of complete experience because they proceed from need; from a hunger and demand that belongs to the organism as a whole and that can be supplied only by instituting definite relations (active relations, interactions) with the environment. (58)
For Dewey, intellectual/philosophical production and poetic/artistic production differ only in degrees; they both involve this need for engagement. Becoming immersed in a time period and genre.
Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 1934.
Stein, Atara. "Epipsychidion, Achtung Baby, and the Teaching of Romanticism." Popular Culture Review 6.1 (1995): 29-44.
U2. "Even Better Than the Real Thing." Actung Baby. Interscope, 1991.