Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies

Karl Kroeber

Edited and with a Foreword by Joseph Viscomi

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Kroeber, Karl, 1926 - 2009.

Blake in a Post-Secular Age: Early Prophecies / Karl Kroeber.

p. cm.

Includes Bibliographical references and illustrations

ISBN 978-1-105-90062-4

1. Blake, William, 1757-1827 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Religion in literature. 3. Science and literature. 4. Blake in popular culture.

Copyright © 2012 Jean T. Kroeber

All rights reserved

A Romantic Circles E-Book

Cover design: David Rettenmaier

Blake in a Post-Secular Era:
Early Prophecies

Originally intended to introduce a study of William Blake’s later prophecies, the late Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between 1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering should be prepared to recognize Blake’s centrality in academic literary humanism, which—in its secular phase—excluded Blake on account of his radical Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber points out, has not diminished Blake’s immense—and still growing—impact on popular culture, on our music, fiction, film, and graphic novels, as well as on our ideas of creativity, spirituality, and individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers, Blake argued that each individual was unique and that only complex social structures based, not on reason, but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can realize and sustain the individual’s innate divinity.

". . . a real contribution, not just in substance but also as a testament to all the wonderful work that Kroeber was doing—right up to the end. It's an erudite text that demonstrates both a deep understanding (and appreciation) of Blake's art and a real insight into why Blake remains relevant to all of us. The book is also an eminently readable one . . . contribut[ing] significantly to reviving Blake yet again. . . . As always, Kroeber sets a standard for us all, and this last work needs to stand as evidence of how one great mind interacted creatively with another one."

Stephen C. Behrendt, University Professor and George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English, University of Nebraska

"It’s hard not to like and appreciate Kroeber’s intense, expert enthusiasm for his ideas about Blake’s faith in the power and centrality of individualism and uniqueness. If only every scholar could write so well. Kroeber’s brisk, clean, thoroughly readable prose has a kind of unstoppable drive, deeply felt personal conviction, and cheerful affect that give energy and credibility to his ideas and assertions. . . . Kroeber says that Blake places the highest value on conversation, and that he values conversation very highly himself. Indeed, the book often reads as strong contributions to a critical conversation that the writer, had he lived, would have been all too happy to defend point for point."

Morris Eaves, Professor of English and Turner Professor of Humanities, University of Rochester

This book is dedicated to all my students over a
lifetime of teaching.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Book Description

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

List of Illustrations

1.1. Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies

1.1.1. 1. Introduction

1.2. 2. All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

1.3. 3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

1.4. 4. The Book of Thel

1.5. 5. Visions of the Daughters of Albion

1.6. 6. Blake and Secularism: The Book of Urizen

1.7. 7. A Final Note

Appendix One: Blake and Science

Appendix Two: Blake and Contemporary Popular Culture

Notes

Works Cited

About this Book

Foreword

I.

Blake in a Post-Secular Era was to be a study of Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, Blake’s masterpieces in illuminated printing, the Four Zoas, the extraordinarily complicated manuscript in which they originated, and the Laocoön text and engraving, the culmination of Blake’s theories on art, religion, and commerce. But, as Karl tells us in his Preface, the “certainty of my age and the uncertainty of my health” forced him to offer separately the seven sections he had written as of 30 August 2009. In addition to the one-page Preface, these included an Introduction and Final Note, chapters on All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and The Book of Urizen. He also intended a short appendix “—just [a] listing of evidence of how Blake permeates modern pop culture—” and left notes for another appendix listing works on science to assist humanists in general and students of Blake in particular. “These diverse commentaries” are “on specific features of Blake’s ‘prophetic’ poems executed between 1788 and 1794,” hence the new title, Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies. Though in various degrees of finish, they stand well on their own and are deeply insightful, provocative, and original. Although he did not [Page 4] realize his full intention, he does indeed provide “the intellectual orientation needed for appreciation of Blake’s later poetic accomplishments.”

I remember exactly where and when Karl told me that he was planning to write an essay on Blake. We were having dinner at his house in Brooklyn, 21 March 2009, just Karl, Jean, his beloved wife of 56 years, and me. He was 82 years old, midway through his last semester before retiring as Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he had been since 1970. He spoke very excitedly about his “sensational undergraduate seminar” on Blake and proudly of the brilliant young undergraduates taking it. The seminar was successful, he knew, because he was learning so much—and he so loved learning. He threatened me with the “essay” by the end of summer, to finally “set me straight” about Blake, he said.

For the whole long evening, I forgot entirely that serious illness was hovering in the room. We had our usual animated sparring matches, joyful and full of laughter and teasing on a variety of subjects, works, and ideas. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, but mostly on Blake. After dinner and drinks, after more illumination and laughter, he walked me to the gate. I asked him: So Karl, how are you, really? Not good, he said; bad actually, this damn cancer has come back and the doctors are mostly idiots. His hope, he said, was to slow it down so each day he could get a few good hours of writing in and finish the essay on Blake and maybe the manuscript on children’s literature that he was then actively working on. He did not mention “the two purely literary studies” that would “investigate the biology of the mind,” which he told an interviewer the previous fall that he hoped “to be granted life enough to finish.”¹

He was not scared of death or of dying, which he saw as an annoying series of interruptions both to himself and to Jean, a sculptor working in marble and wood. Whereas many of us would like to die quickly to avoid pain, he sought to die slowly in order to get some work done. I recall thinking two things: first, how very much like Blake, who at the end of his life had no fear but better things to do than die, like a few more engravings of his Dante illustrations, and, indeed, working on them probably extended his life. And, second, when my time comes I hope I am hard at work on one or more projects, brave and annoyed in like manner.

[Page 5]

At the end of summer, on 30 August 2009, I received his “essay” with the following note:

Joe -sorry to hit you with this mess—effect of my final seminar—couldn't stop the flow—any comment would be appreciated, but don't strain—seems to me 25,000 words of repetition—if you think worth while could you forward to Bob Essick or send me his address - I much admire his work you'll see? ------- problem here is my cancer turned bad - pushed us back to city - 8/20 had chemo embolization of liver tumor from which I am very slowly recovering—quite weak—have lung problem also— hope next Wednesday to get a fix on what might be done there—but at best it will be long and slow—messed up a good summer for Jean, good shows, going like gangbusters a huge elm log - nuts, nuts, nuts—trust all goes well with you, Maria, Sofia Rose and the oncoming new Viscomi—as I say, don't strain, but a perspective on my madness MIGHT help—Karl

At 72 pages, the “essay” was longer than I expected, and, more surprising still, it comprised the preliminary chapters of a book-length study that he had not mentioned. Only then did I realize that Karl had already, that spring, seen this and his other anticipated books slip away from him and had completely re-envisioned his retirement. That he slowed death as much as he did throughout the spring and summer was, I can see now, a truly amazing exertion of will and life.

II.

We exchanged many emails throughout September, but he made no revisions to what he sent me. He was engaged until he physically could no longer be so. I visited him on 9 October and for nearly two hours we talked about Blake, Blakeans, and his “essay.” His instructions were simple: if you don't think it is of any value to anyone, burn it; I don't care, but should you find some use for any of it, perhaps for one of your students, don't put my name on it. I doubt I need the publication. He was witty but adamant and showed no ego whatsoever.

[Page 6]

Six months after Karl died, 8 November 2009, Jean sent me all the materials on the project. These included the electronic files for the commentaries and their variants, the notes to his seminar, and a copy of the second edition of the Norton Critical Edition of Blake’s texts, heavy with (alas, mostly illegible) annotations. There were printouts of my emails and those from Robert Essick with Karl’s penciled-in responses to our comments. There were binders of marked-up photocopies of essays and bibliographies, as well as folders filled with annotated drafts of every section and dozens of drafts and sketches on related subjects and ideas intended for endnotes and to flesh out sections. There were even two drafts of an essay on “post-secularism and religion” for boundary2, but, as his instructions to himself reveal, this abandoned side project devolved into a Blake “essay” even more condensed:

After intro as is more or less MHH and There is no natural religion the poetical genius—then perhaps—Divine Image and Human Abstract—point is to demonstrate that the fall is choosing not to unify one’s uniqueness by acting imaginatively, releasing the true impulses of one’s being—how can this work? Is it possible to operate with without institutions—B applies science to sociology the quantum universe—organizing must reach a higher level—this can be accomplished only by individual acts of imagining

As he told Paul Bové, his friend and editor of boundary2: “Blake took over—effect of my final seminar, couldn't control it” (email, 30 Aug. 2009).

Although Karl did not include notes in his texts, he did indicate them by an [N], sometimes followed by a person’s name or single-word concept. From the materials Jean sent, I was able to reconstruct nearly all of these notes, to construct new notes to clarify references in the texts, to provide examples of Karl’s close readings of key passages, and to make a few corrections I know he intended. With the assistance of Joseph Fletcher, a graduate student in my department studying Blake, I was able to derive a Works Cited list for the “essay” and to compile the bibliographies for the two appendices. I am also greatly indebted to Mark Jones, another of Karl’s students, for assisting me in editing all the final texts.² The “repetition” that Karl heard in his commentaries I hear as variations on the core ideas and beliefs directing Blake’s writing and art. Individuality, one such [Page 7] core idea, Blake pushes to the extreme. Karl emphasizes the pervasiveness in Blake’s thought and artistic practice of the idea and image of the absolutely unique individual. For Blake, he argues, every individual is absolutely unique—hence “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression” (Marriage pl. 16). If every individual is absolutely unique, then each expresses the poetic genius uniquely, and institutionally organized religion can only restrain individuals, imagination, and religion itself. Karl sees these connections and makes these points in various ways throughout his commentaries because Blake did, though it may not appear so if you do not take Blake as seriously at his word as Karl does or follow as closely the logic and details of Blake’s stated and unstated assumptions. Blake, of course, is not alone in trying to figure out the nature and rights of the individual and the individual’s relation to society and religion, but Blake’s concepts of absolute uniqueness and of the social structures it requires are extremely radical and are in stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by other Romantic writers.

Despite the extraordinarily wide range of his scholarly work—or perhaps because of it—Karl’s deep interest in Blake may surprise many readers. His books include Romantic Narrative Art (Wisconsin, 1960); The Artifice of Reality (Wisconsin, 1964); Studying Poetry: A Critical Anthology of English and American Poems (co-ed., Harper, 1965); Backgrounds to British Romantic Literature (ed., Chandler, 1968); Styles in Fictional Structure (Princeton, 1971); Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth (Wisconsin, 1975); Images of Romanticism: Verbal and Visual Affinities (co-ed., Yale, 1978); Traditional Native American Literatures (ed., Nebraska, 1981; 2nd ed, 1997); British Romantic Art (California, 1985); Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction (Yale, 1988); Retelling/Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times (Rutgers, 1992); Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism (co-ed., Rutgers, 1993); Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (Columbia, 1994); Native American Persistence and Resurgence (ed., Duke, 1994); Artistry of Native American Myths (Nebraska, 1998); Jeremiah Curtin's Creation Myths of Primitive America (ed., ARC-Clio, 2002); Ishi in Three Centuries (co-ed., Nebraska, 2003); Native American Storytelling (ed., Blackwell, 2004); Make Believe in Film and Fiction (Palgrave, 2006). Of these, Romantic Narrative Art includes a discussion of Blake and [Page 8] the first chapter of British Romantic Art, “Inventing the Unconscious,” deals with Blake. And of the over 200 essays and reviews, only a handful are on Blake: “Graphic-Poetic Structuring in Blake’s Book of Urizen” (1970), “Delivering Jerusalem” (1973), “Perspectives on Blake’s Milton: A Prefatory Note” in a special issue of Blake Studies that he edited (Fall 1973), “Infirm Perswasion,” his contribution to a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on the future of Blake studies (fall 1982), and “The Blake Archive and the Future of Literary Studies” in Wordsworth Circle (summer 1999). He reviewed David Wagenknecht’s Blake’s Night, Stephen C. Behrendt’s The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustration of Milton, and The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves, in Blake Newsletter (spring 1975) and Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (fall 1985, spring 2005) respectively.

Relative to his fifty-year output, works on Blake are few and far between. That deep interest in Blake, however, was always there; the seminar on Blake I took with him was in 1975 and the first one he taught was in 1959, the first one ever taught to graduate students at the University of Wisconsin. But more important, that interest was always there because it was in the way Karl taught—as he acknowledges in his “Final Note.” Blake, he states, characterizes regenerate life as consisting

mostly of noisy, violent, combative conversations, a verbal warfare of great intensity. This appeals strongly to me personally because I built a pretty successful fifty-year teaching career on these principles. Blake’s idea of the conversation as the highest achievement of humanity has nothing to do with polite, decorous speeches. His ideal “conversation” is the conflict of passionate disagreements—literally intellectual warfare, furious arguments about which all participants care profoundly. My idea of a successful seminar.

By all accounts, his last Blake seminar was successful, great literature and art intensely engaging the imaginations of teacher and students as they learned together. Seminar as collaboration. According to Madeline Dangerfield-Cha, one of the seminar students, Karl was “excited by every prospect for the growth of his students, because he grows with them. Personally, I find myself frenzied to express the excitement and wonder I've felt in his classes, and the gratitude I have for his time and support. . . . A single conversation [Page 9] with Professor Kroeber got me to think differently, think deeper, become happier with myself, become happier.”³ Another seminar student, Peter Petrov, recalls that Karl portrayed Blake “as a kind of shamanistic figure, a poet whose allegiance was not to any standard of aesthetics but to the men and women who lived, suffered, and died around him. Blake—and this is a fact that Kroeber saw more clearly than others—was committed to showing that many of the psychological sources of man’s unhappiness could be cast aside, transmuted, overcome. His poetry stemmed from a desire to show that there was nothing unavoidable, nothing inexorable, about human suffering. Kroeber bore a much more striking resemblance to Blake than he would ever have admitted. In a world replete with self-promotion and self-pity, he worked—quietly and unpretentiously—to remind us of how things could be.”⁴

I trace my own scholarly interests in Blake to a Blake seminar of Karl’s, in 1975, which was life-changing. So too was my experiencing a mind so intuitive about the value of approaching works of the imagination from the inside out. For me, this meant getting to Blake through the studio, both a place of actual work and a metaphor for Blake’s creative mind. For Karl, it meant inhabiting that workspace itself, pugnaciously and comfortably, believing completely in each student’s absolute uniqueness and the unparalleled importance of impulse, energy, and, most of all, imagination.

III.

Without doubt, a great deal came out of the seminar, for Karl and for his students, not least of all as a catalyst (as he hoped) for the commentaries he wrote over the summer. But much went into the seminar as well. Jean tells me that Karl wrote through the summer with a “sense of burning urgency to get his newly fermenting ideas on Blake collected and presented in some coherent form.” He talked to her about the project “a lot, starting more than a year before the seminar, when he determined that his last course had to be on Blake. He felt passionately that that was the context in which he could convey all he had been struggling with throughout his career and, of course, set people straight. As I have said to you before, I never in all our years together saw Karl so furiously [Page 10] pursuing one thing as he did the Blake essay that last summer. He certainly knew time was short, and that work may in fact have extended it” (email 5.15.11).

Karl was not only extraordinarily well prepared, he was also very generous. In his “Introduction to the Seminar,” one of the documents he wrote to prepare his students, he states:

I have been reading, teaching, and writing about Blake for half a century. I played some small part in gaining academic and critical respectability for his poetry in the mid-twentieth century. In recent years I've had to recognize, however, that I had not perceived the full significance of his accomplishments for the present day. Working together with all of you, who bring to our classroom more contemporary perspectives, I anticipate improving my appreciation of Blake’s art.

Karl interviewed all the students registered for the seminar. He was very clear about what they could expect and what he expected of them:

Each of you has told me of how earlier encounters with the art of Blake has aroused your interest in studying his work with intensity. This course is intended to satisfy those individual desires. In my view, significant response to art is always personal, and this course aims to enable each of you to enlarge and strengthen your particular pleasure in Blake’s illuminated poetry. The most important component of our work is the individual project each of you will create at the end of the semester that in one fashion or another articulates some specific aspect of Blake’s art that is peculiarly and especially fascinating for you.

I believe, however, that the personal responsiveness of each of us to any art may be enriched and intensified through collaborative criticism in which we struggle to make others understand in what ways and why we respond as we do to specific works of imaginative power—and struggle to understand the rewards of the different understanding of others. Through this sharing we facilitate our capacity to continue deepening and expanding our personal responsiveness to the finest works of art, which [Page 11] are of the highest value because they possess an inexhaustible potency to evoke ever new and diverse pleasures of imaginative excitement. This is why discussion will be the principal mode of this course, whose final meetings will be devoted entirely to your questions and observations on each other’s projects—with of course a few characteristically cogent comments by me.

That Blake’s art provides an unusually stimulating focus for this kind of study is suggested by the fact that although he was born more than 250 years ago many people today find his poetry and graphic work strangely evocative of twenty-first century problems and idealistic hopes. More than any other artist of his era Blake seems to address at its most fundamental level the unique configuration of fears, desires, injustices, and aspirations that characterize the present. I believe that this immediacy arises from circumstances that situated him not at the edge but at the very center of the civilizational revolution at the end of the eighteenth century that was the beginning of what we have come to recognize as “modern culture,” “modern” signaling not merely temporal presentness but a radical difference from any and all previous cultures. Blake was for nearly two centuries generally misperceived as a marginal figure, ironically, because he imaginatively articulated some of the most centrally dynamic innovations of the past two and half centuries, innovations whose deep and enduring effects have only become manifest with the emergence of what we now call postmodernism.’

Even with his Blake “essay” unfinished, Karl makes a powerful and original case for Blake being, as he believed, “tremendously important to modern realities.”

IV.

[Page 12]

Karl prepared many handouts for the class, including “Fundamental Blakean Positions,” which provided the epigraphs that start each section of Blake in a Post-secular Era: Early Prophecies. Another was “Blakean Prophecy,” in which he states:

The constellation of features I draw to your attention is: Blake’s authority as a prophet is his personal imaginative engagement with madness—his preference [for] speech acts of performative language, which requires an individual performer and focus on “minute particulars” rather than abstract generalizations—and his insistence on contrariety, judging intense differentiation as a major principle of human life. In this perspective Blake’s art seems profoundly, not superficially, anti-institutional because it treats all institutions of modern society as hypocritical, as pretences rather than actualities, since as institutions they are antagonistic to recognizing healthy human society as possible only if constructed out of respect for and encouragement of the complete subjective individuality of every citizen.

I hope these remarks help you to come to terms with perhaps Blake’s most difficult claim—that the best society is that in which everyone always behaves with complete freedom from any socially institutionalized inhibitions. Or, to turn that around, only the most intensely and complexly organized society is capable of fostering productive interdependence among truly free, independent, and unique human individuals. These issues will underlie most of our discussions throughout the semester, along with a few other small matters, like eternity and infinity.

“Small matters” indeed. Needless to say, his was a seminar requiring the imaginations of students and teacher to be fully awake and fully at work.

Karl’s seminar notes—those he wrote to prepare himself for a class and those he wrote to prepare students for specific readings—reveal the scholar as life-changing teacher. Karl genuinely loved teaching because he loved learning; he told an interviewer in 2006 that he felt “enormously lucky” to have so much contact with young people, unlike most people his age, which was why he did not retire.⁵ And, as he told another [Page 13] interviewer in 2009, it is “imagination that enables humans, the only creatures who possess it, to go on learning, growing mentally, and being creative far, far into old age — Sophocles and Titian.”⁶

In an assignment early in the semester he asked his students to think of themselves as teachers: “For next Tuesday please write out a simple explanation (not a commentary), such as you might give to, say, a twelve-year old, of the meaning of each of the ten lines spoken from Thel’s grave just before the end of the poem.” He disarmed complicated texts with straightforward questions. “Why does Blake use the term ‘Poetic Genius’?” “Who speaks in plate 3 of Marriage?” “If there can't be one law for the lion and the ox, must we live anarchically?” “Why does Thel shriek in the penultimate line of the poem? What do you make of the graphic illumination at the bottom of Thel’s final plate depicting the children on the serpent?”

Some of the most difficult questions he directed at himself. Indeed, he often said that we students and scholars of literature have a moral obligation to get things right, and that meant questioning ourselves as well as the material. The former always takes more courage and honesty. I was not surprised, then, when I came across this question for the class:

Considering that Thel is told “Every thing that lives/ Lives not alone nor for itself,” and “we live not for ourselves,” is it possible that all my assertions about the importance to Blake of individuality and uniqueness may have been seriously mistaken?

I do not know how students answered. I do know Karl’s answers. They are his commentaries on Blake’s early prophecies. And I know also, thanks to Madeline Dangerfield-Cha having asked him near the end of the seminar, what he thought of retirement, that is, of not teaching:

I've been teaching for 57 years. How do I feel: fear and regret—I've forgotten what life without teaching, preparing classes, reading papers and scribbling on them is like—it seems all too possible my mind will rapidly ossify without the continuous stimulation of conversation with students. What will I do—health permitting, there are three books I want to write; [Page 14] I'd like to spend more time outside pruning, chopping, digging, planting, and in an inept way do a few more things around the house instead of leaving all the repair jobs to my wife, as I have for the past few years, and give her a little more time for her sculpting. I taught the first Blake seminar for graduate students at the University of Wisconsin fifty years ago. Blake’s position in the academic world [...] was entirely different then from what it [is] now—the current undergraduate seminar reflects the change, notably in indicating that Blake’s importance in the twenty-first century is, and is going to be, quite different from his importance in the twentieth century—and, I hope, some slight improvement in my teaching skills. What hasn't changed is my tremendous excitement in engaging with Blake’s art and the terrific excitement of the students—wonderful. What will I miss most—the surprising, deep pleasures of intellectual academic life at a fine university. There’s damn little I'll not miss. Parting words? It’s been a blast; keep learning—together.

Karl Kroeber⁷

Joseph Viscomi
James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of English Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Preface

The following pages were originally intended as introductory to a study of William Blake’s longest and most complex poems, Milton and Jerusalem, both dated 1804 on their title pages but not published until c. 1811 and 1820 respectively, and both in their origins forged amid the workshop clangor and fire of the never published Four Zoas. Given the certainty of my age and the uncertainty of my health, however, I think it important to offer separately these diverse commentaries on specific features of Blake’s “prophetic” poems executed between 1788 and 1794. They provide the intellectual orientation needed for appreciation of Blake’s later poetic accomplishments.

If post-modernism is sliding into a “post-secular” phase,⁸ it will be valuable for academic humanists to recognize the astonishing breadth of Blake’s inspiring of—and influence upon—American writers, painters, musicians, performing artists, and film and TV makers over the past half-century. No older “canonical” poet, nor any twentieth-century poet, has had anything remotely comparable to Blake’s impact on the evolution of recent popular culture. This Blakean presence has been increasing in the current century and is certain to expand in a post-secular era.⁹ Despite the impressive, even revolutionary, expansion of specialized scholarly studies of Blake during the past thirty years, he has totally disappeared from the view of theorizing critics who claim leadership [Page 16] of academic literary humanism. They ignore Blake primarily because one of their fundamental principles is that all religious concerns should be excluded from literary criticism. “Post-secularism” may well be a response to the manifest dubiousness of that principle.

Academic literary humanists have simultaneously isolated themselves from informed and systematic engagement with the astounding developments in the natural sciences, especially the biological ones, since World War II. Blake’s poetry was created out of intense and deeply informed engagement with the fundamental principles of scientific research and thinking of his time, research and thinking that constitute the ultimate foundation of the most advanced scientific work of the twenty-first century. His poetry offers a unique illustration of the possible benefits of replacing current academic humanists’ intellectual isolationism with a liberalized, aggressive policy of exploration into imagination’s profound contribution to expanding our understanding of the dynamic interconnections among art, science, religion, and technology.

List of Illustrations

Cover: The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 2, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

1. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 21, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

2. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 18, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 3, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

4. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b9, detail. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 45593.9.

5. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b11, detail. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 45593.5.

6. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b10, detail. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 75228.

7. Songs of Innocence, copy B, plate 12, “The Chimney Sweep.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

8. Songs of Innocence, copy B, plate 9, “The Little Black Boy.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

9. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 4, “Introduction.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

10. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 46, “London.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

11. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 5, “The Ecchoing Green.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

12. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 24, “Nurse’s Song.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

13. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 38, “Nurse’s Song.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

14. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 18, “The Divine Image.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

15. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 47, “The Human Abstract.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

16. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 49, “A Poison Tree.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

17. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 34, “The Little Girl Lost.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

18. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 40, “The Fly.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

19. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 39, “The Sick Rose.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

20. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 42, “The Tyger.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

21. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

22. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 14. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

23. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 11. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

24. The Book of Thel, Copy O, plate 8. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

25. The Book of Thel, Copy O, plate 1, “Thel’s Motto.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

26. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy J, plate 5, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

27. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy J, plate 6, detail. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

28. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright © 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

1. Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies

1.1.1. Chapter 1.
Introduction

On my asking Blake in what light he viewed the great question concerning the divinity of Jesus Christ, he said, “He is the only God. But then,” he added, “and so am I, and so are you.” (Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, 1869, Vol. II, 25)

If we are entering a “post-secular age,” the art of William Blake seems certain to become a major focus of humanistic studies. He has been largely ignored for the past thirty years by theorizing critics because of his overt religious commitment—his celebration of imagination adding to his unpopularity. Blake’s thinking, however, is congruent with the central thrust of Darwinian biology (see appendix 1) and with later twentieth and twenty-first century scientific thought emphasizing complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. When we recognize Blake’s ubiquity in contemporary popular culture (see appendix 2), we won't be surprised at how significantly his art (and especially its insistence that the uniqueness of individual humans matters more than their socio-cultural shaping) illuminates some revolutionary implications in the current emergence of a single world-culture.

[Page 21]

I emphasize Blake’s focus upon the uniqueness of each individual person as a way to highlight, by contrast, how deeply ingrained has become the contemporary preconception that to understand human beings we need to comprehend only the fashion in which they are formed by socio-cultural forces. There can be no doubt that every human being is predominantly shaped by his or her society and culture. But that fact is significant because each human physiological organism that is socio-culturally shaped is also indubitably unique. The most obvious, if rather coarse, evidence of this essential individuality is now supplied by genetics, of which Blake knew nothing.¹⁰ But his religious faith was founded on a conviction that the social and the cultural applied their modes of fashioning to life forms that originally were entirely free from, or were innocent of, any taint of the social or cultural. It is necessary to describe Blake’s view in this awkwardly obvious fashion because it is so difficult for us today to recognize how important is his religious commitment to faith in a pre-social, pre-cultural essence in each human being. Such faith, of course, had long been common to many Christians, but Blake is original in using it as the foundation for critiques of social and cultural practices not dependent on conceiving the individual soul as seeking and finding fulfillment in a transcendence of the mundane actualities of life on our particular planet.

Blake’s faith in a pre-social, pre-cultural essence in each human being can hardly be a surprise to anybody who has read a little of Blake, who always insisted that mind and body were inseparable in human beings. What has not been so widely appreciated, however, is that this view produced a conception of the pre-cultural human as what we would today call an organism. That is to say, Blake’s religious commitment is to organic life; in the broadest sense the spiritual is for Blake that which distinguishes the biological human from all other organisms. I don't mean that he thought in such terms as I am using—“biology” in the modern sense didn't exist until late in his life. But from a twenty-first-century perspective a major feature that distinguishes his Christianity is his founding of its opposition to modern culture in the profound physical and imaginative connection of humanity to what today we call the biosphere, that is, the global sum of all living organisms.

Blake’s central purpose as an artist was to persuade as many people as possible that institutionalized religion was a pretense of religion working to destroy religion. [Page 22] When he attacks institutionalization of religion as an effort to destroy religion he is recognizing what seems to be indisputable—that every kind of modern institutionalization is built upon rationalization. Certainly a major reason that religion is virtually exiled from modern literary criticism is that only criticism based on rationality is deemed acceptable. All modern literary theories are founded on some rational philosophy. What makes this dependence on traditional rationalism especially interesting is the growing tendency in contemporary research science to move in other directions. Leaving aside such matters as quantum theory, biology for nearly two centuries has been productively organizing information and systematically theorizing about it according to principles that are less congenial to the generalizations and abstractions beloved of literary theorists than to concern with uniqueness and chance (which one might expect to be the special province of humanists). And like all other sciences it has been ever more explicit in recognizing hypotheses as such and as being often more useful for describing particular phenomena than for large-scale explanations.¹¹

Blake’s prescience in condemning the dangers of religious institutionalization is unmistakable in our time as Christians, Muslims, Jews (and even Hindus) increasingly use their religion to justify intolerant exercises of political power. His critique rested on his perception that modern culture is the most self-consciously rationalistic that has ever existed; he recognized that the rationalistic character of all modern institutions, including religious ones, inevitably destroys individuality. Both his perception of a pathogenic over-valuation of reason as the essential feature of modernism and his continuing notoriety in popular culture suggest how mistaken is the wide-spread academic view that Blake participated only marginally in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English culture. Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, which sixty years ago simultaneously forced Blake to the attention of academic critics and launched Frye’s own spectacular career, took it for granted that Blake worked from the center of the culture in which modernism was born. Frye was a practicing Christian himself, of course, so he didn't (like later secular critics) feel that Blake’s religiosity automatically condemned him to marginality. More important, however, was Frye’s characteristically quick recognition of Blake’s intelligent if often unorthodox understanding not merely of the Bible and Milton but of a surprising range of English and classical literature, visual art, and theological, [Page 23] philosophical, scientific, and political writing. Frye’s own extensive reading and his growing interest in the principles of literary form enabled him to perceive that Blake did not, as T. S. Eliot had asserted, cobble together a hand-hewn, intellectually makeshift philosophy, but was knowledgeably engaged with central intellectual, political, theological, and social issues agitating Europe at the end of the eighteenth century.¹²

Hard on Frye’s heels came David Erdman, no Christian, who with practical knowledge of political radicalism demonstrated that Blake’s prophecies could not be adequately understood without comprehension of their intense involvement with the violent political, social, and economic upheavals that distinguish the three decades following the French Revolution during which almost all of Blake’s finest poetry was written.¹³ Since the 1950s a variety of excellent scholars have demonstrated how persistently Blake’s work and thinking focus upon what we now recognize as conspicuously important innovations in Western Civilization that were beginning to take shape between 1789 and 1819— the foundations of what we think of as Modern culture.¹⁴ Although Blake’s religious thinking is heterodox, it is by no means bizarre or marginal to theological developments of his day. He quoted (and plagiarized) less than Coleridge from the historically important contemporary German religious thinkers, such as Schleiermacher (whom he appears not to have known), but he was more intimately engaged with their predecessors, such as Boehme.¹⁵ Thirty years ago Leopold Damrosch, Jr., demonstrated the depth of Blake’s informed use of major figures of Western theological history; subsequently E. P. Thomson’s historical research displayed the extent of Blake’s debt to millenarian dissenting sects whose flowering in the seventeenth century left indelible effects upon his Protestantism. These appear most significantly in his response to Henry Crabb Robinson’s inquiry as to his belief in the divinity of Jesus: “‘He is the only God. But then,’ he added, ‘and so am I, and so are you.’”¹⁶

This statement might be said to carry to an extreme an anti-institutional tendency present in much Christian Protestantism. But Blake’s insistence that institutionalized Christianity falsifies it in order to destroy genuine Christianity is founded upon his unusually deep faith in the absolute uniqueness of every human being. This faith that each of us is unique and that we and our community will prosper only to the degree that [Page 24] each of us develops uninhibitedly our intrinsic singularity gives Blake’s religious faith special value in any discussion of the role of religion in contemporary culture. To understand this faith (which, as noted, finds support in modern biologists’ insistence on the uniqueness of every living organism) we must confront what I call the paradox of human individuality. Human beings are social creatures who cannot flourish, or even survive, except amongst a community of their fellows, yet that community is successful so far as it simultaneously enables each member fully to develop his or her individuality. Unlike other social organisms (ants and bees offering obvious contrasts) human communities are strengthened by the intensification of individuality in each of their members.

While our social nature has been widely recognized, it has been insufficiently noticed that human communities are unique among organisms of which we have knowledge in that our communities flourish through the enhancing of their members’ individualities. What has long been recognized as fundamental to language, that it is a virtual system, Saussurre’s langue, which can be manifested only in personal speech acts, parole, acts which inevitably —if usually inadvertently—introduce variation and developmental change into the system, is in more complex fashions equally true of societies composed of human individuals. Indeed, linguistics provides the clearest manifestation of how successful interdependence may be created out of the uniqueness of individuals. As Saussure observed, any particular linguistic system exists only virtually until some individual speaks or writes. The individual speech act literally “realizes” the language, puts the system into practical activity—but in so doing it introduces, however slightly, a peculiar accent to the existing “ideal” form of the words used. The historical development of a language is a process by which individual speakers persistently transform the system that has allowed them to speak and be understood, because every one of us speaks in a unique fashion, never exactly duplicated by anyone else.¹⁷

For 200 years every secular philosopher, every sociologist, every political theorist, every contemporary literary theorist—in fact, every modern institution—has insisted that human individuality is— and should be—most significantly shaped by the society and culture into which we are born and in which we live. The modern idea of culture, which came into being during the last years of the eighteenth century through [Page 25] modern anthropology¹⁸ with its radical revision of the “classical” concept of “culture” as a unitary ideal, is now totally dominant among academic intellectuals, to the point where the idea of “human nature” is treated as laughable. And, practically speaking, every modern social institution has developed from the premise that to function effectively it must continuously attend carefully to those characteristics of humans which are uniform, or whose idiosyncrasies can most readily be shaped into uniformity. Blake’s commitment to the faith that the most important quality of every human being is his or her absolute uniqueness puts him at odds with every celebrated contemporary literary theorist, and whichever rationalizing philosopher the theorist uses to justify his prejudice. And if Walter Benjamin was correct that in an age of mechanical reproduction value for the uniqueness of works of art inevitably declines, and if John Dewey was right that loss of localized origin turns art works into consumer products, and if Fredric Jameson is right to identify post-modern art as being as much art theory as art, Blake is justifiably dismissed, although that leaves unexplained his high name-recognition among contemporary practicing artists.¹⁹

Throughout his life Blake was continuously and actively engaged, not with the past, never in nostalgia, but always with the emerging developments of what we now call print culture, a “culture” that during the past two hundred years has progressively penetrated every major nation in the world. Blake’s life-long involvement especially with “popular print culture” alerts us to his unwavering focus on the current economic facts of rapidly industrializing urban life, a focus that explains his commitment to what did turn out to be the politics of the future, democracy. The depth of his commitment to essential features of urbanized economic democracy (“Liberality! We want not Liberality. We want a Fair price & Proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art” [E 637]) has been obscured by his relative indifference to purely political ideology. Blake’s religiously founded radicalism (as discussed by Frye and Glen among others) allowed him an unusually critical understanding of the more superficial because purely political radicalisms of his day.²⁰ Blakean “radicalism” E. P. Thompson has shown to be that of his, and his family’s, positions as tradesmen. Tradesmen in eighteenth-century London “were, exactly, where a robust, Wilkesite, radical independency was located” and this independency “had an uncrackable doctrinal defence, a profound cultural resource in [Page 26] faith, a presumption of spiritual superiority over the Rich and Great. What most distinguishes . . . [this] radical Dissent among the trades is a stubborn lack of deference, both social and intellectual. This lack of deference is the veritable signature of William Blake” (Thompson 112).²¹

That Blake’s interests and insights moved away from Renaissance and Enlightenment theorizing directly toward modern psychology (most notably embodied in Freudianism) is obvious to everyone—and has produced a large body of Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian commentary on his poetry and his graphic work.²² A quarter of a century ago I drew a contrast between Blake’s graphic work and Hogarth’s to show that between these two remarkable pioneers of multi-media publication Blake’s psychologizing visual representation of social phenomena better anticipated the dominant concerns of major twentieth-century artists (“Graphic-Poetic” 9). The difference is spectacularly illustrated in Blake’s fondness for display of the naked body (Figure 1), of dramatically exposed genitalia (Figure 2), even of a woman giving birth to a child (Figure 3).

Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 21. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 18. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 3.

Figure 3. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 3. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Blake, in fact, worked consciously at the dynamic center of an emerging modernist culture. Further evidence of this is the extraordinary prescience of his scientific thinking. Blake was a part of the later eighteenth century’s rejection of Newtonianism. His contribution to that widespread movement was skillfully analyzed by Donald Ault nearly half a century ago and the ramifications have since been traced by a number of conscientious scholars.²³ What Ault’s fine book could not address is how deeply Blakean anti-Newtonianism is bound into the emergence of the new biologically oriented “life sciences” such as chemistry, physiology, and embryology, whose supreme achievement by the end of the century was a development of the radically revolutionary concept of evolution.²⁴ Denise Gigante documents with admirable cogency the tremendous surge in the eighteenth century of biological knowledge, based in part on improvements in the microscope and techniques for using it, along with the emergence of the first vitalistic understanding of natural phenomena.²⁵

Blake scholars have for fifty years been deepening our understanding of his anti-Newtonianism and its accord with the development of physics toward Einsteinian relativity—a recent example being Wai Chee Dimock’s perceptive “A Non-Biological [Page 27] Clock.”²⁶ Yet it is Blake’s sensitivity to the more profoundly revolutionary implications of emerging biological science that confirms his continuing artistic relevance, and this arises from his working from the center of his culture. For the emerging life sciences of the late eighteenth century led to a conception of the universe both as a whole and in all of its parts as never static or permanent, but always involved in processes of self-transformation. Biological sciences welcome inescapable unpredictability, which is now being accepted by physical scientists. Blake apparently knew nothing about Jean-Baptiste LaMarck’s evolutionary theory, but he was well aware of Erasmus Darwin’s anticipations of his grandson Charles’ fundamental ideas. Blake’s religious conceptions are founded on an understanding of life as consisting entirely of processes of change, movement, development.²⁷

Propaganda for systematic modern scientific research is commonly regarded as beginning with Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, which appeared in 1667. Sprat is explicit and sincerely adamant that such science serves the greater glory of God because, even beyond the services it provides to expanding trade, manufacture, and economic imperialism, science compels admiration for God’s supreme wisdom and skill as an artificer of the endless wonders of the natural universe. For the following century and a half most British scientists could and did have faith that their work sustained and even enhanced belief in God. The emergence of the concept of evolution challenged that conviction, because it was founded on the premise that nothing in the universe was fixed or stable, that all that has ever existed were processes of transformation that in themselves and in their consequences could not be predicted because their operations were always open to the effects of chance. Humanists have overlooked the real importance of the late emergence of the life sciences. Take the essential matter of measurement. In Blake’s last letter, written when he was nearly 70, he disparages Newton’s system of measurement; 70 years later, 24-year-old H. G. Wells wrote a paper demonstrating that it was impossible for physicists to make accurate measurements, a demonstration they have had to accept (106-11).²⁸

Resistance to modern science by orthodox religious institutions, Islamic, Judaic, and Christian, is essentially to the life sciences only, in particular to the concept of evolution—not because it may suggest that our ancestors were apes, but because it sees [Page 28] every part of the universe, and the universe itself, as perpetually changing in ways that cannot be predicted because always open to chance: never offering any point of stability, its only certainty is evanescence. One hell of an idea on which to base an orthodox monotheistic system. Blake, however, absorbed evolutionary thinking into the very core of his Christian faith. The key to this fusion, and what has made him a figure of importance in popular culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, is his conceiving of everything as energy. Blake was untroubled by issues of heat and the problems of thermodynamics. He conceives of “energy” in its most obvious form, “vital energy,” the powering force of life that is inherent in each plant, animal, and person.²⁹ This enables him to re-evaluate the importance of imagining, as well as of uniqueness, in human life.

To Blake imagination is “the Real Man”; “Man is All Imagination” (E 664); imaginative power is essential to Blake’s understanding of the nature and effects of all art. In this, too, he is very much of his time, for it was only at the beginning of the nineteenth century that imagination came to be regarded as central to the creation and appreciation of artistic accomplishments—all encyclopedias of poetics and dictionaries of literary and critical terms focus their discussions on this historical moment. Oddly, however, “imagination” (which of course derives from Latin) and its equivalent terms in Greek and Sanskrit seem always to have been in use in a manner very close to that of contemporary speech. Yet its role as a term in criticism until the late Renaissance was trivial to nonexistent—especially in contrast to “imitation.” This contrast rewards careful study, because human beings are indubitably the most imitative of creatures—all of our early learning (most spectacularly of course of language) is through imitation, and throughout life imitating plays a significant, although steadily diminishing role (as habit usurps its functions). Imagination, to the contrary, scarcely exists in infants, and does not develop its full power until after the attainment of physiological maturity: no great imaginative works have been produced by the immature. But, unlike most of our mental capacities, imagination can continue to develop, sometimes extraordinarily, even far into old age (Sophocles, Titian).³⁰

John Guillory observes in his well-researched and lucid discussion of “imagination” that it seems always to have meant, as it does today, “the capacity of the [Page 29] mind to represent images to itself in the absence of sense perception” (1).³¹ “Imagination” became important critically only when (in the late Renaissance) its meaning extended, naturally enough, from the mental representing of something real but not present to the power of the mind to represent to itself possibilities—that is, to conceive of what really might exist, or might be made to exist, but does not now exist and, indeed, might prove to be an impossibility. Two features of this extension of meaning that Guillory does not note are of special importance to my concerns. First, the extension to possibilities diminishes the significance of the purely visual implications of “imagination,” making the term more useful for literary analysis. Second, the extension links imagination closely to hypothesis. It is not mere coincidence that “imagination” began gaining significance in literary theory just at the time that modern science began to assume major importance in Western culture. There is no better illustration of the significance of the extended meaning of imagining than Copernicus’ hypothesis, against the obvious visual evidence that the sun moves around the earth, that in fact it is we who are moving. Indeed, it seems probable that De revolutionibus did not bring down on its author the wrath of the Church because the preface to the book presented it not as fact but as hypothesis.

For Blake imagination was a power properly exercised not merely in the arts—it was equally essential in all activities of human life, including science (the science he condemned, such as Newton’s, he judged faulty because of the imaginative failure of the scientist) and religion. The essential point of this study is simply that Blake offers a view of art, science, and religion as all equally products of imagining. I concur fully with Guillory’s judgment, however, that the origins of this modern, extended significance of imagination are to be found in Italian critical controversies about the true meaning of fantasia in the Divina Commedia. A crux of these controversies was the distinction between imagination and inspiration, because the source of the latter is outside the poet’s mind. It is the insistence on fantasia, on imagination originating in Dante’s mind, that is the core of the new view articulated by Jacopo Mazzoni in 1587:

I say, then, that the phantasy is the power of the mind for dreams and for poetic verisimilitude . . . . The verisimilitude, then, sought after by the poets is of such a nature that it is feigned by them according to their wish . [Page 30] . . . Then of necessity the power fitted to generate is the fantastic power called by the Latins Imaginative . . . . phantasy is the true power over poetic fables, since she alone is capable of those fictions which we of ourselves are able to feign and put together.

(qtd. in Guillory 5)

As Guillory puts it, Mazzoni advances “what he believes [is] the true defining feature of poetry: the imagination as an autonomous power of the mind” (6).

It is this autonomous power of imagination that in England began to become important in literature, beginning with Sidney, then in Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Cambridge Platonists. It is, of course, Theseus’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Guillory cites as decisively superimposing this new imaginativeness “upon the much older conception of the furor poeticus” (18).³² Guillory also observes, significantly, that neither Spenser nor Milton “would have been able to agree with Theseus’s analysis” (18)—further evidence that what I call the extension of the concept of imagination is just beginning to evolve at the end of the sixteenth century.

Blake at first used the word cautiously, in All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, employing instead “Poetic Genius.” The latter term, which picks up on the emerging popularity of the term “genius,” carries a connotative emphasis on the individual who imagines. Blake seems to have recognized the need for establishing the validity of his transformation in a long established tradition. As Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, observes, he was “using the word in the then unusual but true sense, of a faculty which busies itself with the subtler realities, not with fiction. . . . He said that things imagination saw were as much realities as were gross and tangible facts” (I 364).

Blake’s insistence that imagination is concerned solely with real possibilities is essential to the extraordinary importance with which he endows the term. Blake never fictionalizes. Imagination for him is not daydreaming or reverie, and is the exact opposite of literal dreaming, being willfully controlled and purposefully directed to explore and reveal what might truly be possible. Blake is interested only in realities. His visions are without exception focused on what is or could be true. Like every good scientist, and every truly religious person, he is concerned only to discover and reveal [Page 31] existent realities. Writing in a fallen world, he envisions a regenerated world that might become real now, at this moment, not in some indefinite future time or distant place; his spiritual vision is aimed entirely at improving present actual conditions.³³

Because Blake’s conception of imagining is inseparable from his passionate involvement with science and religion as well as with art, his understanding of how the human mind is organized is more dynamically fluid and interpenetratingly complex than that of any of his contemporaries. But it is also more congruent not only with our contemporary psychology but also with recent discoveries in physiology and neuroscience. Basic to this congruence is the principle that all mental activity is capable of significant self-transformation. For Blake, the individual human capability for imagining offers means for each of us to organize both our individual psychosomatic being and our relations with others in a fashion far superior to any earlier form of organizing either individual or communal life.

The superior complexity of Blake’s organization arises from his fusion of a late eighteenth-century understanding of life processes with his Christian conception of the human world in which he lived—to him a “fallen” world. Blake’s conception of the world’s corruption, however, was not the most traditional one. For him, the biblical story of Adam and Eve was silly if not pernicious. He believed that each of us chooses for himself or herself to “fall”—to pervert the divine power of goodness inborn in each of us. But because the divinity of Jesus Christ continues to inhere in us even as we fall away from Him, we are always capable of redeeming ourselves, what Blake thinks of as regenerating ourselves, and thus individually of enjoying eternal life—not in some future time, in some “hereafter,” but as the full psychosomatic experience of the complete reality of the present moment. All Blake’s “prophetic” works are efforts to enable his audience to have the experience evoked in perhaps his most celebrated quatrain:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

(E 490)

[Page 32]

Blake’s enduring interest to so many engaged in a diversity of activities of popular culture in recent years suggests that his understanding of imagination deserves careful study. I therefore offer a summary definition of imagination, focused on what I believe is the core of Blake’s understanding of the term, and which I think most contemporary artists who find in Blake encouragement for their work may find acceptable. I have also deliberately phrased the definition in terms that resonate both with and against Blake’s literary contemporaries, who were also engaged in upgrading the importance of imagination in the creation and appreciation of art. I hope this approach will sustain awareness that “imagination” was—and still is—a conception in process of definition.

Imagining is the deliberate creation of provisional faith. To imagine requires an act of will—it is something one does, not something that happens to one, like dreaming. Although loose and vague valorizations of “creativity” are one of the banes of modern speech, it is true that imagining is making. Imagining is a form of poesis, and its value is inseparable from the skill manifested in any making. What is made, however complete and satisfying, nevertheless is not definitive, is not the end but only the completion of a particular project, which itself provokes attention to other untested possibilities of exploration and discovery. Imagining is the continuous renewing of productive energy through its exercise—hence its “provisionality,” or more specifically the fact that all genuine artists as soon as they have finished one project begin another, and that the completion of a successful experiment immediately sets a scientist to work on another. And of course for the reader-spectator of, or listener to, the work of art, the experience is transitory, a dynamic particularity.³⁴

I chose “faith” rather than “belief” as a consequence of my efforts to judge how appropriate it was for Blake to identify imagination with Jesus Christ. This identification, of course, would be rejected by most contemporary academic critics, although it does not seem to diminish Blake’s appeal among practicing artists whose Christian devoutness is rare or non-existent. Trying to discover what “believe” might mean, I ran into Rodney Needham’s extensive anthropological study of nearly half a century ago, which led him to the conviction that the meaning of the term “believe” in one culture was usually entirely different from the equivalent term in another culture. He judged that there was no [Page 33] definitive meaning of the term belief that could appropriately be applied to diverse cultures.³⁵ At the same time that Needham was conducting his research, the distinguished Harvard theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith, entirely independently, was studying the history of the term “belief” in English. What he discovered was that in the course of the past five hundred years the meaning of “belief” had changed from a close identity with “faith,” unqualified conviction of and passionate dedication to the absolute truth of what was believed in, as appears in the medieval “Credo.” What “belief” had changed into by the twentieth century was close to the opposite of its original force— in the modern world “believe” being used perhaps most frequently to express a conviction that is recognized as open to doubt, and that may even be false. Smith cites a mid-twentieth-century dictionary definition of “belief” that offers as its first illustration, “belief that the world is flat.”³⁶

What makes Smith’s analysis especially interesting to a literary critic is that in tracing out the transformations in the meaning of “believe” he observes also shifting patterns of usage—whether, for example, the verb is more frequently used in the first or second person active, “I believe,” or in the third person passive, “it is believed.” From Smith’s findings it would seem that Blake was writing when the turn toward present-day usage was just beginning. Current usage, with its strong implications that “belief” may be untrue, would contradict Blake’s conviction that imagination always seeks for and reveals truth. For Blake, only by exercise of our imaginations can we fully engage with reality, and unimaginative perceptions and understandings are inevitably fallacious, misconceivings both of ourselves and of the natural environment. For him, each of us chooses to “fall”; in failing fully to exercise our imagination we fail to have faith in ourselves.

This is of course the junction point for Blake of art and religion. But for those of us who are not Christians, Blake’s view may still carry a significant truth. That truth would be that our capability for imagining enables us not to escape reality but to organize it, and ourselves in relation to it, in a superior fashion. Einstein said that in science imagination is more important than knowledge.³⁷ The purpose of scientific research is to discover more than we already know, and above all to reveal unexpected new mysteries whose existence we never suspected. For most of us, a desire to discover [Page 34] realities beyond what is already known and to explore what we have never even conceived seems a significant, even defining, characteristic of human beings: we are, indeed, curious creatures.

Blake’s conviction that genuine imagining never aims at evading the real is linked to his faith that this impulse is the central feature of our uniqueness as individual human beings. That faith puts Blake in opposition to perhaps the most important enlightenment idea of the past two centuries: that what makes us human beings is our socio-cultural training. That each of us is above all else a socially constructed being has become so firm a presupposition that we almost never think to question its validity. Blake did. His faith was that the divine spirit of Jesus Christ dwelling in each of us guaranteed that the essence of each of us is absolute uniqueness. That faith is shared by some other Christians, but it has caused difficulty for many readers of Blake. He used it to attack as debasements of every individual’s unique divine identity the socialization and acculturation that most Western intellectuals of the past two centuries have claimed is, and should be, the prime source for the identity of each human. The social constructedness of each individual, which is now assumed to be inevitable and universal, Blake identifies with our “fallen” condition, caused by our denial of our inalienable personal uniqueness.

Much, perhaps most, of the objection to Blake’s “religiosity” by secular critics is really objection to his insistence on the fact of the essential uniqueness of each and every human, on a uniqueness that is not a fiction, transcendental or otherwise. For contemporary secular philosophers and sociologists a system of human interrelations that would recognize each and every individual as prior to any social, economic, political, or cultural interdependence seems an impossibility. Blake’s persistent attack on institutionalized religion as a “pretence of Religion to destroy Religion” (E 185), however, depends on his commitment to the primacy of the unique individual, a commitment that carries to an extreme very strong and long-standing Protestant traditions. And Blake is scarcely unusual, in his own time or in the years that have followed, in recognizing that not just religion but all kinds of modern institutions cripple and distort individuality. His emphasis on the uniqueness of each human being, moreover, is very much in keeping with the direction in which science since his day has [Page 35] been developing. It is now a scientific commonplace that no two living beings, even identical twins, are exactly alike (see note 10). The driving force of evolution is recognized to be individual variations. And the “butterfly effect”—by flapping its wings at just the right place and time it can precipitate vast changes in weather— has become a favored piece of popularized science.

More important, however, is Blake’s commitment to what I have called the paradox of human individuality—that being the interdependence of genuinely independent individuals. For Blake an authentic individual is perfectly self-integrated—his or her uniqueness depends upon this individualized integrity. This is why, in direct rejection of Isaiah (11.7), he affirms categorically that “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression” (pl. 24), while also insisting that “Opposition is true Friendship” (pl. 20), both of which he asserts in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. That is, the dynamic productivity of friendship is built upon differences, upon both the equality and the uniqueness of each. A “friend” who invariably agrees with you is of no use to either you or himself. Blake therefore conceives the best social organization for humans to be that in which there is an integrity of the whole community built upon the integral uniqueness of each participant, because insofar as the integral uniqueness of any individual is constricted or compromised the social organization will be rendered imperfect.

Blake is concerned with organizational principles, both psychological and sociological. The “states” of “Innocence” and “Experience,” for example, are primarily organizational conditions: “innocence” is the condition of a well-organized person of any age, “experience” is the condition of individuals who have become disorganized. And it needs to be noted that Blake’s focus upon friendship—a relationship that was just beginning to assume its modern importance in his day—was in fact the beginning of an exploration into new forms of social interdependence, the interest in which was a driving force in the nineteenth-century efflorescence of the novel.³⁸ Blake’s contribution to this immensely important sociological change in the conception of social interdependence, which indeed differentiates modern societies from all earlier ones, is his insistence that there be no form of sacrifice of the independence of individuals. Truly valid and productive human interrelations, instead, necessarily confirm and celebrate the unique integrity of each individual. Blake’s idea is curiously prescient of some changes [Page 36] that in the past few decades seem to be forcing us to rethink traditional relations between the socio/culture and the individual. The world is already well on its way to becoming a world of a single culture, a process that understandably frightens people with troubling visions of ant-like uniformity. But it is conceivable that a single world culture might produce and sustain richer forms of personal uniqueness—from which unsuspectedly richer forms of interdependence might evolve.

[Page 37]

1.2. Chapter 2.
All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

Knowledge is not by deduction but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once Christ addresses himself to the Man not to his Reason Plato did not bring Life & Immortality to Light Jesus only did this (Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, E 664)

The first of Blake’s illuminated books, All Religions are One (1788), unequivocally establishes the fundamental principles that animate all his art until the end of his life. All religions are one because all religions are created by what he here calls the poetic genius. By using the term “Poetic Genius” (pls. 4-10), he simultaneously emphasizes both the relation of religious imagining to literary imagining and the unique individuality of such imagining. “Genius,” a word just coming into favor in literary criticism (Coleridge was soon to develop it significantly for the English), carries the strong connotation of an individual capacity. Spiritual experience is produced by the exploring imagination of each human being manifesting itself in a variety of individualized ways, all of which, however, are produced by the exercise of a capacity shared by all people.³⁹ Moreover, with this term “genius,” using their own style of [Page 38] logical empiricism, Blake attacks Bacon-Locke for describing, defining, and celebrating reason in a fashion that denies the existence of the most valuable and distinctive feature of human beings—the poetic genius that manifests their individuality. Bacon-Locke focus on what is similar in humans, on what Blake in There is No Natural Religion (pl. b10) calls the “ratio”—the reasonable abstraction that we all agree to and that of itself cannot go beyond itself—that most notably cannot comprehend infinity. Here it seems to me that Blake is rejecting faith in a rationality that refuses to function as a dynamic process, that is, one capable of accommodating itself both to the unique and to the possibility of transformations in its most fundamental principles of operation. Such a rationality cannot lead to “self-evident truth,” the truth of Christ.

His second book, There is No Natural Religion (1788), poses a problem because in its title Blake uses the term “natural,” which as Raymond Williams famously demonstrated has been employed with about as many diverse meanings as any English word.⁴⁰ Blake’s primary meaning of “natural” here is as a synonym for “rational,” a usage favored by eighteenth-century “Deists,” who assumed that the natural universe functioned entirely according to simple rational principles. To Blake, as to scientists today, that assumption was a piece of arrogance. For him, capacity for spiritual experience, poetic genius, is what is inherent (“natural”) in every individual human being: the source of our spiritual-imaginative powers is an inalienable birthright shared by no other creature.

Blake’s use of “natural,” therefore, is a deliberate exploitation of the term’s contradictory meanings, a formal technique appearing in all his prophecies, a kind of verbal kenosis.⁴¹ He deliberately “misuses” a word that he believes others have deviously or unwittingly misused—in this case making “natural” mean “rational”—thereby inviting his readers to perceive his opponents’ error and recognize that Blake’s language conveys genuine truth. I know of no other poet who uses this technique so persistently, so variously, and so subtly—it is, indeed, the signature technique of his style—in his graphic art as well. And it is difficult not to associate it with his life-long practice as an etcher-engraver, always drawing and writing on copper plates backward so the truth will be clearly revealed. Be that as it may, the satirically rigorous logicality of There is No Natural Religion displays Blake’s characteristic practice of inverting inversions or [Page 39] negating negations, a device that enables him to engage his audience in working through for themselves fundamental truths that, in part because they are fundamental, have been lost sight of by sophisticated audiences of modern culture.⁴² There is No Natural Religion thus dramatizes I Corinthians 2:14: “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Figure 4.

Figure 4. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b9. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 45593.9.

Figure 5.

Figure 5. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b11. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 45593.5.

Figure 6.

Figure 6. There is No Natural Religion, copy L, plate b10. Used with Permission. Morgan Library and Museum, NYC, PML 75228.

Another function of Blake’s signature double inversions, however, is to introduce new or newly understood concepts; here in Section VII, infinity: “The desire of Man being infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.” Figure 4 and the Conclusion (Figure 5)—“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again”—set up the “Application” (Figure 6), which tells us that “He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.”⁴³ All of Blake’s art aims to persuade us that we are capable of personally experiencing infinity and eternality. The problem for the present-day reader is likely to be his pseudo-familiarity with the term “infinity,” which popular science has injected into our everyday vocabulary, but for which few of us can offer a worthwhile definition, and which we never think of as applicable to commonplace experiences of ordinary, routine daily living. But it is exactly the infinitude—and eternality—of such trivial experiences Blake wishes us to imagine.

In arguing that there can be no “Natural Religion,” Blake is rejecting the scientific rationalizing that may be summarily referred to as Newtonian mechanics. In this Blake, like many of his more scientifically professionalized contemporaries, was in a real sense anticipating the anti-Newtonianism of physicists of a century later. Einstein in his Autobiographical Notes writes:

Newton, forgive me; you found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible for a man of highest thought and creative power. The concepts, which you created, are even today still guiding our thinking in physics, although we now know that they will have to be replaced. . . . “Is this supposed to be an obituary?” the astonished reader will likely ask. I would like to reply: essentially yes. (31)

[Page 40] Blake was not a physicist, although he had read in Newton and other scientists, but his poetry shows that he had understood some of Newton’s fundamental purposes. Consider this statement from Newton’s Principia: “Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external. . . . Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. . . . All things are placed in time as to order of succession; and in space as to order of situation.”⁴⁴ As many observers have noted, time for Newton functions in exactly the same way as spatial coordinates—it is a place, a location; Newton spatializes time and standardizes it. So even though Newton is describing the motion of planets and of earthly projectiles, such motion takes place in a geometrical time that is completely uniform, completely predictable, never varying. Newton’s mathematical laws require the existence of an absolute, unchanging system of coordinates.

Blake saw this kind of absolute, mechanistically quantitative reasoning penetrating—detrimentally—all aspects of contemporary life, including not only the developing of the industrial revolution (whose first phase coincides with the course of Blake’s life, 1757-1827) but even the bases of institutionalized Christianity. And contemporary life is what he was solely concerned with. He did not conceive of a heaven or hell apart from the actualities of the present. His “vision” of divinity was always an opening of the possibilities of infinite and eternal life now. Blake is not a myth-maker, but what might be called a practical man who believed in the possibility of the immediate joyousness of living—if you had that, you had everything. This is why his art offers almost no specific depictions of “utopia” or a future state of being, either theological or historical. We need only to realize the possibilities of being with which we are already fully endowed to enjoy a wonderful life here and now.

Given the vigorous spiritual/intellectual polemic of Blake’s first two illuminated works, it is perhaps surprising that Blake’s next is Songs of Innocence (1789). Whereas Blake states clearly in his tractates what their purpose is, we do not know why he then published these songs. Along with Songs of Experience (1794), added five years later, they have nevertheless been the Blakean poems most popular with ordinary readers over the past two centuries, and critics now regard them as among the finest lyrics in English. [Page 41] Blake had begun composing lyric poetry at a very early age, and throughout his life he demonstrated a willingness to rework and revise minute details of short poems, often making them appear simpler and more spontaneous while deepening their complexities.⁴⁵

This attention to details and revision, whether in manuscripts or in executing and printing relief-etched designs integrating texts and illustrations, may appear to contradict Blake’s celebration of “impulse” as the essential feature of imaginative activity (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pls. 23, 24; see section 3 of this essay). But he conceived of “impulse” as an extended process, not a mere flash of inspiration. This “contradiction” embodies the very core of all significant art, the artist’s faith in the value of his original vision and the tenacity required to realize it.⁴⁶ Blake’s celebration of impulse is a demand for such unsparing efforts always to represent the truth of things completely and exactly, never knowingly in the slightest way to falsify reality.

It is worth observing, furthermore, that the Songs of Innocence offer Blake’s first publication in which every lyric appears as part of a fully detailed graphic illumination (since the calligraphic text is created in the same fashion as the pictorial elements). It is no accident that deep critical appreciation of the collection began to emerge only when, well into the nineteenth century, the collection became recognized as a form of “composite art.” Along with Songs of Experience, these lyrics remain without peer in the subtly complex intensity with which their verbal and visual artistry interact, an intensity (now fully explorable thanks to the William Blake Archive) far surpassing that of any later eighteenth-century experiments in such composite compositions and clearly serving as inspiration for new explorations in a variety of genres, from comic books to graphic novels (Persepolis, Spiegelman’s Maus, etc.), to experimental films and videos.

Until very recently commentators had ignored the importance of the Songs of Innocence in the history of children’s literature.⁴⁷ It is, in fact, the most important publication in that genre in the eighteenth century. It anticipates by nearly half a century Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, which launched the nineteenth-century proliferation of abused-child novels. Lyrics such as “The Chimney Sweeper” and “The Little Black Boy” are the first works by a major writer anywhere in the world to allow children (even brutally abused children) to speak for themselves. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience remain the finest poetry of and for children yet written, and testify powerfully [Page 42] to Blake’s importance as innovator in the genres and forms that distinguish literature of the modern era. Among the most significant of these is children’s literature, which did not exist before the 1740s, when John Newbery established the first publishing house devoted to the publication of books for children, now a huge proportion of the fictional market.

Forty years after Newbery’s venture, children’s literature was a well-established and flourishing genre, both ideologically and theologically dominated by women, some like Mrs. Barbauld intelligent and no more than reasonably conservative, but some of the more influential, such as Sarah Trimmer, fiercely determined to extirpate from this new field anything that did not sustain and celebrate the most oppressive forms of socioeconomic class stratification sustained by institutionalized religion. Trimmer wanted this new literature to enforce on the children of the poor the necessity to accept as good and inevitable their debased economic condition. Influenced by Locke, she did encourage children to be kind to dumb animals. But her theological ambition was to impress on young minds the dogma that unequal social and economic conditions exactly fulfilled the will of God, such that the slightest questioning of established adult authority was a sure symptom of desperate, probably incurable, sinfulness.⁴⁸

Figure 8.

Figure 8. Songs of Innocence, copy B, plate 9, “The Little Black Boy.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 7.

Figure 7. Songs of Innocence, copy B, plate 12, “The Chimney Sweep.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Blake, whose views could scarcely have been more antithetical, was fully aware of Mrs. Trimmer and her ilk, which makes several of the Songs of Innocence, such as “The Chimney Sweeper” (Figure 7) and “The Little Black Boy” (Figure 8), profoundly revealing of the nature and purposes of his art.⁴⁹ In the first of these poems, for example, all the words are spoken, apparently to an adult (“your chimneys”), by a child who was sold as a sweep when little more than an infant and who has known nothing but that terrible life. The child, however, voices no complaint, speaking matter-of-factly about his life. His lack of awareness of his condition encourages a sense of outrage in most readers. The sweep himself, however, spends his time comforting and cheering up a fellow worker, little Tom Dacre, who, in turn, has a marvelous dream of himself and his fellow sweeps being released by an angel from their deadly toil, so that, when they are roused in the cold darkness to return to their work, he is himself “happy & warm,” leading the speaker to conclude that “if all do their duty they need not fear harm” (l. 24)—a statement so at odds with the terrible injustice of the conditions of his life as to anger any [Page 43] decent reader. But Blake has constructed this poem, like several others, in a fashion that, while not mitigating the damage done to the child, resists becoming a work of simple social protest. It dramatizes a child terribly abused not complaining but comforting a fellow-sufferer who is made happy by his friend. To put the matter perhaps too simply, because Blake is a good Christian, to him social protest alone is dangerously insufficient. What is most deeply outrageous about the treatment of the sweep is that it manifests the true character of a spiritually corrupt society indifferent to selfless goodness and unwilling to assist individuals to help one another. What is revealed in the poem is that not merely that the mind and body of the sweep are treated as trash by modern society, but even his soul. Bettering the social condition of chimney sweeps is a worthwhile aim, but the true underlying problem the sweep reveals is that the institutionalizations of modern culture are constructed specifically to victimize the weaker members of society, starting with children.

The sweep, however, does not represent himself as a victim—were he to do so Blake’s lyric would not be a song of innocence. We tend to think of the child as ignorant, which reduces him and Tom Dacre to suckers. Blake has more respect for the child, believing him to be possessed of soul, and by representing him as innocent, he associates him with wisdom, not ignorance. In Blake’s view, innocence is a condition of being well organized. So children can be innocent, because they are often very well organized, but being immature their self-organization is simpler than what is required of an adult. That the sweep comforts his friend rather than complaining about his lot is evidence of the healthy condition of his soul, but on a relatively simple level in contrast to an adult reader, for the child’s knowledge, intelligence, imagination, and bodily strength are not yet fully developed. This is perhaps most apparent to us in very young infants, who usually are quite efficiently organized to do what they wish, mostly to eat, sleep, and develop their lungs. Being an adult demands many more multi-tasking competencies, and an adult who attains the genuine innocence of maturity, totally organized integrity, deserves admiration and respect. Blake believes, however, that the innocence of maturity is within the power of every individual, that it is his god-given birthright, and that the chief reason its attainment seems so daunting a task is that our civilization is constructed to deny the ideal of unique self-organization and to prevent its accomplishment. For [Page 44] Blake, as for Christ, the organizedness of children offers a simplified model of what should be every individual’s highest ambition.

Blake does not deny the value of working for social, political, and economic justice, but he believes we should not let those immediate aims distract us from the more important task of realizing the full integrity of our unique being, which alone can ultimately make productive the singularity of others through cooperativeness of totally free people. This is one reason he almost always presents children in Songs of Innocence realistically—as dependent upon adults. Childhood is dependency—whereas the fundamental condition of an adult is, or should be, independence. Children are not self-sufficient, they need adults, so that the condition of innocence is for children largely determined by the wisdom and competence of parents, care-takers, guardians. In Songs of Innocence the highest wisdom and competence in care-giving tasks are always shown in respect for and trust of the children as individuals; the adult therefore gives them as much freedom of action as possible, for only in this way can a dependent develop into an independent individual. Characteristic of this kind of guardianship is the behavior of “The Shepherd” to his sheep: he follows them instead of leading them.

Because even excellent critics have had difficulty in explaining the formal success of such easily accessible poems (many children enjoy them), it is worth saying something about the much-praised “Introduction” (Figure 9).

Figure 9.

Figure 9. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 4, “Introduction.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

To me, the chief problem this lyric poses is not the silly Derridean concern with “staining the water” (silly because Blake was a watercolorist who made his own inks and paints), but that “rural pen.” Blake’s pen is about as urban as that of any poet I know. And the Songs of Innocence are unusual among his mature works in including a poem such as “Night,” as well as many other echoes of eighteenth-century and earlier pastoral poetry. To my mind, these dramatize Blake’s orienting poetry in a new direction, decisively away from pastoral tradition to something radically different—the beginnings of a truly modern poetry that the totally unlettered and unsophisticated, a child, “may joy to hear.” One should note that the piper appears not in a pastoral setting but in “valleys wild” where his delight in his music materializes a child on a cloud. The child created by his music then demands words to go with the music, and then that the words be written. It is the personal imaginativeness of the piper that produces the substantive book that we hold in our hands and read, no longer [Page 45] imagining the silent music that evoked it. And what we have in this “Introduction” we find repeated throughout the collection, which is filled with singing, saying, speaking, laughing, and the like. Here as throughout Blake’s poetry we are engaged with acts of speech, not just speech-acts in the narrow Austinian sense,⁵⁰ for Blake’s poetry is saturated with every kind of activity. In his lyrics, unlike so many others, people are continually doing things. They don't meditate, they act, physically, verbally, emotionally, so we have the impression, as in this “Introduction,” of participating in a present happening rather than of listening to somebody’s memories or speculations, philosophic or otherwise. In Blake’s lyrics we experience art coming into being, and creation, as it should, takes place now, before our eyes, in our minds, not in some vanished past or fantasized future. To be innocent is to be able to live vibrantly in the present.

Five years after publishing Songs of Innocence Blake published the collection together with another, Songs of Experience, with a combined title page bearing the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The latter collection includes several of Blake’s most famous and powerful lyrics, and its chief difficulty for many of us is that we suppose “experience” to be a good thing. What we experience may be harrowing or painful, but we (along with theologians, philosophers, and great dramatists such as Aeschylus) regard what we learn from personal experience of all kinds as of enormous value. Blake does not disagree, adding only the serious qualification that we cannot benefit in any way from “Experience.” Experience with a capital E for Blake means “fallen experience,” experience of a corrupted individual in a corrupted world. Capital E Experience is worse than useless, and the proper thing to do if one finds oneself in a state of Experience is to get out of it as quickly as possible, as when one finds oneself in Mississippi or South Carolina.

A State of the Human Soul for Blake is a condition or phase of life, which adolescence or old age may serve to illustrate. In the period or condition between childhood and adulthood any human being is likely to undergo considerable turmoil and distress, not primarily because of personal failings but because the conditions of existence in this state often bring to the surface the least attractive and least productive qualities of one’s character and situation in life. In an analogous fashion the weakening of mind and body as we age may diminish the effectiveness even of our virtues. Blake [Page 46] insists that “states” of the soul are permanent conditions of life on this planet, which is a good thing, because as such an individual can pass through them—he uses the analogy of a traveler crossing through a foreign country.⁵¹ There are circumstances that make our life easier or more difficult, and we should recognize these for what they are and do, but ultimately we are each master of our own fate, and we can, if we will to do so, sustain our individuality even under adverse circumstances.

And Experience is horrendously adverse; it is a condition of disorganization. Contrary to Innocence, which for Blake refers to a condition of being well organized, Experience is the personal incoherence that is the primary effect of the “fall,” of how we disorder ourselves and in all ways act, think, and speak inefficiently, ineffectively, and unproductively. Thus Innocence and Experience are true contraries; they cannot be reconciled, for they are absolutely incommensurate. There can be no opposition between contraries as there is between true friends, because a person essentially disorganized is incapable of positive relationships, which constitute a state of Innocence. To come into any genuine relationship, one has to escape from the state of Experience.

I have tried to portray Experience as negatively as possible, but I can't match Blake’s poetry—“London” being an obvious example (Figure 10).

Figure 10.

Figure 10. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 46, “London.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Yet no serious critic so far as I know has accused Blake of exaggerating. Blake tries always to tell the truth. The unusual power of his poetry lies in the realism of what he portrays. Blake’s realism is the obverse of his idealism. He truly believes that all of us could lead energetically vital, passionately delightful because productive lives— if we would recognize that the hellish sufferings and frustrations of modern life are what we have ourselves created unnecessarily, indeed, against the primary orientation of our being. No one who reads Blake carefully, I believe, regards him as a fanatic. He presents an interesting contrast in this respect to Dickens, whose most attractive quality as an artist is the sincere immediacy of his hatred of acts of injustice and tyranny characteristic of modern industrial society. This hatred makes Dickens a major successor to Blake, but Blake invariably condemns the sin without hating the sinner.⁵²

He is always intensely aware of how close to good and to generous relations even the most corrupt of people are. The truth of goodness is always right at hand, and Blake’s most realistic presentations of viciously perverted behavior evoke the possibility of their [Page 47] reverse. That salvation is never distant may be an unusual but is a persistent feature of his realistic portrayals of what is terrible in modern life.

That “London,” though not presented as directly contrastive with an Innocence poem, can be considered with “The Ecchoing Green” (Figure 11) arises first from Blake’s consistently envisioning his human ideals in terms of a city—such as building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. Blake was, moreover, a totally urbanized person—he was absent from London a mere three years, 1800-03, when working for the poet William Hayley out of a cottage in Felpham, on the Sussex coast, a cottage he pictures in Milton plate 36.

Figure 11.

Figure 11. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 5, “The Ecchoing Green.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

This bias, in fact, is what enables him to savage so cogently the evils of what was Europe’s greatest city. He does not condemn the city in terms of the opposite virtues of rural village life, but rather for perverting the potential delights of urban living. This draws attention to the fact that the “pastoral” settings of Songs of Innocence do not really continue or even connect to earlier traditions of pastoral poetry. A sign of this disjunction is that, although Blake offers a few sheep, he favors lions and tigers, birds, and insects, which don't get into traditional pastoral. I put a lot of emphasis on the opening line of the “Introduction,” “valleys wild.” So for me, an intriguing feature of “The Ecchoing Green” is that it is not presented as the conventionally rural idyllic opposite to the urban— just as Blake doesn't overtly pair it with “London.” As a result, critical examination of differences between the two lyrics reveals complex and subtle aspects of Blake’s insight into the problems and possibilities of actual contemporary life.

No two “songs” better dramatize the incommensurability of Innocence and Experience than those of the two nurses, the contrast made overt by the fact that three lines of the first song, from Innocence (Figure 12), are repeated in the second, from Experience (Figure 13). Never before had a major poet written seriously of such trivial people as nursemaids, but Blake believes that the nature of a civilization is vividly revealed by how it treats children.

Figure 12.

Figure 12. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 24, “Nurse’s Song.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 13.

Figure 13. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 38, “Nurse’s Song.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

The nurse speaker of the latter Song pretends responsibly to care for her immature charges, and may have genuinely deceived herself. In fact, however, she plainly projects her fears, insecurities, and frustration on the children, treating them as objects of resentment. Why? She doesn't trust them because she doesn't like or trust herself. This is terrible because children are necessarily trusting; they are dependent, so they must rely on adults in order to survive and develop. A [Page 48] nursemaid, a hired guardian of children, is a revealing figure because her existence manifests the extraordinarily long dependency of immature human beings, and, consequently, the extraordinarily long period of obligation of parents to care for children. Children have no choice: their condition is one of dependency. Adults choose how they meet their obligation to care for trusting dependents. And, as so often in his art, Blake’s contrasting songs unobtrusively address a significant social feature of modern culture: the frequent choice of affluent parents to meet their obligation by employing hired surrogates.

The two “Nurse’s Songs” dramatize unmistakably that the central feature of both of Blake’s collections is trust, which denotes reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of the one trusted. This confidence in one on whom you depend relates to hope, because it is an attitude that precedes behavior—to trust someone is to have faith in how she will act. Trusting is a dynamic relation, although it seems quiet and is normally not demonstrative. But in fact trusting is a continuous feeling and commitment—as one discovers with horror when one’s trust is violated. Trust is, obviously, closely related to religious faith, and in children is usually manifested as a trust that others and the world in which we live together is a good place in which happiness can be expected.

The views of the nurse of Experience are the exact reverse. We cannot know whether her feelings originated in an unhappy childhood of her own, or whether the sounds of happily playing children simply remind her that her youth is gone forever, but possible causes here matter little. The critical fact is that the nurse envies the children. For Blake, the key to the sickness of modern culture, and there is no doubt that the nurse of Experience is a sick person, is jealousy. This nurse, we would say today, is repressing something in herself and trying to repress, or impose her false sense of order on, the children. This is why one may believe that she “honestly” believes she acts for the children’s good—is protecting them. But from what? She says, from “your spring & your day. . . wasted in play,” and “your winter and night in disguise” (7-8). Unlike the nurse of Innocence, this one uses metaphors—which in fact are surprisingly rare throughout Blake’s poetry. For good reason—he is primarily concerned with directly articulating the truths of reality, and metaphoric language is founded on telling what is by telling what is not. What the nurse of Experience through the form and content of her [Page 49] speech reveals is the simple truth that repression prevents healthy relations with others. When I repress my feelings I necessarily disguise them, from others and myself, and this prevents complete and healthy relations with others, of which jealousy is a natural manifestation, envy of feelings that others possess and I do not. Jealousy is a condition that precludes empathy. In the repressed, jealous, unempathetic nurse of Experience we have a clear representation of what Blake later calls “Selfhood,” a false individualization. In a state of Selfhood one is passive, unable to interact productively with others, and unable to change and grow because trapped within disguises of one’s past that one is unable to throw off because they seem to sustain one’s identity, although in fact they pervert one’s true uniqueness. This is the characteristic fake individualism produced by modern culture; its moral malignancy is dramatized by the Experienced nurse’s efforts, well-intentioned like all roads into hell, to infect the children she has been entrusted to care for with her paralyzing disease of self-misunderstanding, with her lack of hope and self-confidence, and in short, with her total incapacity to play.

Playing is exactly what the nurse of Innocence sanctions. She rescinds her call to the children to go home when they express their desire to stay outside at play. Because she can change, sympathetically responsive to the children’s impulses, her heart is at rest, in harmony with the vitality and calm of the natural environment. The children’s claim is that the world is still awake, as is evidenced by the birds flying about and the sheep on the hillside. Their impulse to go on playing is in harmony with the natural environment, or, perhaps their impulse animates the natural world, since the hills echo the children’s shouts of joy.

Figure 14.

Figure 14. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 18, “The Divine Image.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

This nurse fulfills her responsibilities as guardian by giving the children the freedom to play, the point of which is sheer pleasure in simultaneous activity of body and mind—a breeding ground for imaginativeness that exploits the delights of the freedom of fulfilling one’s desires through unity with one’s environment, human and natural. In one sense we know less about the nurse of Innocence than of Experience, because the former is not defined by crippling self-limitations that define her Selfhood; but we recognize the vitality of a unique self in the nurse of Innocence, whose identity is dynamically free and therefore unpredictable.

In “The Divine Image” (Figure 14) in Innocence, all who are distressed pray to “Mercy Pity Peace and Love. . . /And to these virtues of delight / Return their [Page 50] thankfulness” (1, 3-4). These virtues of delight are not abstractions; they are particularized actions for the relief, comfort, healing, and restoration of specific distresses of individual petitioners. They are performed by other human beings who thus exercise their intrinsic divinity, and who therefore take delight in so acting to transform the petitioners’ distress into delight. Such virtuous actions of delight are within the power of all human beings (even as all of us are subject to distresses) because all human beings carry within themselves the power of God; all humans are “the human form divine.” This power, therefore, may be exercised by any human being, regardless of race or religion, “heathen, turk or jew” (18). So these virtues reveal the essential unity of humankind—a unity of unique individuals—that is falsified by institutionalized distinctions of religion, culture, society, or race. In its essence as a divine capability, pity (like mercy and love) is the act of one individual toward another, the virtuous response of one individual to the distress of another individual.

The “Pity” problem starts with the contrast of “The Divine Image” to “The Human Abstract” (Figure 15) of Experience. “Pity,” as a “virtue of delight,” is prayed to in the Innocence poem by those in distress and is identified with the divine; in Experience, pity would not exist “If we did not make somebody poor,” a negative view that is reinforced in Urizen, where pity “divides the soul” (pl. 13).

Figure 15.

Figure 15. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, plate 47, “The Human Abstract.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

The contradiction is explained by the titles, “The Divine Image” and “The Human Abstract,” the latter identifying the “fallen world,” the world of Los and Enitharmon in Urizen. The state of Experience is terrible because it has lost the divine image (or imaginative vision) of true pity.

“The Human Abstract” reveals how the state of experience is a condition in which such virtues have become abstract, in the most literal sense, since an abstract is a summary, a condensation and simplification, of a longer, more complex text, the reduction of a vital expression to a dead, incomplete, depersonalized report of what was an act of communication. Exactly what the abstract does is to eliminate the minute particulars of the original, especially those that embody the original’s active endeavor to communicate to a specifically perceived audience. Contrary to popular (fallen) opinion, exactly what an abstract does not present is the essence of the original. It is a skeleton offering only the absence of the essence of a human life.

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The state of Experience is a world of abstractions, in which pity can only divide the soul because the vitality of relationship has been extinguished. Relationships have become unreal because truly emotionalized perceptions have been excised in favored of depersonalizing reasoning. This abstract reason (producing hypocrisy) is appropriate to a selfishness founded on a false sense of individuality, a selfhood, not a genuine self, fabricated from the decision to suppress all free play of individual impulse and desire. In this state pity divides the soul because it is not an immediate response to aid another’s distress, but an assertion of one’s superiority to another: in Urizen Enitharmon does not ask for pity—Los thrusts his “pity” upon her, just as rich people often “pity” less affluent people.

In short, the contrast of “The Human Abstract” to “The Divine Image” dramatizes “the fall” as Blake conceives it. Each of us falls when we choose to transform the life-enhancing powers of our uniqueness to enrich human relationships into a self-crippling selfishness. That selfishness destroys our potential for fruitful and ever-expanding interrelations with others by distorting our inherent divine impulses of pity, mercy, peace, and love into acts of envy, fear, cruelty, and deceit. The union of the four qualities in Innocence images the divine in a non-hierarchal father whose immanence is realized contingently. The virtues are called forth in individual acts by individual needs—God appears in particular acts of human interrelationship.

I've called attention to Blake’s unusual willingness to display the dangers of metaphor, and two other interlocking formal characteristics of the Songs of Experience require mention, not least because they become the foundation for Blake’s later, more intricate and extended poetry in Milton and Jerusalem, although they have attracted little critical commentary. In Experience, Blake perfects his skill at the condensed narrative that implies much more than is literally said. The dynamic of a Blakean story resides in its evocation of a context that makes the events happen as they do. “A Poison Tree” (Figure 16) and “The Little Girl Lost” (Figure 17) illustrate this developing mode; the latter is interesting also as an advance toward the non-mythological story-telling of Thel.

Figure 16.

Figure 16. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 49, “A Poison Tree.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 17.

Figure 17. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 34, “The Little Girl Lost.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Blake’s later, longer prophecies are built up of multitudes of such condensed narratives. They also make use of his particular development of the dramatic monologue, which attains a high point in Songs of Experience.

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“The Tyger” is unquestionably the most famous of these—it is said, in fact, to be the most frequently republished lyric in English during the past two centuries.⁵³ It was the most widely known of Blake’s songs during his lifetime, and it is the one most frequently referenced by contemporary writers, artists, musicians, and film makers. This popularity means that probably 98% of those who admire the poem do not know it in its original form, that is, as an illuminated text, though this is the aspect that has drawn the largest amount of critical comment by specialists. For these readers, the problem is the graphic representation at the bottom of the text, which is totally incongruous with the darkly powerful evocation of the text, which is invariably the focus of non-specialists. In the context of Songs of Experience, “The Tyger” seems to belong with other dramatic monologues, notably “The Fly” (Figure 18) and “The Sick Rose” (Figure 19), in which one recognizes that the anonymous speaker seriously misunderstands the nature of the reality of which he speaks.

Figure 19.

Figure 19. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 39, “The Sick Rose.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Figure 18.

Figure 18. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 40, “The Fly.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

This discrepancy brings into sharp focus the importance of Blake’s unusual manipulations of the dramatic monologue form. In the lyrics at issue the speakers are anonymous, in contrast to the most celebrated exemplifications of the dramatic monologue—such as Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” or “My Last Duchess,” which create highly individualized representations of specific individuals, although we do not know the names of the pathological killer or of the suavely ruthless Duke who speak.

Figure 20.

Figure 20. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy Z, plate 42, “The Tyger.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

For me, as for many other readers of “The Tyger” (Figure 20), the absolute anonymity of the speaker allows me to concentrate on what is said, which evokes awareness of how I imagine a tiger. “Burning bright” (which Steinbeck used as the title of a play) seems to put into two words my imagining of the frightening vitality of the beautiful animal moving through a jungle. But the triteness of “jungle” is obliterated by the originality of “forests of the night.” I then wonder with the speaker, what “immortal hand or eye” could “frame” (the framing of hand and eye being quite different yet related creations) that “fearful symmetry,” a stunning oxymoron that seems a perfectly reasonable statement of what makes my imagined tiger so impressive.⁵⁴

The point is that even somebody like me who has struggled with the “problem” of the graphic illumination, and who knows that the actual animal is quite different, finds the text wonderfully “accurate” to what I feel imaginatively about tigers. If the speaker of [Page 53] the poem is wrong about the true nature of actual tigers, his misunderstanding liberates our imaginations. Or, to foreground Blake’s strangest accomplishment, by “mis-reading” the lyric we in fact have the experience Blake wished to evoke. He was not interested in a single individual’s misconception of what tigers are, but in a cultural, or imaginatively conventionalized misconception. His dramatic monologue evokes in each reader as an individual a misconception of reality— which of course is not just of what a tiger is, but also of its place in a divinely activated world. This proves the rightness of Blake’s variant of the dramatic monologue form, which of course is normally declarative, whereas Blake’s poem consists entirely of questions. Necessarily the speaker’s questions become my questions as I read. So when I reach the final question my answer is: me, it is my immortal hand and eye. If I am reading the illuminated text, this answer is reinforced because I can see plainly enough that the pictured tiger is woefully inadequate to the power of my imaginative vision. And that perception compels me to question if I have not in fact been in many poems mis-seeing by underestimating both my own imaginative powers and the supernatural vitality of my environment.

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1.3. Chapter 3.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it. (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 566)

The first two words of Blake’s best-known illuminated book, “Rintrah roars” (Figure 21), manifest the dynamic energy that the prophecy celebrates: who the hell is Rintrah? Since Blake invented the name Rintrah and never in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell describes or explains who or what Rintrah is, we cannot know. Why begin—and end— an “introduction” with the incomprehensible? Well, it launches us into

Figure 21.

Figure 21. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

uncertainty. Uncertainty plays an enormous role in The Marriage, which poses a variety of unanswered questions and is structured by crisscrossing paradoxes. Marriage asserts authoritatively and systematically that no authoritative and systematic statements can be true. Blake hammers home the view upon which are built the powerful classical dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles: life is uncertainty, and we court disaster if we do not adjust our thinking, behavior, and ethical convictions to accommodate this fundamental reality. [Page 55] But Blake contradicts these dramatists because he finds in Christianity, modern science, and the human capacity to imagine, the means to transform the irresistible uncertainty of living into a promise of boundless happiness. “Never to have been born is best” is false if Jesus Christ exists.⁵⁵

Yet Blake’s view of the present condition of humankind is perhaps more negative than that of his Greek predecessors, because he regards it as “fallen,” completely disorganized, and productive of endless frustration, cruelty, injustice, degradation, fear, and suffering. This terrible sickness, however, is not in his view an inevitable “natural” condition. Human beings have created it. Therefore it is capable of cure by human exertions—we can heal ourselves. The key to the cure is given in the book’s final plates when we are told that Jesus Christ broke every one of the ten commandments. “I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules” (pls. 23-24). “Impulse” here means not instinct but desire, the essential human form of energy, and for Blake, at least as much as for modern physicists, everything that exists is in essence nothing but energy. For him everything that exists is both inherently dynamic and always—unceasingly—interacting with other energies. So nothing—absolutely nothing, including the universe itself—is stable, fixed, or permanent.

The psychic energy that is impulse is self-generating, spontaneous action, not pre-calculated but an immediate manifesting of what one is as an integral being. Blake believes that when we act on genuine impulse we manifest the divine energy of Jesus, which dwells in every human being. When we try to act by pre-calculating, deliberating, and following established rules of behavior, thought, and emotion, we only frustrate the exercise of our desiring energy, producing disorder, disorganization, despair. Blake, like many Christians, believes there is nothing in the universe intrinsically evil. What the misguided call evil are only failures in the individual exercise of energy, non-acts. This view may seem absurd because it so flies in the face of current conventional thinking: how could there be blockbuster movies if Blake’s view prevailed? But what if we believe that every human being is absolutely unique, and that uniqueness is one’s soul?

Blakean impulsiveness is not hastiness or thoughtlessness. Impulse is spontaneous, uncalculated; it is not instinct or will, but the whole body and mind [Page 56] together, the outsurge of energy that thrusts unpredicted organization into the world. The opposite of prohibitive law, it is the manifestation of individuality and therefore brings order that cannot be codified. A penetration of limits that makes a richer order possible, it opens the way for reasoned understanding. At the same time it is responsive to the environment and not random: the animating and naming of “all sensible objects” in The Marriage, plate 11, illustrates the perfecting and laboring over the impulse: it brings out the harmony between impulsive self and indifferent world, as the world is absorbed in self.

Christ exemplifies how truly impulsive behavior responds to the uniqueness of a specific situation, enabling one to seize the right instant to be forgiving, when to drive money-changers out of the temple, when to evade a trap: if the coin belongs to the emperor, give it to him. Christ dramatizes the “impulsiveness” essential for dealing productively with the inescapable uncertainties of life. Conceiving of each individual as a singular particle of His spiritual energy, furthermore, opens the way to recognizing that uniqueness of being does not entail anarchy or preclude the possibility of communal interdependence. Indeed, true impulsiveness makes feasible a degree of organization among unique beings that would otherwise be unattainable. This insight is a foundation of Blake’s continuing relevance to modern culture, which has developed forms of human organization of a complexity never attained by earlier cultures.

Impulse, moreover, opens the way to recognizing chance as potentially a positive force. Growth and the enhancement of life processes require change and a condition of unpredictability. Here one may think of Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy: the more precisely one determines the position of a particle at any given moment, the less precisely can one determine its movement or what it is doing at that moment; conversely, knowledge of its “momentum” (as Heisenberg calls it) blocks knowledge of its position. The practical value of this principle is to make possible precise calculations of a range of possibilities—a significant enhancement of our human capacity to make positive use of the inherent dynamism of our universe.

Blake offers us analogous empowerment. The difficulty many of us have in appreciating the value of imaging a range of possibilities in a universe of unpredictable play of energies is encapsulated in The Marriage’s key aphorism, “One Law for the Lion [Page 57] & Ox is oppression” (pl. 24), which may be called the social counterpart of the work’s other key aphorism: “Opposition is true Friendship” (pl. 20). How, the citizen of a democratic, egalitarian society must ask, can law not apply equally to everyone? The beginning of an answer may be generated by inverting the premise of the question. If each individual is truly unique, if I differ from you as much as a lion differs from an ox, any law that treats us as alike must violate one or both of our individualities (think not of Isaiah’s improbable lion and ox sharing a bale of hay, but of Thurber’s football-playing classmate, who, “while . . . not dumber than an ox,” was “not any smarter” (67)). If Blake’s assertion about “one law” troubles us, it is because we do not in fact believe that each of us is absolutely unique, or because we believe that our singularity is not absolutely important. That individuality is of secondary importance is a hidden but fundamental assumption of all Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment political theorists. To Blake, as to any genuine Christian, the uniqueness of each human soul is supremely important. I am not a Christian, but I believe that anyone who has studied the history of the past two centuries (let alone earlier times) ought to be troubled, if not horrified, to observe the terrible sufferings political, social, economic, and religious that have been inflicted on millions through ideological denials of the sacred singularity of each and every individual human being.⁵⁶

Marriage, by celebrating impulse, challenges our unthinking acceptance of too simple a concept of law, of law on the model of the Ten Commandments, law that limits, that denies uniqueness, that functions invariably as prohibition. And, in fact, the overwhelming majority of laws in modern culture are prohibitions, starting with limits on driving speeds. “Opposition is true Friendship” may help us to imagine our way free of belief in the necessity for law to prohibit, to deny, to negate the exercise of our uniqueness. As I've observed, most of us recognize from actual experience that a genuine friend is someone who tells you the truth about yourself even if he knows it will be displeasing. A genuine friend cares too much for you as an individual not to try to help you. Quite simply, a genuine friend values you as you value him, because of your individuality, your difference from him. For many of us (and this illuminates the title of Blake’s work), these are equally the defining characteristics of a good marriage. This is why Blake dramatizes in Marriage his principle that all act is virtue—that what we [Page 58] call crimes or acts of evil are not in fact actions but their hindering, failures genuinely to act that prevent positive exercises of energy. Are we not justified in entertaining the possibility that simple rejections of the Blakean view as idealistic may be evidence of our failure to imagine the full possibilities of conceiving the richest human interdependence as deriving only from the highest valuation of individuality? Why should I deny that behaving well to others, treating others as I wish to be treated, is a better kind of “law” than an abstract commandment scratched on stone not to kill?

This issue of law enables us to understand why The Marriage satirizes more than anything else, and with pit-bull ferocity, all moralities. For Blake, what modern culture calls “goodness” is not authentic goodness, but in fact its opposite. We speak, think, and behave in destructive and self-destructive ways, because we teach ourselves to speak, think, and behave hurtfully, selfishly, enviously, spitefully, unlovingly, having convinced ourselves that in so doing we are being “good.” Our culture is a huge (and hugely successful) mechanism for promoting this self-deceiving hypocrisy. Our insistence on believing in fictional “goodness” has produced the terrible realities of modern history, untold poverty, uncountable killings. Blake’s main purpose throughout his career is to awaken us to how and why our cultural commitments foster unconscious hypocrisies that produce appalling consequences. Blake believes that as soon as we recognize that what we've been calling “good” is in reality not good, we instantly achieve the possibility of living a happier, because more productively vital, life. “Jerusalem” is when everybody shares that recognition. Blake writes so as to help us understand that our mindsets and cultural commitments are wrong, convinced that because we are the creators of our imprisoning misconceptions we can correct our errors. In some ways mind-forged manacles are easier to shatter than metal ones. The correction has the effect of instant apocalypse, liberation into genuine freedom.

By constructing Marriage around the contrast of unreal “angels” and unreal “devils,” Blake dramatizes the deadly fictionality of modern culture’s “good” and “evil.” Blake dramatizes how this fiction encourages us passively to accept regulation of thought and behavior by others, because we conceive ourselves to be not unique individuals but socially constructed products of purely rational socio-cultural systems. Blake identifies the original and paradigmatic cultural institution as a priesthood. Historically that may [Page 59] well be true. At any rate, for Blake cultural institutions originate in a perverting of individual imaginings, a corrupting of individual “Poetic Genius.” This is reasonable, if one accepts Blake’s view that religious experience to a significant degree is imaginative experience, and that imagination for him is an activation of the total person, an exercise of incredible power. In plate 14 of The Marriage (Figure 22), he happily foretells the apocalyptic change that he personally will bring about by unleashing our imaginations:

     the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

Figure 22.

Figure 22. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 14. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.

This passage is celebrated but seldom taken as literally as it should be. It articulates a cluster of Blake’s most essential convictions, first that “mind” and “body” are one and indivisible, so that none of our qualities or capacities exist separately from all the others— sensation, perception, emotion, reason, imagination are continually interacting and interinfluencing one another, physically, mentally, spiritually. The Blakean apocalypse occurs—delightful idea—through improvement of sensual enjoyment, because his art will display the infiniteness of everything (including sex) by enhancing our sensory perceptions. This cleansing process by which deceptive surfaces are melted away is initiated by his infernal printing method that liberates the reader’s imagination—for as Blake says in another equally famous passage, “I question not my [Page 60] Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it” (E 566). It is the activity of our imagination (never, as Huxley thought, the use of drugs)⁵⁷ that “cleanses” our optical perception. Imagination enables us to perceive what is obscured by mere physical sensations unanimated by our desire to discover and even to create reality.

This conception underlies Blake’s depiction of the emergence of Priesthood as the originating cultural institution in plate 11 of Marriage. Blake begins by telling us that “ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods” (Figure 23).

Figure 23.

Figure 23. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy D, plate 11. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Poets injected divineness into objects of sensation. They accomplished this feat by “calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes”—and also of “cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.” Our senses are enlarged and increased in number by intensified imaginative power, just as they are shrunken and diminished by weakening of imaginative power. The poets made sensible objects divine by naming them, but also by “adorning” them with “properties,” both civilizational and natural. These properties, as the following sentence implies, are equally produced by imaginative perception: “And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. placing it under its mental deity.” This complex process seems significantly circular: the naming and adorning and placing under are not arbitrarily imposed by poets upon the sensible objects but are derived from an understanding of them, both in themselves and as they participate in an interactive social-natural environment. The process is thus highly individualized, not merely because individual poets name and adorn, but also because those acts reveal the unique character of the “objects” in themselves and in their particularized interrelationships. The process is intensely coherent, but is not reduced to a mechanistic system. That is what “priests” introduce:

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & and enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects; thus began Priesthood.

Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods [Page 61] had orderd such things.

Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

(pl. 11)

This seems to me a pretty good imagining of how human institutions come into being through the abstract repression of individual imagining. The imagined divinities that poets introduced into living entities, natural and cultural, some systematizer (a good term for power-seeking intellectuals, bureaucrats, and ideologues) pulls out to construct an entirely abstract structure that no longer has any direct and immediate relation to the actual environment or to individuals’ specific experiences of it. The system now is useful only to, and provides employment only for, its “priests,” making us forget that the only thing in the universe that is genuinely “supernaturally powerful” is the exercise of the individual’s “Poetic Genius.”

Plate 11 of Marriage offers a dangerous because simplified but convenient understanding of how Blake might have arrived at his identification of the spiritual with the artistic. It opens an entrance into an “historical” rather than a personal perspective on this core Protestantism that identifies the two. Blake had nothing against the word “imagination,” but here, as previously in All Religions are One, he uses “Poetic Genius,” which simultaneously emphasizes both the relation of religious imagining to literary imagining and the unique individuality of such imagining. In plate 11, Blake utilizes literary associations with “genius loci” and draws on the traditions of humanized singularity in religious figures such as dryads and “water nymphs” to describe the poets’ attribution of special qualities to individual natural objects. Simultaneously, he dramatically distinguishes the power of such personal imaginative endowments from the “Priesthood’s” abstracting and systematizing of individual imaginings. The institutionalizing of religion destroys religious imagining. That is the core of Blake’s religious belief, a conviction that true religion cannot exist in any institutionalized form. This core conviction is close to the originating center of every Protestant movement, most of which, especially the successful ones, rapidly become institutionalized, thus preparing the way for a new kind of Protestantism.

The foregoing shows plainly that language is central to Blake’s concept of [Page 62] imagining, and in my view the best study of his language is Robert Essick’s The Language of Adam, because Essick situates Blake’s linguistic practices within the immediate and rapidly developing historical context of linguistic study and speculation at the end of the eighteenth century. He also details Blake’s use of older religious traditions associated with the story of Adam naming all of God’s creatures, yet he does not overlook the possible relevance of ideas about language by notable modern philosophers such as Derrida. These, however, as David Simpson observes, have added little to our understanding of any specific poet’s linguistic artistry.⁵⁸ One reason for this practical impotence is that these theorizers become excited about superficial secondary results of what poets have always intuitively grasped, that all words are polyvalent, that every word possesses more than one meaning, and that meanings always change, sometimes radically, through usage by individuals over time. This is part of what Blake means by “Poetic Genius,” and he exploits enthusiastically the power of every word or utterance to mean variously—always depending upon who is speaking to whom under what circumstances (Esterhammer 165-66). It is his attention to these “minute particulars” of each specific speech act in every song of Innocence and of Experience that endows these lyrics with such compelling cogency.

Like all the best poets, Blake recognizes that the value of language arises from its—literally—infinite flexibility. The primary mode of human communication is supremely adapted to continuous innovation, change, and productive modification, especially in intense conversation. Conversation encourages progressive development of the linguistic forms given the issues being debated. This is why conversation is a major, perhaps the major, form of learning, because it encourages continuous conscious reconstituting of its structural and semantic organizations.

Blake’s approach derives from Locke’s observation that there are more things and phenomena in the world than there are words. If each chair had to be given a unique name, language would be impossible. So Locke claims that we generalize, using the generic “chair” to represent an infinite variety of particular chairs. A more potent illustration would be the frustration many of us have felt at being able to say only “I love you”—a hideously inadequate articulating of the intense particularity of our emotions. But the difficulty arises from our personal inadequacy in using words, as poets prove. [Page 63] Locke’s error, repeated by subsequent philosophers, is to treat generalization as the essential feature of semantics. In fact, it is a practical convenience that degenerates easily into a bad habit, crippling our ability to use language with full effectiveness—especially for refining and strengthening our appreciation of the infinite complexity of phenomenal reality. Productive use of language always focuses on minute particulars, using language’s infinite flexibility to attain nuanced specificity of description and evocation, and welcoming irony, contradiction, and paradox as means for reconstituting the language system when it encounters a temporary impasse—thereby enhancing our awareness of reality’s intricacies and establishing a basis for more precise communication with our fellows. A traditional instance of how language acts as a self-reconstituting, or, perhaps better, self-regenerating system is that of Milo the Cretan who tells you that all Cretans are liars. Quotation marks around the last word transform the impasse into a fresh perception of the complexities of truth telling.

“One Law for the Lion & Ox is oppression” is an anti-dogmatic assertion in the form of a dogmatic axiom. Many of Blake’s sentences must be read as paradoxical: do you believe the Cretan who tells you all Cretans are liars? As I noted before, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell states authoritatively and systematically that no authoritative and systematic statements can be true. The purpose of this mind-stretching is to carry us beyond false, secondary distinctions, false contraries that are in fact merely institutionalized divisions, falsifications of truth and reality—such as “man” and “woman.” We ought first to conceive and perceive each individual as “human being,” which allows us to appreciate the true individuality of the person unobscured by false, socially constructed differences such as gender. Analogously, “heaven” and “hell” are a false, socially constructed contrary that divides energy of mind from energy of body. True contraries foster vitally dynamic interrelations and productive interactions as in “Opposition is true friendship”—they never divide.

I use this familiar example of Milo the Cretan because Blake’s poetry always centers on truth-telling—it especially seeks to recover the truth obscured by a modern culture that is hurtful to individuals because it is based on denying our “fallen” condition. Indeed, the outstanding manifestation of the “fall” is our eagerness to shape our lives to accord totally with rationalized institutions, all of which arise from and promote the [Page 64] misuse of language, encouraging us to think, speak, and believe falsehoods. Blake’s poetry aims to persuade us to recognize and reject these falsehoods, to break free from these rigidifyings and diminishments of linguistic flexibility and innovative power. Blake writes against a culture that is becoming rife with advertising, economic propagandizing, and false political ideologies. He writes against the growing acceptance that differences between the very rich and very poor are inevitable, and that wealth is the object most worth striving for, justifying any means used to attain it. A concrete instance of the effect of these views on his linguistic forms is his anticipation in practice by a few years of Wordsworth’s claim that there is no essential difference between prose and poetry. Marriage concretely illustrates this claim, furnishing an additional example of Blake’s centrality to his cultural circumstances. Perhaps more interesting, because so many learned academics have identified the essence of poetry with metaphor, is Blake’s relatively infrequent use of simile and metaphor, tropes that rely more on tradition than is usually noticed. Robert Burns compares his “luv” to “a red, red rose” (although the rose of Scotland is white), rather than to “that red flower over there,” because he relies on the accreted connotations and symbolic resonances of “rose.” Blake’s now equally famous rose poem refuses those accretions and resonances. His rose is “sick” only in the conventionalized vision of its speaker, whose value as a judge is dramatized by his belief in invisible flying worms.

To metaphor Blake prefers the simple turning of language against itself, exploiting its intrinsic polyvalence, which works equally well in poetry or prose. This is best illustrated in the extraordinary “Proverbs of Hell,” brief pithy statements that upset instead of confirming traditional wisdom, quite possibly the most powerful four pages of prose in the entire Anglophone tradition. “Prisons are built with stones of Law” is a simple and appropriate metaphor, but its significance is radically changed, and enhanced, by the addition of the violent originality of “Brothels with bricks of Religion” (pl. 8), which is almost instantaneously and subversively absorbed into the “obviousness” of the first phrase. Even more striking is the unmetaphoric “The cut worm forgives the plow” (pl. 7), which with the utmost economy plunges worms and plows into the realm of ethical emotions. By demanding that we confront the full implications of Blake’s insistence on the uninhibited freedom of each individual, this proverb carries us to the [Page 65] realization of the supreme importance in all relationships of a possibility for forgiveness, the essential feature of Christian ethics. “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (pl. 10) presents a shocking literalization of a Freudian insight normally softened by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary, an insight seldom if ever so literally invoked as here with the opening “Sooner,” and the final verb “nurse” that so frighteningly evokes perversion of the most primal act of nurturing.

Blake differs from every major modern philosopher, social and economic thinker, psychologist, political scientist, or politician in identifying the cause of the fundamental problem of modern culture as dependence on a false morality, on a foundational ethical confusion. As a poet he was aware of the significance of how we use words, specifically of how we deceive ourselves and others by not recognizing how complex and potent language is. He knew that words are the most powerful means of acting we possess. Language makes possible culture; culture enables us not only to adapt to our environment, as do all organisms, but also deliberately to change the environment to suit our purposes. Blake’s Protestant tradition, teaching that God is present in each of us, insisted that the ethical dimension was of paramount importance in all interpersonal relations and challenged any institutionalized control of personal ethical decisions. So Blake faulted modern culture and the psychology it fostered for suppressing the uniqueness of creative individuality by pretending to offer personal and social freedom. In fact, our culture trains us to believe it is good to repress our impulses and to regard ourselves not as independent, self-creative beings but as socially-constructed products of our culture, most fully human when we passively accept the regulation of our thinking and behaving by institutionalized social structures. This self-misunderstanding Blake exposes by satire.

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1.4. Chapter 4.
The Book of Thel

What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy which blinds the Eye of Imagination
The Real Man.
(Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, E 664)

Unlike most satires, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ridicules not particular social or political arrangements but fundamental values of western culture in which the social, political, economic, and educational practices of Blake’s day were grounded and most of which still prevail—making Blake’s satire a cogent critique of current social and psychological assumptions. The Marriage lays the groundwork for a series of poetic prophecies through which Blake comments upon the evolving cultural, rather than merely political, conflicts brought to light by developments of the French Revolution—including Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, and The Song of Los, and culminating in The Book of Urizen, his most important published prophecy until Milton and Jerusalem in the next century. Of these earlier prophecies, Visions of the Daughters of Albion is the most sensational and [Page 67] significant, but appreciation of it is enhanced by its contrast with The Book of Thel, a delicately lovely poetic work completed before The Marriage in 1789-90.⁵⁹ Thel illustrates concretely why it is misleading to speak of Blake as writing myths or mythopoetic poems; everything he wrote was an endeavor to advance our understanding of and appreciation for all the realities, including the most mundane, of contemporary life.

One understands why commentators are tempted to use the honorific “myth” for Blake’s prophecies, but its inappropriateness is revealed, for example, by the frequent reference to Blakean “archetypes,” which are impossibilities for a poet committed to the uniqueness of every imagination. Blakean prophecies represent contemporary social and psychological conditions as literally as possible. Their function is to enable readers to recognize the present-day world as it truly is, not as it is conventionally conceived or as it appears to superficial inspection. Blake, significantly, preferred to draw human beings naked. He had little interest in the historical past, never writing for posterity but only for contemporary readers.⁶⁰

Perhaps the most acute effort to explain Blake’s unswerving determination to use his imagination to dramatize with complete fidelity the actualities of contemporary life is the essay by Edward J. Rose, “Los, Pilgrim of Eternity.” Although not fully successful, and in some respects self-contradictory, Rose’s analysis draws attention to the fact that Blake’s figures are “not allegorical abstractions or mythological people and gods, but energizing images in action” (86). Because Rose focuses consistently on both visual and verbal aspects of Blake’s prophecies, he recognizes more clearly than many literary critics that “to Blake’s mind, a mythological figure is as general or abstract as a mathematical sign or natural law and as equally one dimensional . . .” (86). Which leads Rose understandably (if a bit confusingly) to equate his prophecies with Wallace Stevens’ “There was a myth before the myth began / Venerable and articulate and complete” (86). Anyone who has struggled to describe the character of Blake’s prophecies will sympathize with Rose’s efforts, but to use words such as myth, mythopoetic, and the like is inevitably to obscure the surprising fact that Blake’s visionary artistry is devoted principally to empowering his audience to recognize the facts of how we are presently living.⁶¹

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We need to remember that Blake’s only requirement for the prophet is that he be an honest man—which seems simple until one remembers Diogenes. “Every honest man is a Prophet he utters his opinion both of private & public matters / Thus / If you go on So / the result is So / He never says such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. a Prophet is a Seer not an Arbitrary Dictator” (E 617). Blake’s multi-media form of prophecy embodies his concept of contrariety, acceptance of diversity that implies irreconcilable differences. You and I embody the divinity of the cosmos by our individualities that are incommensurable. A good marriage for Blake is the productive intensification of two individualities. So truth cannot be told except through “contrary” representations, and the graphic elements of Blake’s prophecies “illuminate” rather than “illustrate” the text and vice versa.

The “Every honest man is a Prophet” quotation suggests that when Blake creates “inspired” prophecies he is not emphasizing his superiority to ordinary people. I think he hopes to inspire the prophetic powers in each of his readers, to arouse the imagination of each, his or her “Poetic Genius.” His poetry is notable for its heavy use of active verbs, and in most of his poems a lot happens. One hundred and fifty years before the term “speech act” was coined he was consciously exploiting “performative utterance,” speech or writing that constitutes an action rather than referring to something other than itself, that is simultaneously an act producing specific physical, social, or psychological effects, as when a bride or groom says “I will” or a president declares war, or someone shouts a warning: “Stop!” What is important about such speech acts is not whether they are true or false but their practical effects, what the words composing them do. Most if not all of Blake’s poems are performative utterances, intended to affect practically and immediately his readers’ current thinking and physical behavior. What is most rewarding to seek in Blake’s art, both prophetic and otherwise, is what it does and how it may affect its audience.⁶²

Prophecy is a personal estimation of the probable consequences of a current action or pattern of behavior. The future cannot be definitively predicted because it is the future of a world always changing in multiple ways. Blake holds this view against the oncoming avalanche of utopias, “scientific” like Marx’s, or “fantastic” like those of science fiction writers. Blake’s prophecies do no more, although that is much, than fully [Page 69] articulate the opinions of an honest man. His prophetic enthusiasm derives from his firm belief in the power of imagination. To imagine is to hypothesize possible and probable consequences of particular actions now. The dishonest man, from politician to scam artist to run-of-the-mill liars of expedience like you and me, who constitute the vast majority of most social groups, for one reason or another falsifies, does not genuinely try to imagine the true nature of present reality and from that to estimate its probable consequences. Prophecy is of value not because it is always correct but because it concentrates wholeheartedly on trying to determine what the real truth of the present moment is most likely to produce in the future.

Prophecy is produced by an individual’s effort to inform others of what he imagines, as precisely as he is able, that does not yet exist, or that has not yet happened, and in fact what may never come into being, or what may happen in a fashion he has not foreseen. In short, honest prophecy and honest imagining are necessarily endeavors accurately to comprehend the dynamic potency of current realities and, as wisely as is possible, to judge the future actualities likely to be produced by the present configuration of these ongoing processes. Imagining and prophecy can be of value only to the degree that they concentrate entirely on determining, as best they can, the real truth of the present moment and the oncoming future.

I know this description seems to diminish what strikes many as Blake’s dogmatic assurance. Certainly his “firm perswasion” that he understands better than most the certain consequences of not changing radically our fundamental patterns of thinking and behaving comes on strong. Yet his prophetic enthusiasm derives directly from his conception of imaginativeness—the capacity for the deliberate creation of provisional faith—as inherent in every human being. To imagine is to hypothesize probable future consequences of particular actions in the present. The dishonest man either falsifies probable consequences or tries to conceal the fact that consequences of some kind are inevitable. Which brings us back to honesty as the sole requirement for prophecy.

The nature of Blakean prophecy may be illuminated by the contrast between his realism and William Hogarth’s, whose visual series such as Industry and Idleness as originally produced possessed many literary qualities.⁶³ First Hogarth (1697 - 1764) painted the pictures and after a time he had engraved copies of them made. (Some of [Page 70] these engravings were made in the workshop of the engraver Basire, to whom Blake was apprenticed for seven years (1772-1779), during which time he worked on many plates for and with Basire.) To the engravings were added titles and often verses. The engraving was then prefaced by an engraved “subscription ticket” for the potential buyer with explanations of Hogarth’s artistic, political, or moral intentions in the series. Publication for sale of the set of prints was usually followed by a detailed written commentary, explaining the prints’ meaning, first for French readers, and later for English readers as well.

Late in life Hogarth published an interesting book, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), highly regarded in the eighteenth century, in which he discussed the nature and techniques of painting. For our purposes two passages are peculiarly interesting because they bring into sharp focus issues relevant to Blake’s purposes in his graphic art, and also pose some significant differences between visual and verbal expression.

It is strange that nature hath afforded us so many lines and shapes to indicate the deficiencies and blemishes of the mind, whilst there are none at all that point out the perfections of it beyond the appearance of common sense and placidity. Deportment, words, and actions, must speak the good, the wise, the witty, the humane, the generous, the merciful, and the brave. Nor are gravity and solemn looks always signs of wisdom: the mind much occupied with trifles will occasion as grave and sagacious an aspect, as if it was charged with matters of the utmost moment. (131)

Very handsom faces of almost any age, will hide a foolish or a wicked mind till they betray themselves by their actions or their words: yet the frequent aukward movements of the muscles of the fool’s face, tho’ ever so handsom, is apt in time to leave such traces up and down it, as will distinguish a defect of mind upon examination: but the bad man, if he be an hypocrite, may so manage his muscles, by teaching them to contradict his heart, that little of his mind can be gather'd from his countenance, so that the character of an hypocrite is entirely out of the power of the pencil, without some adjoining circumstance to discover him, as smiling and stabing [sic] at the same time, or the like. (125-26)

[Page 71] Hogarth depicts only the surfaces of contemporary social practices. Blake reveals the effects of invisible sociological and psychological forces, and the disguised pressure of sensual and spiritual biases in himself and his readers, judging what these might lead to. He alerts each member of his audience to the links between external events and impulses of his or her inmost being. Like his contemporaries Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Jane Austen, Blake consistently employed his imaginative power to awaken his audience to their realities of current life; like them he was an idealistic realist, for he wanted to improve the lives of his readers— in his case specifically to make them aware of their fallen condition and the possibility of regenerating themselves. Blake’s religion impelled him to seek out what churned beneath the surface of ordinary life.

Blake’s specific aim led him to develop more complex overarching aesthetic forms than his contemporaries: in a variety of ways, he presents us with the semblance of a familiar literary form and then subverts our expectations. He first used this self-betraying form in All Religions are One, where he deployed the method of empiricist argument to reveal its incapacity to say anything worthwhile about religious matters. Fully evolved, the same use of misleading form produces some of the densest complexities of Milton and Jerusalem. More simply, but quite effectively, he adapts the approach in Songs of Experience by offering the dramatic monologue of an anonymous speaker, the ethical ambiguity of whose words makes it difficult for a reader to accept his judgments as simply ambiguous. Without pretentious exaggeration, this effect may be compared to the effect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which in subverting the conventional form of revenge tragedy compels us to wrestle with the provocative enigma of the protagonist. The common ground in lyric and tragedy is self-betraying form, Blake’s most persistently repeated structuring device throughout his career.

The inversion of familiar form is obvious in Thel, which seems if not mythical at least like a fairy tale. It tells the story of a very young woman who, oppressed with the thought that her life is without purpose, converses with a lily, a cloud, and a clod of clay, trying to discover an acceptable meaning to her existence. Finally she is allowed to visit the land of death, and when she reaches her own grave plot, with a shriek she flees back to her sister shepherdesses and mother, Mne. Seraphim, in the vales of Har. The key here is what I've called the “Rintrah effect.” The poem itself does not permit us to evaluate [Page 72] with certainty the significance of Thel’s unhappiness. It provides us with no sure knowledge of who Mne. Seraphim and her daughters may be or of what kind of place the vales of Har may be. As terms invented by Blake there can be no certainty as to their meaning, which means that we cannot be certain what the significance of Thel’s departure from and return to her sisters is, or, to oversimplify, whether she is a spoiled teenager or a young woman genuinely seeking wisdom. Are the vales of Har an idyllic refuge from reality, or an earthly paradise? Who is Mne. Seraphim? Academics of course speculate on the relevance of Blake’s possible sources, but Blake did not write for academics. He tried to compel ordinary readers to use their imaginations to figure out what these dubious terms might signify. He evokes possibilities, not a search for certainty.

This deliberate interpretive uncertainty is the source of the poem’s fascination, which is enhanced by the stylistic contrast of its conclusion (plate 8) with all that has gone before: in the dark mysterious underworld of Thel’s grave plot, a voice from the pit that may be her own poses violent, complex, and frightening questions about the senses and human perceptions (Figure 24).

Figure 24.

Figure 24. The Book of Thel, Copy O, plate 8. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

Until this point in the narrative, the poem has been extraordinarily gentle, delicate, and quiet in its exploration of life at its most transient, with Thel’s naïve curiosity met by kindly, unaggressive responses that do their best to help her. Everything in this major portion of the poem leaves the impression of a fresh, transient, beautiful, and loving natural world and serves to emphasize that God cherishes every portion of the natural world down to its feeblest and most evanescent elements, such as the infant worm and the disappearing drop of dew. At the bottom of plate 8, by contrast with the severity of the questions, the erotically charged vignette of children playfully riding a serpent returns the reader to that loving world. The vignette also suggests that Thel’s awakening sexual desire is not necessarily something to be “fled” (pl. 8, 22).

Thel is, in fact, a dramatic celebration of what we call the biosphere, as divinely approved and animated. This is the foundation of Blake’s religious faith. The human individual inhabits an environment that is beautifully and delicately and, above all else, vitally physically coherent, interconnected, and characterized by gentleness, generosity, affection, pleasure, hope, and interdependencies that facilitate the exercise of these lovely [Page 73] and gracious qualities of being and relationship. Blake’s religion is embodied in the simplest and most elementary processes of physical life, even though these do not include much knowledge or self-understanding. The lily cannot explain her pleasure in being eaten, the cloud the delight of the evanescence of his love, nor the clod of clay her joy in being the slimy, disregarded, foundation and maternal caretaker of seemingly trivial forms of life such as the helpless worm. Understanding of this divine life is the task of human beings—and such understanding is for Blake the foundation of true, non-institutionalized religion.

Religious consciousness, that is to say, is based on appreciation for the wonderful beauty of the web of natural life in which our earth is wrapped. For Blake true religion and the natural are not antagonistic: the former is full of appreciation that the latter is the only proper environment of humans who have realized their inherent divinity. The biosphere is the only environment that is adequate to the full capacities of the truly human, or perhaps one should say, only the biosphere allows full exercise of the wonderfully beautiful potency of humankind’s organizing capacities, its infinite creative power.

Blake’s demonstration of this is the poem Thel. Lilies, clouds, clods of clay do not speak. Blake imagines them speaking, even of being conscious of their limitations in understanding themselves and their world, and his imagining enables human readers to imagine all these vividly. Without humans, as on earth a million years ago, there was a web of life but no biosphere. The name “biosphere” is not merely the sign of the biosphere but also the physical manifestation (in print or sound) of the self-awareness that is the fullness of life because it opens the way to possibilities of more and richer and even new kinds of life and therefore new kinds of productively vital interrelationships. This is why Blake says “Where man is not nature is barren” (Marriage pl. 10): even the richly vital life of simple nature that Thel enables us to imagine is relatively “barren” as against life processes we can imagine and realize that we have not yet imagined.

All this of course requires that we address the uncertainties provoked by the behavior of Thel herself, but before we turn to those difficulties we must recognize that in reading The Book of Thel we engage ourselves in a work of verbal and visual imagining that at the same time is an expression of religious imagining: it is the articulation of a [Page 74] faith that both the natural non-human environment of the earth we inhabit, and we ourselves as complex psychosomatic organisms with mental powers, manifest in ways beautiful and inspiring that this existence possesses a “spiritual” dimension. Here “spiritual” designates dynamic potencies that we and our natural environment possess and that cannot be properly understood through merely rational analysis and description. The imaginativeness embodied in verbal and visual artistry carries us beyond what reason enables us to understand by appealing to our power both to imagine and to create possibilities of real experience that we have never had and that may, indeed, be impossible.

Figuring out what Blake’s dubious terms might signify is tantalizing because the lily, the cloud, and the clod of clay are wonderfully imagined—we feel that if such things could talk, they would speak as they do here. Especially appealing is that each displays an absence of Thel’s self-consciousness that gives rise to her questioning. Here we are truly down to earth where there can be no metaphysical answers to queries about ultimate purpose—only factual reports of what is done and what happens. All three, however, emphasize the transitory nature of their lives, and how they live for others without sacrificing themselves. They stress the opposite—to them, their unimportance and their evanescence are totally fulfilling. Here Blake is building up exactly the understanding of life that his younger (and purportedly atheistic) contemporary, Percy Shelley, insisted upon: nothing in the universe endures except evanescence.⁶⁴ For both poets, perpetual transformation is the fundamental fact of life and is a cause for joy, not lamentation.

In fact, Thel exemplifies a tendency amongst poets (and painters of Blake’s era such as J. M. W. Turner) to celebrate the essence of life as mobility and as fluidly transparent, powerful because of its continuously transformative insubstantiality. These artists conceive of life as the energy of pure process, and none embraces this vision more passionately than Blake. His very choice of Thel’s protagonist as a girl just turning to womanhood illustrates his consistent imaging of diversely supple and almost invisible changefulness as the essential manifestation of the most powerful and enduring vitality. Evaporating and condensing moisture is life. The massively petrific rigidity of The Book of Urizen dramatizes how death-oriented are the rational creations of modern culture.

Yet, ironically, Thel points herself toward Urizenic self-terrorizing with her quest [Page 75] for rational answers, for simplified, abstract explanations of the apparently pointless translucent fecundity of life. That ceaseless energy can be understood only through willing participation in the “meaninglessness” of its continuous evanescence. That we today are Thels is revealed by the sympathy we feel for her horror at the vision of her ultimate down-and-dirty dissolution into sustenance delicious to worms. Why shouldn't she shriek and flee at what she beholds? We do.

THEL’s Motto,

Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?

Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:

Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?

Or Love in a golden bowl?

(pl. 1, Figure 25)

Figure 25.

Figure 25. The Book of Thel, Copy O, plate 1, “Thel’s Motto.” Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

However one answers Thel’s provocative questions (I think Henry James was dead right about the last), we ought to consider the opportunity Blake offers: there are lots of poetic eagles, but few poetic moles. What frightens Thel and makes us uneasy is physical dissolution—even though we may intellectually understand that it is a necessary consequence of livingness. But true vitality for Blake is not an endless stretching out of time but the timelessness of Eternity. “Eternity Exists and All things in Eternity” (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 563) is probably Blake’s most significant assertion and his primary claim upon our attention in a post-secular era. In fact, only since his time have we begun to be able to imagine infinity and eternity, to liberate the words from the realm of vague mysticism, to grasp that they may denote super-dimensions of experiential life, considerations that are enormously valuable because they challenge traditional thinking about space and time. All of Blake’s art aims at forcing us toward discovering how infinity and eternity may be understood as practically meaningful in daily life.⁶⁵

It is important that Blake’s freest spirit, Oothoon, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, is a woman—she embodies imagination and seeks possibilities of intensified reality, which ultimately is the attainment of eternity. Of all Blake’s ideas, ETERNITY [Page 76] is least effectively commented upon by critics, though it is a “most pernicious Idea” to deny it (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 563) because it is the essence of life. In the intensity of living experience, Oothoon is eternalized, that is, freed from time. The experience of timelessness is the realization of self through release of self into what is not self to the enrichment of both. Mental becomes bodily and vice-versa—a possibility that realized makes possible further possibilities. What could not be predicted is made a vital part of one’s self-organization. Eternity is the condition in which an impulse of energy is fully completed, and this requires imagination. Eternity can only be imagined because it is the ultimate reality.

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1.5. Chapter 5.
Visions of the Daughters of Albion

The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate <Uncurbed> in their Eternal Glory (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 564).

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) is the most original, powerful, and currently relevant of Blake’s prophecies before The [First] Book of Urizen (1794), yet over the years most critics have evaded confronting the many difficult issues the poem raises. There are now two outstanding commentaries, Robert Essick’s the more recent, making fine use of the elegant Huntington Library copy⁶⁶ and developing the splendid analysis by him, Morris Eaves, and Joseph Viscomi in Blake: The Early Illuminated Books (volume 3 of the six-volume series published by the William Blake Trust, ed. David Bindman). But even these do not fully engage with the deepest difficulties of the prophecy or with its astonishing applicability of Oothoon’s rape (and, Bromion supposes, [Page 78] pregnancy) to twenty-first century circumstances.

First, to ease into these matters, I suggest there are valuable contrasts to be made between Blake’s poem and G. B. Shaw’s wonderful Man and Superman published a century later (1903), because both are attacks on the institution of marriage; Blake’s goes deeper because, although profoundly religious, his focus is the sacrament of marriage. Second, at the risk of seeming impudent or frivolous, I ask of Blake’s poem, who is Mrs. Albion? The poem is of the visions of Albion’s daughters, so we know their paternity, but not their maternity, even though the prophecy focuses on female sexual desire. These are not idle issues today, when more than a third of the children born in America are born out of wedlock. Blake’s prophecy, in short, is focused on one of the most distinctive features of contemporary culture.

I know of no European poem before Visions (or after, for that matter) that celebrates the insistence of a raped woman (Oothoon) that the violence done to her has not dishonored her in the slightest, and that her purity of body, mind, and soul is entirely intact. More—she endeavors to persuade the man she loves of these truths by exposing her body to savage injury and uninhibitedly proclaiming her intense love, spiritual and physical, for him, even offering to prove the utter unselfishness of her affection by bringing to him for his sexual pleasure attractive young women whose coupling she will watch with delight in his pleasure. Tragically, she has fastened her affections on a man (Theotormon) utterly impotent, although Oothoon gamely keeps trying to arouse him. This personal story is simultaneously a dramatization of socio-political relations between Albion (England), of whom Theotormon is representative, and the now self-liberated colonies, recently established as an independent nation, Oothoon being identified as “the soft soul of America” (pl. 4): it is the sorrowing daughters of Albion whose visions the poem recounts. While the political symbolism of the prophecy is overt, Visions never sags into mere allegory, and political references are deployed to illuminate the personal story, not the reverse.

How and why Blake works this reversal of what modern ideologically oriented critics expect appears in the character of the rapist, Bromion, who is given no geographical-nationalistic identification, because he embodies the spiritual/economic disease with which both England and America, that is, modern culture, are infected. For [Page 79] Blake rape, physical personal sexual violation, denial of the humanity of another person, is the foundational rejection of one’s own humanity that gives rise to attempts to enslave. Enslavement is the extension into social life of the individual pathology manifested in rape. To talk about slavery, as many Europeans were doing in 1793, Blake felt was to speak abstractly and thereby to obscure the terrible destructiveness of human individuality that is the deepest horror of enslavement. Condemning “slavery” is all too likely to suggest that its evil is multiplied by its extent. Blake felt, along with people like Frederick Douglass, that that view dangerously jeopardized recognition that the deepest horror of slavery is what it does to each enslaved individual.

The narrative of Visions is simple. Oothoon, wandering in the vales of Leutha, sadly yearning for Theotormon, hesitates to pluck a “Marygold” to comfort herself, wondering:

Art thou a flower! Art thou a nymph! I see thee now a flower;

Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!

To which the Marygold replies:

pluck thou my flower . . .

Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight Can never pass away.

(pl. 4)

The final words, echoing a Proverb of Hell, complete the expression of Blake’s concept of eternal life—not the endless endurance of a particular entity but its endless regeneration through its exercise of the energy of “the soul of sweet delight.” For Blake, the soul is not a thing but a mode of behaving. The marigold that replaces this one will physically be different but as an object and a giver of delight it will be similar. This is why seeing the marigold as both flower and nymph is good, imaginative perception. In giving human delight to Oothoon the insensate plant acts the part of a generous little goddess, thus not sacrificing herself but fulfilling herself beyond her purely natural being—a perfect image of Oothoon’s loving to which the impotent Theotormon cannot [Page 80] respond.

Oothoon plucks the marigold, places it between her breasts, crying “I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks,” and “Over the waves she went in wing'd exulting swift delight” (pl. 4). But suddenly Bromion “rent her with his thunders” (pl. 4), then boasts:

behold this harlot here on Bromions bed,

And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid;

Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:

Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:

They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:

Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent:

Now thou maist marry Bromions harlot, and protect the child

Of Bromions rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons time

(pls. 4-5)

This speech fully identifies Bromion in the fused role of rapist-slave-owner, a role far more important than any mere ideological commitment. Blake certainly favored American democracy, and believed that its emergence in France foretold the overthrow of autocratic monarchies everywhere. But he did not blind himself to the fact that slavery, particularly slavery founded on skin color, was far more widespread in America than in England. Bromion’s thunderings cannot be identified solely with either Europe or the Americas, nor can they be ascribed, as many recent commentators have tried to do, with either a political left or right. Like any successful modern entrepreneur, Bromion’s culture is international modernism, and his religion is ruthless exploitation of other human beings for personal financial profit. Rapists, like hedge-fund operators, tend to be indifferent to ideological distinctions.

Essick is absolutely correct in commenting on such matters that it is a mistake to deny that Blake was a man of his time and attribute to him knowledge that was not available 200 years ago. But it is equally necessary to recognize that Blake adheres to his own definition of a prophet, as an honest man who offers a personal evaluation of the [Page 81] consequences of present attitudes, actions, and ambitions. His prophecies such as Visions endeavor to articulate the practical significance (which does not exclude the ethical significance) of the actual lives of the people of his time. He was not much interested in past history, nor in political ideologies, nor in philosophical theorizing, but very much interested in revealing the current practice and true value and consequences of art and religion. That perspective, given his life-long participation in some of the most important socio-economic innovations of his era, enabled him to attain some penetrating insights into the full implications of what was really going on in the life of his time—in which many of the most significant features of modern culture were first becoming visible.

It is not therefore surprising, as Essick admirably demonstrates, that in many ways the most interesting features of Visions are its psychological portraits of its major characters.⁶⁷ Yet the action of the poem seems dramatically unbalanced, dominated by Oothoon. After the rape, Bromion refers contemptuously to Oothoon as a harlot, suggesting, apparently to Theotormon, that he may marry her and bring up Bromion’s child, but primarily claiming that his act has given him slaveholding dominion over the new world—which might seem the truth if Oothoon is “the soft soul of America,” and her “soft American plains are” his (pls. 4-5). Theotormon, in the first exhibition of his impotence, returns no answer. “Rent” (the word used for Bromion’s rape of Oothoon) by interior storms, he only “folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair / Bound back to back in Bromions caves,” while Theotormon at the entrance “sits wearing the threshold hard / With secret tears” (pl. 5). Theotormon enfolds, perhaps protects, Bromion’s enslaving while secretly deploring it, or perhaps wishing he had so acted.

beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore

The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money,

That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires

Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth

(pl. 5, Figure 26)

This is a powerful but difficult passage, beginning with a simile of sounds “like waves on a desart shore,” which are the “voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money.” The unusual yet effective comparison then (in characteristic Blakean fashion) metamorphoses into proliferating contradictory contrasts, as the slaves and children [Page 82] “shiver” in “religious caves” beneath the “burning fires of lust” that “belch incessant from the summits of the earth.” What at first seems an impossible topography upon which Theotormon sits is a vivid evocation of humans perverting into destructive chaos the coherence of natural energies that should be the foundation for productive social structures. Here the proliferating confusion of the valid and vivid comparison of voices (sound waves) to the pointless repetition of sea waves wasting themselves on a desolate shore, morphs into a geological dramatization of the psychological split of Bromion-Theotormon’s masculine potency into the conflicted negativities of tyrannous exploitation and utter impotence, neither capable of positive action, diverse kinds of destructiveness reflecting their fall into semi-humanness.⁶⁸

Figure 26.

Figure 26. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy J, plate 5. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

For Blake, anticipating Dostoevsky’s Double, Stevenson’s Jekyll/Hyde, and twentieth-century writers from Andreyev to Pinter, presents as two men what is in fact one, their dividedness made vivid by Oothoon’s integral unity that enables her loving soul to be manifested in her unabashed sexuality. But ultimately Oothoon is frustrated. The problem she cannot overcome, what makes the fallen world hell in Blake’s view, is that the unique integrity of every human being precludes any fundamental distinction of male from female. If we so distinguish, we have lost sight of the truly human. This view is a consequence of his conviction that every human is absolutely unique, a characteristic which is most easily indicated by referring to persons as souls: sex differences are secondary qualities of souls, and therefore separating humans on that basis confuses—disorganizes—understanding of what we really are. Blake’s insight goes far beyond Mary Wollstonecraft in his day or the professional feminists of ours because he perceives the problem not as social or as one of identity politics but as religious. He represents institutionalized religion as the ultimate source of a perversion of Christianity that is manifested in enslavement and exploitation of women and of children.

Institutionalized religion Blake sees as constructed on a division of male from female as we ordinarily distinguish the genders—that is, what is institutionalized is the fallen misunderstanding of the individual human soul. It is difficult to refute Blake historically, because it is not easy to find a religion, especially a monotheistic one, that has not established discriminations between male and female worshippers. For Blake such discriminations violate the unified integrity of each unique human soul by creating [Page 83] categories within the “human.” From there it is an easy move to further distinctions of skin color, social class, heredity, and the rest. What makes Blake’s rigor on this issue complex but very interesting is that his vision of the unique individual soul is not of a monolithic unity but of a perfectly integrated organization of diverse energies, an entirely vital being. His view, as later dramatized in Milton and Jerusalem, is that the human soul is Man (not male) whose emanation is Woman (not female). Woman is the flowing forth of Man (either male or female), what alone enables Man to mingle with one or more other unique souls, Men (male or female). What fallen vision sees as two beings is in fact one, with two potencies necessary to the productive existence of any unique being—the power of integrated independence, perfectly organized individuality, hence uniqueness, and the power of that unique being fruitfully to engage interdependently with one or more other unique souls. Feminists are understandably irked at Blake’s saying that in a redeemed world, when fallenness is overcome, there is no female will (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 562)—but his point is that redemption supersedes the fallacious male-female distinction with a unique unity that nevertheless is capable of emanating that uniqueness, exercising it in fruitful and enduring interactivity, so that the uniqueness of Man can be, and is, not static, not finished, but ever emanating—changing, and changing its environment.

What gives Visions special interest is the vigor with which it displays Blake’s religious conception of the truly human, a conception enabling him enthusiastically to endorse complete and exuberant freedom—especially for the exercise of our sexuality. This conception also makes possible his enforcing of a vision of the terribly corrupt condition of contemporary culture, which misuses my reason and your reason (this text first identifies “Urizen” as the primary cause of our perversion of our divine powers) to turn into frustration, murderousness, and slavery our most productive and joyous impulses, our fullest pleasures in mutual interchangings of the indissoluble uniqueness of our minds and bodies. Essick acutely notes the significance of “religious caves” in the passage in which this discussion originated:

The text now journeys into what lies “beneath” (5:7) Theotormon. Not surprisingly, we find there a landscape of waves and desolate shore resembling those represented on the frontispiece, which immediately [Page 84] becomes a simile for the “voice of slaves beneath the sun” (5:8). The relationships among the three main characters in Visions have their foundation in the same metaphoric (but more-than-metaphoric) connections among rape, slavery, and colonialism that underlie Blake’s rhetorical strategies and historical perceptions. Blake adds to this circle of reference an additional dimension, religion. Later passages will enrich his reference to “religious caves” (5:9), but suffice it to say at this juncture that Blake is here suggesting connections between institutionalized religion, as a mode of repression, and the destructive acts and institutions already explored by his narrative. Such repression lies at the origin “beneath” (the third use of the word within three lines) the “fires / Of lust” (5:9-10) that rise from the depths of the psyche and explode destructively, like lava from a volcano. The implication here that violence is the product of desire deformed by repression also lies behind one of the most controversial “Proverbs of Hell”: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, E 38).
(Essick, VDA 45)

Blake’s religious angle of approach to modern problems of repression, enslavement, and sexual abuse has many advantages, besides the obvious one of violently foregrounding their ethical dimensions. It enables him to say explicitly, as we see toward the end of Oothoon’s concluding speech, that institutionalized religion plays a significant role in these abominations (pl. 10), which indeed are the primary evidence of how institutionalization corrupts true religion, a point which few other socio-cultural commentators, whether psychologically (Freud) or sociologically (Marx) oriented, were willing to assert in such concrete detail. His religious approach permits Blake to combine the psychological and sociological—depicting, as few if any others have done, children suffering from the fires of lust of priests. But one could say in reverse that his religious approach simultaneously frees him from the limitations of contemporary cultural criticism—it is damage to the soul that he deplores, and the “soul” in common understanding is applicable to an individual of either sex of any age and of any culture.⁶⁹

Much of the originality and power of the latter part of Oothoon’s condemnation of [Page 85] the effects of institutionalized religion— effects economic, political, and psychological, from unjust taxation to the encouragement of masturbation—lies in the absoluteness of her celebration of free physical sexual intercourse as truly religious. Although critics have not noticed the fact, this is what Blake means when he speaks of Christ coming to do away with the “Heathen or Platonic Philosophy” (Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, E 664). Surely that philosophy has no more wonderful artistic articulation than Plato’s Symposium, the climax of which is Alcibiades’ story of his failure to seduce Socrates into physical sex, a failure that establishes Socrates’ superiority as the triumph of his intellect over his bodily passions. Christ in Blake’s view regards Socratic restraint as a perversion of the soul. In Blake’s view the healthy individual’s mental, or spiritual, energies cannot be separated from his bodily energies, but beyond that, in his view (which he takes to be Christ’s) the passions originate in and emanate from the intellect.

In The Ego and the Id, Freud states that “the work of thought must itself be supplied from sublimated erotic sources” (64). In his essay, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” he states that “the grandest cultural achievements” are “brought to birth by ever greater sublimations of the erotic drive. For what motive would induce man to put his sexual energy to other uses if by any disposal of it he could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? He could never let go of the pleasure and would make no further progress” (59). Blake saw no need for sublimation, saying “The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect from which All the Passions Emanate <Uncurbed> in their Eternal Glory” (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 564). He believed, like John Saltmarsh, that “the spirit of Christ sets a believer as free from Hell, the Law, and Bondage as if he were in Heaven, nor wants he anything to make him so, but to make him believe that he is so” (Saltmarsh 140).

That Blake would absolutely reject the idea of sublimation as espoused by Freud is plain enough. What is less clear, to me anyway, is whether Socrates as represented in The Symposium embodies an intellectual passion that is different from and superior to bodily passions, although Plato’s later work makes this reading quite dubious. Be that as it may, Oothoon is Blake’s most spectacular exemplar of uninhibited sexuality, his primary demonstration that no human action can be evil. “Evil” for him is negative, failure to act, the absence of energy, a hindering of life impulses.

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If we recognize that Oothoon’s empowerment by the marigold is a healthy, productive identifying of her religious vision with her sexuality that runs exactly counter to the anti-vital institutionalized religion of Bromion-Theotormon, the fury of her rhetoric and the extremeness of her actions must seem appropriate. Countering institutionalized religion’s verdict that her body is sullied by Bromion’s shameful violence, she calls upon eagles to tear open her bosom to display her purity (Figure 27).

Figure 27.

Figure 27. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, copy J, plate 6. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

As many critics have observed, the action may call up for the learned echoes of Prometheus’s torture. If so, however, one needs to remember that the Titan did not himself summon the vultures who preyed on his liver. And Blake was not writing for an academic audience; Oothoon’s act of personal mutilation is primarily appropriate in its shocking immediacy, in that only such repulsive, physically painful suffering is, in fact, an adequate response to the absurd cruelty of the accusation that she must share in her victimizer’s dirty vileness. A more subtle complexity is Oothoon’s using traps to capture maidens to be Theotormon’s sexual playmates. The justification for this deceit, which Blake’s Marriage condemns in food-gathering, is that here it accentuates the unselfishness of Oothoon’s sexual passion (which at its healthiest always includes pleasuring another); it is the very opposite of the masturbatory spectatorship that is encouraged by institutionalized religion and climaxes in the total impotence of Theotormon.

“All act is virtue” is a theologically respectable view, but it was especially important to Blake because of his identification of individual divinity with living energy. An early commentary of his sharply focuses the importance of the issue for him: refuting Edmund Burke’s claim that “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere. . . . men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters” (69), Blake asserts:

as I understand Vice it is a Negative—It does not signify what the laws of Kings & Priests have calld Vice . . . .

. . . all Act [<from Individual propensity>] is Virtue. To hinder another is not an act it is the contrary it is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinderd. for he who hinders another omits his own duty. . . .

. . . the or[i]gin of this mistake in Lavater & his cotemporaries, is, They suppose that Womans Love is Sin. in consequence all the Loves & Graces with [Page 87] them are Sin

(“Annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man,” E 601)

The final sentence that at first glance appears a world-class non sequitur is concretely illustrated by Visions. Rape is a “hindering,” not an act, and though Bromion may thunder, the impotence of his Theotormon-half reveals the negativity of his repulsive non-act. What surfaces here may appear a contradiction in Blake’s understanding of sexual differentiation unless one adopts his perception of human beings as most essentially “souls.” “Soul” can refer to either a male or a female because the term is gender-neutral.

“They” (presumably kings, priests, and Burkeians) believe woman’s love is “sin.” This strange man’s-love-good, woman’s-love-bad comes about, as we will discover in Urizen, because the first female is produced by man’s self-division. Man divides himself and reasons that what he has made separate is inferior, dangerous, bad. In fact, he has damaged himself by mistakenly violating his unique and complex unity: the real man for Blake is a distinct individual, not an abstraction. His self-separating is a non-act, a negation, a diminishment rather than a fulfillment. The “female,” whatever she may be called by heads of institutions, kings, popes, CEOs, is not abstractly sinful but evidence of male impotence, when by hindering of self and by not-acting Man allows his unity to divide. This omitting of man’s duty to his true self (not his culturally acquired false “selfhood,” in Blake’s terminology) puts any “female” in a difficult position while endowing her with spurious but dangerous power, as appears in later prophecies. Oothoon, however, courageously attacks the contradiction head on—charging that the institutionalizations created by self-division distort the truth of genuine religion, which is entirely active because it is the offering of eternal life.

Oothoon is helpful for understanding Blake’s conception of Urizen, developed in the later prophecy bearing his name, because the Bromion-Theotormon figure illustrates Blake’s distinction between division as bad and differentiation as good. The self-division that Urizen enacts in the later prophecy destroys the complex interplay of multiple energies that constitute the integrity of each unique soul. The substitute unity Urizen would impose on everything is inert, not “fluctuating,” not alive, not hospitable to the uniqueness created and sustained by a vital play of forces. It is but the unity of a stone— [Page 88] literally a “petrific abominable chaos” (pl. 3). All a stone can do is fall apart, divide itself into separate apparently singular entities, which in fact are merely the original lifelessness self-diminished. As the process repeats itself, first with Urizen and Los, then with Los and Enitharmon, male and female, the fragments separate more and more from the vital interactivity that is eternal life.

Oothoon’s desire to be united with Theotormon is a desire to interact with what is different from her, which she conceives as an action of unadulterated pleasure because it will produce an increase of the vital complexity of both. Whereas the marigold can only, though joyously, replicate itself by giving of itself, the implication of Oothoon’s impulse is that she will be enhanced by the consummation of their mutual love—which is evidenced by her willingness to find other sexual playmates for her lover. Oothoon embodies the concept of differentiation as making possible augmentation—change, growth, enhancement—of the individual self through love. This brings into the sharpest possible focus the foundation of Blake’s condemning of institutionalization of every sort, although most importantly religion—and, of course, specifically marriage. I know no passages in English literature to match the horrificness of Blake’s depictions in the latter part of Visions of how marriage may pervert love. The uniqueness that is the essence of life, and most intensely realized in human life, can be sustained and advanced only through the organization of relationships made possible by complete freedom of the individuals who relate. This certainly strikes many people as a hopeless paradox— so far have we fallen. Because, in fact, this is what we must have faith in if we truly truly believe in freedom of individual human beings. Of course in the modern world everybody pretends to believe in political freedom, intellectual freedom, sexual freedom—but pretense is the opposite of faith.

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1.6. Chapter 6.
Blake and Secularism: The Book of Urizen

Forms must be apprehended by Sense or the Eye of Imagination. Man is All Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in him (Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, E 664)

The Book of Urizen is the climax of Blake’s early prophecies, and the most magnificently illuminated of all his poems. It depicts what Blake perceived as the actual condition of human life in Europe in 1794, the beginning of the modern age, which a century later Chekhov judged with a simple harshness few of us can protest against today:

“You were quite right just now! The sturgeon wasn't fresh!”

These words, in themselves so commonplace, for some reason aroused Gurov’s indignation: they seemed somehow dirty and degrading. What savage manners, what awful faces! What wasted nights, what dull days devoid of interest! Frenzied card playing, gluttony, drunkenness, [Page 90] endless conversations about the same thing. Futile pursuits and conversations about the same topics taking up the greater part of the day and the greater part of man’s strength, so that he was left to live a curtailed, bobtailed life with his wings clipped—an idiotic mess—impossible to run away from or escape— one might as well be in a madhouse or a convict settlement.

(“The Lady with the Dog” 295)

Blake’s purpose was to enable his audience to understand the causes for such personal unhappiness, and why so many individuals are unable to lead prosperous and satisfying lives. He identified the causes as both sociological, the persistence of widespread political and economic injustices, and psychological, perverted conceptions of what constitutes individual mental health and happiness. He believed, however, that understanding of the true causes for current unhappiness could lead to its eradication, in short, that modern European culture was desperately sick, but that an effective cure was ready at hand.

The root cause for the sickness of modern culture Blake identified as its overvaluation of rationality, especially its accepting of rationality as the sole valid basis for judging the worth of establishing and sustaining all human institutions. The damage caused by this overvaluation was, first, that it led to a denial of the absolute uniqueness of every human being, inevitably enforcing uniformities of thought and behavior that degraded every human being’s most essential characteristic—his or her individuality. Second, this deification of rationality produced disastrous misunderstandings of how human minds and bodies actually function. Humans, in fact, are totally psychosomatic creatures, their bodily and mental functions are inseparable, and modern culture’s commitment to pure rationality upsets this holistic organization, inevitably disrupting the effective cooperative functioning of diverse powers, with the consequence that both human interrelationships and the relations of humans to the natural environment are distorted.

The Book of Urizen depicts the cascadingly disastrous effects of modern culture’s attempts to construct all its institutions on the sole foundation of rationality. These attempts Blake perceives as originating in a rejection of the Christian conception of [Page 91] human life as a free commitment by individuals to enjoyment of the infinite and eternal energies of the universe. In 1794 the limited support for Blake’s view was almost entirely confined to small sects of Protestant Christians. Two centuries later the situation is quite different. In most areas of contemporary intellectual culture Blake’s attitudes and ideas at least appear to point in an acceptable direction. For literary critics and theoreticians, however, Blake’s religious bias makes him unworthy of attention. But Blake is now firmly established as a major artist/poet in the Anglophone tradition, which provides an aesthetic basis for taking seriously The Book of Urizen’s attack on academic critics’ faith in the immaculate secularity of their discipline.

“Urizen” may be pronounced in a variety ways, suggesting the considerable range of the title’s references, but the normal fashion of pronouncing “Urizen” is “your reason.” And the prophecy is composed so as to speak, not as do most poems, novels, and dramas, to a general audience, but to each reader as a distinct individual. The difference is most easily illustrated through a contrast with any comic play, which is successful when everybody laughs at the same time. Critical observation that Urizen “comes directly at you” has been applied also to the stunning graphic features of the prophecy, the earliest of such commentaries I know being W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential analysis of some forty years ago.⁷⁰

The peculiar effect of Urizen, of feeling an artistic work of such dramatic violence directed squarely at oneself, arises from Blake’s deepening and intensifying of the argument he initiated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—that institutionalization of religion turns it into a pretence, a source of spiritual hypocrisy, conscious and unconscious. The core of this argument is that rational institutionalization necessarily destroys the uniqueness of human beings—the foundation of all true religion. The Book of Urizen reveals the internal mechanisms of this destructive process, which is simultaneously Blake’s version of the “fall of man.” In his telling, the “fall” is caused by the rise of religious institutions that prevent individual spiritual fulfillment.

Of the primeval Priests assum'd power,

When Eternals spurn'd back his religion;

(pl. 2, Figure 28)

Figure 28.

Figure 28. The Book of Urizen, copy G, plate 2. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress. Copyright (c) 2011 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

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This preludic opening defines precisely the nature of Blake’s version of the fall of man: the primeval Priest’s assumed power makes clear that the institutionalization of reason as sole authority over the psychosomatic structure of my mind is an assumption—both a real usurpation of power and a supposition of dubious validity. What power? Psychological. For the “Eternals” clearly are psychic forces, of whom elsewhere Blake speaks as the “Giants” of our minds, thus massively representing his conviction of the inseparability of mental and physical energies (Marriage pl. 16). The institutionalization of my reason thus separates this particular eternal energy from the integral unity with other such forces that makes me a singular human being. I “fall” when I treat my reason as independent from (instead of interdependent with) the interplay of diverse mental energies that constitute my individuality. I fatally damage the dynamic integrity of my wholeness of being by subtracting from my non-rational powers the support of reason, while simultaneously isolating my rational power from mutually productive interactions with other energies. So isolated, my rational power becomes a cancerous parody of its true vitality, madly producing ghastly simulacra of real life processes.

Why should I do such a horrible thing to myself? The immediate and specific answer supplied by The Book of Urizen is that to my reason when isolated it appears that my other mental powers, the other psychic giants, “fluctuat[e],” and only “live in unquenchable burnings” (pl. 4), that is, they constantly seem to my reason painfully to consume themselves by ever changing, “living” without stability because always self-transforming. Good point here. So far as I reason effectively, my reasoning does not “fluctuate”; it establishes stabilities I rely on, consistent systems, durable structures of practical value. What was rationally coherent yesterday should be rationally coherent today. When I reason, I try to establish relations, connections, and orderings that are not merely temporary but are more or less always true—that is why I rely on reason. This reliability depends on my reason working primarily with what has happened to me, what I have thought, have felt, have perceived, have experienced. Blake correctly associates reason with the past and memory. My reason provides what I have established as my personality into which new perceptions may be fitted, usually changing it. Reason is the basic already-established organization that enables me profitably to enter into new experiences that may modify my self-organization, for example, permitting “maturation.”

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To operate properly, however, reason must work in conjunction with other non-rational mental powers. G. K. Chesterton described exactly what The Book of Urizen is about when he observed that “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason” (Orthodoxy, ch. 2). A rationally constructed institution is one that so far as is possible eliminates from its structure whatever is not reasonable. If we observe that no significant theologian or spiritual leader has ever suggested that reason alone can bring one to religious truth, Blake’s condemnation of all rational institutionalizations of religion takes on cogency. This opens a deeper question: Why, then, do religious people create religious institutions? Why should anyone use some of his powers to damage himself? My answer (which I believe is in accord with Blake’s thinking, because he so consistently distinguishes humankind from the rest of nature) is that anything empowered with life is automatically empowered to injure itself. A rock can't get itself into much trouble, can't hurt itself, but an animal can. And a super-live, imaginative human being can very easily and very deeply bereave himself. The Book of Urizen teaches that our worst injuries are self-inflicted, that it is, ironically, the tremendous potency of our imaginative self-conscious vitality that makes it possible for us mistakenly to choose to “fall,” to bereave ourselves.

Urizen comes into being at the beginning of the prophecy as a total negation, a complete unreality—“a shadow of horror . . . risen / In Eternity! Unknown, unprolific! / Self-closd, all–repelling,” an “abominable void / This soul-shudd'ring vacuum” (pl. 3). In separating himself from any interactivity with other Eternals, Urizen becomes nothing, but, simultaneously, he disorganizes them, threatens to make them nothing because they exist through the activity of their mutual interdependence. He is exactly a “shadow of horror . . . / In Eternity” (pl. 3).

The response of the other “Eternals” to Los’s failure to do anything more for Urizen than temporarily confine and isolate him drives home the profound importance of interdependence among independently unique beings. The Eternals impose the “Tent” of “Science” (pl. 19) upon Los and Urizen, isolating them from eternity, and guaranteeing that what they will produce is a multiplying of divisions assuring an increase in disorganization rather than a recovered integral wholeness of human life. The new life [Page 94] energy produced by division, dramatized in the figure of Orc, is the product of the sexual coupling of a divided individual, Enitharmon separated from Los, and therefore cannot inaugurate regeneration—only increase the spread of false life, fallen life, vital energy not effectively organized and thus causing further disorganization. Blake’s point is to make us realize that each of us can be saved only by ourselves, that there is no possibility of salvation from anywhere outside: we are the only sources for our individual regeneration. Here the personification of the diverse powers each of us possesses dramatizes the paradox that I alone can establish the integrity of individuality that is healthy, that indeed allows me eternal life (just as I alone had the power to disintegrate my unique individuality) but that simultaneously opens the possibility of real, healthy, productive interaction with other absolutely unique human beings. We can truly live only interdependently because each of us is truly independent, capable of unique self-integration—reflecting the fundamental Christian paradox that because Christ dwells within each of us as unique creatures we possess the power to live together, not in some temporary utopia, but in eternity.

Blake’s accomplishment in The Book of Urizen is to enable his reader through text and graphics to imagine the significance of the experience of the “fall.” This requires him to represent the fall both objectively and subjectively. In appealing directly to “my reason” he enables me to imagine processes of self-perversion but in a form that allows me to perceive and evaluate them as Urizen’s. This unusual doubleness of imaginative vision includes his presentation of Los, fallen imagination, as unable to restore Urizen. Blake dramatizes how, in separating himself from the other eternal energies constituting humanness, Urizen, my reason, destroys the others’ positive effectiveness. Unfallenness is an interplay of diverse energies. So when Urizen has separated himself, Los’s efforts to restore him can do nothing but confirm his separateness, and in fact only draw Los into the process of separation. Instead of “curing” Urizen, Los spreads his disease of separateness, becoming separated from other Eternals, and carrying further the multiplication of divisions begun by Urizen, which become with Los the sexual division of humankind, leading to the creation of the dysfunctional family wherein parents and children are inevitably at war.

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Blake thus dramatizes the fall as essentially the self-destruction of the complexly dynamic organization that sustains the individual human being in an ongoing freedom of existence without any defined limits. It makes sense, therefore, that my reason is the cause of my self-injury, since it is a power that seeks to organize into fully practical effectiveness my emotions, perceptions, and imaginations, a power, that is to say, whose function puts it constantly in danger of restricting and confining the freedom it attempts to make effective. There is inevitably and always a tension between imagination, which goes beyond and expands existing limits, and reason, which assures the efficacious integration of new and old. The key feature in Blake’s approach is that his conceptions are built upon the principle of an integrity of diverse, even conflicting, energies as constituting the unified wholeness of each human being. So it is not surprising that he conceives of social formations in the same way. His thinking on these matters is in accord with the thinking of those who today specialize in the life sciences, who see most processes in the living world as complexly organized and as usually undergoing changes as they continue to function, being capable of self-transformations such as regeneration. Working from such premises, it is inevitable that different forms of imaginativeness should seem important to the successful functioning of human beings.

Here, against all critical precedent, I leap from the beginning of this terror-and torment-filled prophecy to the end of its coda, the Book of Ahania. This lamentation occurs after the narrative of Urizen’s son Fuzon’s attempt to kill his father, declaring “I am God . . . eldest of things,” concludes in failure, when Urizen murders Fuzon and crucifies his corpse. We then hear the voice of Ahania, Urizen’s female consort, lamenting his current rejection of her and remembering the joyous days of their early marriage.

5. I cannot touch his hand:

Nor weep on his knees, nor hear

His voice & bow, nor see his eyes

And joy, nor hear his footsteps, and

My heart leap at the lovely sound!

I cannot kiss the place

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Whereon his bright feet have trod,

But I wander on the rocks

With hard necessity.

6. Where is my golden palace

Where my ivory bed

Where the joy of my morning hour

Where the sons of eternity, singing

7. To awake bright Urizen my king!

To arise to the mountain sport,

To the bliss of eternal valleys:

8. To awake my king in the morn!

To embrace Ahanias joy

On the bredth of his open bosom:

From my soft cloud of dew to fall

In showers of life on his harvests.

9. When he gave my happy soul

To the sons of eternal joy:

When he took the daughters of life.

Into my chambers of love:

10. When I found babes of bliss on my beds.

And bosoms of milk in my chambers

Fill'd with eternal seed

O! eternal births sung round Ahania

In interchange sweet of their joys.

11. Swell'd with ripeness & fat with fatness

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Bursting on winds my odors,

My ripe figs and rich pomegranates

In infant joy at thy feet

O Urizen, sported and sang;

12. Then thou with thy lap full of seed

With thy hand full of generous fire

Walked forth from the clouds of morning

On the virgins of springing joy,

On the human soul to cast

The seed of eternal science.

13. The sweat poured down thy temples

To Ahania return'd in evening

The moisture awoke to birth

My mothers-joys, sleeping in bliss.

(pls. 5, 6)

The passionately satisfying and evocative sensuality of this lyric, shaped primarily from the Song of Solomon but drawing on every resource of the Bible that Blake can find to praise marital delight and fulfillment at its most ecstatic, is the ultimate dramatization of the significance of Urizen’s self-destructiveness in choosing to fall from earthly bliss into a despairing “shadow of Horror” (pl. 3). His choice, which in our rationalized culture each of us is all too likely to repeat, is the loss not of some vague after-life, some philosophic attainment of pure virtue or abstract wisdom. It is the loss of a sustained mutuality of mental and sensual pleasure with other human beings, which every one of us, from the simplest and least aggressive to the most complex and ambitious, recognizes instantly as something good and desirable. Blake’s name for this wonderful condition is Eternity. And “Eternity Exists and All things in Eternity” (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 563)—unless we use our reason to choose, instead, a pathological pseudo-temporal life of torture, torment, and despair. No analysis of The Book of Urizen— really of any of Blake’s prophetic poems—is complete if it fails to [Page 98] recall to its readers that loss of Ahania’s joy is our free choice, and that every minute particular of Blake’s artistry is directed to arousing our imaginative energies to not make Urizen’s hell of a mistake.

The foundation of Blake’s endeavor is commitment to the belief that the essential constituent of every portion of the universe is energy. Morton Paley offers an excellent survey of sources contributing to Blake’s belief, such as Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, and, more immediate in Blake’s acquaintance, the scientist Joseph Priestley; he also compares writers thinking along similar lines whom Blake probably didn't know, such as Kepler—“In the energy of the earth is the essence of the soul” (Paley 8). As valuable in another way is H. W. Piper’s The Active Universe of 1962, which never mentions Blake but describes with acuteness the rapidly spreading late eighteenth-century conviction that, as his title indicates, the universe was never stable and mechanically predictable but in essence totally and perpetually active. Nothing is of more importance to an understanding of Blake than to recognize that whenever he speaks of the “mental” or “spiritual,” the bodily is included in his term. Contrarily, when he speaks of the body, notably in sexual activity, he never thinks of it as separated from intellect or soul. In stark contrast, separation is fundamental to Urizen’s ghastly project.⁷¹

Energy Blake conceived as an organizing force; imagination venturing beyond established mental limits revels in the inadequacy of established rational orderliness. Freedom, the most dynamic form of organization, is “incomprehensible” to reason. Evidence of this is reason’s difficulty with contradictions. Reason, to begin with, is upset by contradictions; the highest order it can conceive is a place for everything, and everything in its place. Reason is in trouble when A and A’ are the same, when light is both particles and waves. My reason always tries to overcome unpredictability. Unfortunately in 1794 the greatest of all changes in scientific thinking was gathering force, soon to appear concretely in the concept of evolution—which puts unpredictability at the center of all things. Reason works from the past, from what has been known. Its vital task is to absorb new possibilities into established systems so they can become more effective in meeting new conditions. Reason therefore always simplifies, trying to “reduce” new discoveries into enhancements of established organizations.

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Reason seeks one law for lion and ox. If everything operates uniquely, how can there be rational order? In one sense, there cannot be: no scientist today makes the Enlightenment mistake of presuming that the universe is organized so as to be easily accommodated by conventional human rationality. Reason does plenty of good work, for instance in discovering structures that exist regardless of whatever it is to which they give form—the canoe that can be built of bark or aluminum. Reason seeks reductive simplifications of abstraction. So far as these enable us to use new awareness of real possibilities heretofore unimagined, they are tremendously useful.

But Blake was a Christian, and his Christianity was rooted in the Gospels, in which all of Christ’s acts and words focus not on doctrines and abstract ideas but on specific human relationships. These relationships are the exclusive focus of every important poem Blake wrote. His art is thus intensely focused because his faith that every human being is unique opens to the imagination the possibility of human interrelations more profound, complex, and dynamically fulfilling than any other relationships in the universe. Human imagination alone makes possible the untold satisfactions of human interdependencies. Because you and I are not merely different, but absolutely so (we even grow, develop differently), there exist possibilities of interrelationship between us that cannot be predicted. But they can manifest life at its most intense because they are premised on productive interaction of two complexly integral beings acting with perfect freedom. This interactive freedom reason can help to confirm and give definable structure to, but only if reason operates in the service of free relations between unique beings. The danger, dramatized by The Book of Urizen, lies in mistaking the valuable but lesser order of reason as more important than the seemingly anarchic but in fact more profound organization attainable by the imaginative willingness to go beyond all arbitrary limitations. This is why Blake always condemns any form of self-sacrifice, because sacrifice means inhibiting oneself, in some way weakening one’s integrated but ever-expanding individuality.⁷²

Hence his important proverb of hell: “The cut worm forgives the plow” (pl. 7). Any relationship of two beings is a colliding of forces, but so long as both are exercising uninhibitedly their uniqueness the damage can be, indeed always is, forgivable and forgiven, because the possibility of deep productive relationship can be realized only [Page 100] through complete freedom of action of every being. What Urizen never realizes is that true freedom and true forgiveness are inseparable. This understanding of totally uninhibited independence, which establishes the foundation for enriched interdependence, can never be attained by rationality itself. Forgiveness, which enhances the intensity of an interrelationship, is an act that originates in imagining and utilizing empathetic emotion, not reasoning. But after the act, reason may confirm and strengthen the imaginative/emotional impulses both to forgive and to welcome forgiveness.

This carries us to the heart of Blake’s claim that institutionalized religion, religion rationally organized, is a pretense of religion to destroy religion. True religion involves vigorous exercise of imaginativeness, which does not mean that it dismisses rationality or denies it a vital function. To do so would be to make Urizen’s mistake of separating himself from other eternal powers instead of differentiating himself from them. In any healthy human being reason and imagination cooperate and support one another, which is why Blake describes reason as the “outward circumference of Energy” (Marriage pl. 4). For Blake, as for Emily Dickinson, the “bounding line” (Descriptive Catalogue, E 550) of circumference is the shape energy takes, simultaneously establishing definiteness of form and identity and encouraging “leaps beyond” itself, opening new possibilities for change both in the integrated self and in the self’s new interrelationships.⁷³ Imagination is the energy that carries reason beyond its previous range of competent organizing power, presenting invitations to new forms for the exercise of rational organization, as when the probabilistic supersedes the syllogistic. Blake’s concept is a bit like Kuhn’s shifting paradigms.⁷⁴ Reason works industriously within one paradigm; after a time, it has everything neatly ordered, and so has trapped itself in what Blake calls the “same dull round” (No Natural Religion pl. b11), and is just shifting the positions of the goods on the shelf. What is needed then is a new paradigm that opens new fields in which reason can begin again to operate productively rather than repetitively.

For Blake a normal human is endowed with perfect equipment for the healthiest living conceivable. There are no inherent faults in our make-up, nor any produced by the passage of geological ages, as ecological psychologists now suggest. Any problems we have are entirely our personal creations right now. The diverse energies constituting our being work together efficiently until we choose to disrupt their activities. The mental [Page 101] energies of perceiving, emoting, reasoning, and imagining are distinctive but they function (unless distorted by Urizen) interactively, continuously flowing into and through one another, and all of them are equally deriving and inseparable from physical, bodily energies. So all our energies for Blake are properly libidinal, life-produced and life producing. This is why total sexual freedom for him is essential to every cultural enterprise, whereas for Freud “sublimation” of sexual impulse is necessary for any cultural “advance,” whatever that may mean. Freud, like Urizen, conceives intellectual and sexual activities as necessarily opposed. Blake conceives of intellect fostering sexuality—necessarily, because for him the integrity of a human individual is founded on the inseparability of physical and mental, body and soul. Urizen alone can create nothing but chaos and deathliness because he by himself can do nothing but separate, and then multiply his divisions, rather as rocks exfoliate. It may seem totally unreasonable to claim that the many are one and the one are many as the foundation of the international Christian community (as Paul does in Romans 12.5), yet using that paradox Blake is able to imagine that the healthiest human community would be one that reproduces on the social level the integral psychological structures of each of the unique individuals constituting it.

Why does Blake represent psychological conditions, movements, and actions in the form of human beings, reason or imagination as human-like figures? Most critics now agree that his purpose is not allegorical, but what he gains from this personification remains unclear. I suggest, first, that his personifications assist his audience in imagining mental capacities as possessed of substantive existence. This is important to Blake, because he is as committed as any contemporary neuroscientist to linking mental phenomena to bodily processes. Furthermore, nothing is more important to him than to have us recognize that all these capacities function properly only in continuous interconnection with one another. We get ourselves into trouble when reason and imagination are not functioning interactively—that interactivity being the primary expression of our unique individuality, the source of our particular life-energy. And of course because Blake attributes the “fall” of each of us to our purely personal choice of how to behave, the representation of mental processes as person-like entities helps to drive home our responsibility for the ethical consequences of our psychological choices. [Page 102] The sole cause for the separation of my reason from my imagination is my choice—the division is not in any way impersonal, is not a “natural” process but a consequence solely of my desire. The same is true of Los’s “confining” of Urizen; nothing compels my imagination to deny that the injury of the separation can be healed only by “cooperative” actions between Los and Urizen. Nothing compels my refusal to recognize, in my desire for a quick fix by Los, that regeneration of my wholeness requires productive interaction between the “healthy” and “diseased” because in fact they are inseparable processes constituting a properly functioning unique mind-body.

Given his commitment to the psychosomatic holism of each individual, it seems inevitable that Blake should be drawn into radical reassessments of the nature of the language out of which he created his poetry. Robert Essick, in one of the most important studies of recent years, has described with clarity and insight how Blake utilized and transformed diverse ideas about language—which at the end of the eighteenth century were proliferating spectacularly. By applying carefully a judicious understanding of twentieth-century theories and philosophies of language to his thorough knowledge of the earlier history of language-study, Essick is able to demonstrate how Blake’s use of now-unfamiliar linguistic speculations often illuminates vividly the special deployments of language that give such enduring originality to his poetry. Essick’s analyses of the attraction to Blake of the idea of what he calls the “motivated sign,” that a word (or image for that matter) bears a more than arbitrary relation to its referent, is particularly revealing, especially because it demonstrates the important influence on Blake of such forgotten proposals as Boehme’s for the “incarnational sign” (Essick 50-54) while simultaneously locating Blake’s approach to the subject within the then newly developing consensus that would produce modern linguistic studies.

One of Essick’s illuminating analyses shows how Urizen’s use of language, and the language used to describe the effects of his words and actions, embody (rather than merely refer to) the intrinsic destructiveness of his purposes. Thus the conclusion of the all-important “One law” speech of chapter 2, plate 4,

brings to the fore the political and hegemonic dimensions of semiotic systems. Like any other rule of law, grammar and the representational powers of arbitrary signs depend upon consensus backed by enforcement . . . . Urizen . . . is an [Page 103] eighteenth-century lexicographical reformer who, like Johnson, struggles against what he perceives to be semantic chaos. The weapon for both Urizen and Johnson is a magisterial book establishing the “one Law” of univocal meanings as the agency through which “One King” and “one God” (2:8) can project their rule.
(154)

Thus the oppression of one law for lion and ox is socially realized.

This line of analysis leads to Essick’s most important insight into the Blakean conception that underlies The Book of Urizen, a conception that the nature of this prophecy necessarily conceals, but that both Milton and Jerusalem fully develop: the insight is that for Blake the supreme human attainment is conversation. Conversation is of course exactly what Urizen in his monologic tyranny of a single uniformity continuously attempts to destroy, as does any dictator on whatever scale, whether it is a government prohibiting any gathering of more than four citizens or a CEO who tries to shut down gossip around the water cooler. What The Book of Urizen dramatizes is that the most essential freedom of individuals, and therefore the supreme exercise of the socially liberating power of their interactions, is embodied in their converse with one another.

Although this at first may seem a surprisingly modest ideal to oppose to the violences and disorganization of a world suffering from Urizenic repressive torments, I believe it explains a good deal about the widespread feeling (except among academic theorizers, monologists all) that Blake speaks to some essential needs of contemporary culture. An obvious if inconsequential illustration of the subversive potential in conversation is President George W. Bush’s frightened unwillingness to converse freely with people who disagreed with his policies. But the most important proof of our common awareness of its paramount social importance is the simple fact that our capabilities for conversation have increased astronomically. In a whole variety of ways, facilitated by hundreds of technological inventions, human beings today can, and do, converse with all kinds of persons with whom a century ago they could not have hoped to experience such free and easy communication. Cell phones, email, and all the rest sometimes drive one crazy, yet there can be no doubt that they make possible the enrichment of our humanness in the only way that that is possible—by enhancing the free [Page 104] interchange, emphatically not of mere messages but of conversation. Thus what Johann Gottfried von Herder first envisioned as the full realization of our diversely common humanity is now become a conceivable possibility with the near attainment of a one-culture planet.⁷⁵

Besides carrying forward Blake’s innovative revaluations of traditional rhetorical forms and initiating his fullest investigations into the potential meaningfulness—and hence utility—of ordinary language, The Book of Urizen also inaugurates his most penetrating rejections of seventeenth and eighteenth century scientific philosophizing, preeminently his refutations of Newton. Donald Ault’s book remains perhaps the best analysis of these refutations, in part because Ault recognizes that Blake was motivated by the perception that much in the Newtonian system was alluring to those like himself who desired a more imaginative approach. There can be no doubt that Newton remained a major negative focus for Blake’s developing ideas throughout his career: Ault aptly cites Blake’s last letter as evidence of his grasp of the isotropic nature of Newton’s absolute space and its (for Blake) wrong-headed implications about the nature of physical measurements. It is in the Book of Urizen thirty years earlier that Blake begins to make this “anti-Newtonianism” a major dramatic constituent in his attack on institutionalized religion.

“Urizen’s first act,” observes Ault, “is to create a void, which is, by nature, unmeasurable, since it is completely amorphous or continuous, completely homogenous and isotropic” (129). So “Urizen must first ‘divide’ the void and establish some kind of metrical units . . . before he can begin to measure” (130). But “[t]he syntax of this action”— “Times on times he divided, & measur'd / Space by space” (pl. 3)— “implicates Urizen as the victim as well as the perpetrator of division.” And as he “attempt[s] to spatialize time,” creating his “solid without fluctuation,” eliminating processes, his “reduction results in an extension of his units of measure into the realm of ethics and emotions: . . . . ‘One command, one joy, one desire, / One curse, one weight, one measure / One King, one God, one Law’” (Essick 130, citing pl. 4). In his later prophecies, starting with the Four Zoas, Blake substantially develops the contrast introduced here between rational systems able to fabricate only static institutions and the dynamically energetic systems created by imagination, which encompass more and more while also moving to ever [Page 105] increasing levels of organizational complexity (Ault 29). “Blake’s poetry requires the reader to be constantly shifting his perspective and never to be willing to settle on a finite solution to a problem. The basic form of Eternity for Blake is a constant expansion” (Ault 51).

These advances are begun in The Book of Urizen, because Blake’s “visionary poetry” more and more precisely and comprehensively describes, evokes, and evaluates both Eternity and the fallen world. His visionary poetry increasingly reveals why we lose sight of eternity as he seeks to redeem, or regenerate, his readers—not, as Ault puts it, merely to amuse them, or fill up their heads with abstract wisdom. Such visionary poetry as Blake’s must participate in our individual falsehoods and errors if it is to help us escape these products of our shared human weakness. Already in The Book of Urizen Blake’s poetry is concerned not with merely condemning Urizen but with helping us to understand how and why we pervert the wonderful power of reason. It is visionary poetry that enables us to perceive that the Last Judgment is not the silly pseudo-apocalypse of science fiction or the elementary-school theology of Left Behind pseudo-evangelicalism (the most popular contemporary form of Manichaeism), but a liberating shift in self-perception and self-understanding within an individual: “whenever any Individual Rejects Error & embraces Truth a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual” (“A Vision of the Last Judgment,” E 562).

Blake’s poetry is visionary because it works to release the individual into full exercise and appreciation of his absolute uniqueness, at which moment the false and partial systems of the rational institutions of the fallen world drop away, recognized for what they truly are, the disguised diseases of Selfhood’s solipsistic selfishness that destroy the dynamic integrity of a fully organized, true, because unique, Self.

The redemptive purpose of Blake’s visionary poetry, so dramatically embodied in the torments of Urizen, arises from its intense intellectual engagement with Newton’s powerful, mind-expanding effort to create a scientific understanding of how the universe operates; and it is this engagement that peculiarly endows Blake’s poetry with a continuing relevance shared by no other Western European poets. In the twentieth century Blake’s poetry speaks to us more directly and cogently than does Goethe’s, for example. It does so because it is more fully committed to awakening in us possibilities of [Page 106] the redemptive power of the imagination (while fully displaying the difficulty of this task)—an imagination conceived of as accessible to every normal person. Blake’s visionary poetry does not evade or dismiss the extraordinarily exhilarating and frighteningly dangerous potencies released by the success of modernity’s rigorously scientific systems. To the contrary, it knowledgably and forthrightly challenges the Giant of Institutionalized Science both in its essence and its social effects as inadequate to the realization of the fullest capabilities of human beings. These can be realized only through the uninhibited exercise of imagination, which in Blake’s view cannot be achieved without the flourishing of art and religion. This supposes a religiosity that refuses to be bound within any abstractly prescribed beliefs and an artistic endeavor that is visionary also in the sense that it refuses to limit itself to personal expression or to mere accounts of personal experience. Visionary art is the more difficult and heroic effort to discover the deepest causes for the failures of all of us, especially to achieve the uniqueness of being that would liberate us all to engage in the “intellectual warfare” of truly conversing with one another. Visionary art aims to recover the vital truth of our real existence out of mucky fake socialization, the moral trashiness, the intellectual sleaziness we now make ourselves wade through every day. Visionary art tries to make each of us recognize that true, liberating, life-expanding reality exists in no fiction, no distant utopia, but here and now—in the libidinal exercise of the purest intellect, here, now, as my hand and voice reach toward yours— for eternity exists and all things in eternity.

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1.7. Chapter 7.
A Final Note

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.

(MHH pls. 8 and 10)

Blake offers few and not very extensive descriptions of regenerated life, giving details on only two aspects, one quite attractive. In lines 43-44 of plate 69 of Jerusalem he describes regenerated sexual coupling in contrast to present conditions as

Embraces are Cominglings: from the Head even to the Feet,

And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place.

These lines climax one of Blake’s most interesting contradictions of Freud. Both agree that infants are, in Freud’s gloomy terminology, “polymorphously perverse,” that is, the infant’s sexuality is distributed throughout the entire body, not concentrated in the genitalia. Freud treats this as evidence of immaturity, hence “perverse”; Blake, to the contrary, regards the localizing of sexuality in the genitalia as a perversion. Healthy [Page 108] maturation for him is the increasing strength and reach of sexual impulse in every part of the human being, a mature fulfillment of Oothoon’s celebration of

Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight

In laps of pleasure; Innocence! honest, open, seeking

The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss.

(VDA pl. 9)

To my knowledge no critic has sufficiently examined this fascinating contrast, which reveals much about Blake’s concept of regenerated life as profoundly antithetical to the dominant psychological assumptions of intellectual modernists. So far as I can tell, Freud invariably assumed that the “natural” place for sexuality is in the dark, at night, as something essentially secret, hidden, private. Blake’s assumption is the opposite; so far as I am aware, he always praises healthy sex as an open-air, daylight activity. This view opens the way not merely to his easy acceptance of sexuality as “natural,” but also, more importantly, offers an immediate linkage between sexual and spiritual impulses.

The second characteristic of regenerated life about which Blake is explicit is that it consists mostly of noisy, violent, combative conversations, a verbal warfare of great intensity. This appeals strongly to me personally because I built a pretty successful fifty-year teaching career on these principles. Blake’s idea of the conversation as the highest achievement of humanity has nothing to do with polite, decorous speeches. His ideal “conversation” is the conflict of passionate disagreements—literally intellectual warfare, furious arguments about which all participants care profoundly. My idea of a successful seminar.

Blake is perhaps a trifle hard on lecturers, but he is entirely correct that a lecturer learns little or nothing in lecturing. The only way for a teacher to learn is through classroom discussion, and I always felt a class in which I learned nothing was a failure. Only through the arguing out of disagreements can the mind improve and advance into new and unsuspected territories of knowledge and insight. But leaving aside my personal experience, I wish to suggest that Blake’s rating of combative conversation as a supreme achievement of humanity has much to recommend it in the light, first, of the dismal [Page 109] failures of recent linguists and philosophers of language, and, second, of recent discoveries in biology, especially recent developments of neuroscience.

It appears to me that in the past half century linguistics has offered us almost nothing helpful for understanding active processes of linguistic intercommunication. The failure is particularly striking in contrast with biology: starting in the 1950s with the development of molecular biology, but involving virtually every biological field, it has produced possibly the most significant half-century of scientific progress in human history. Contributory to this remarkable progress was intensification of biologists’ willingness to seek for explanations not merely in simplified principles but also, and in fact more commonly, in recognition of increased complexities. Simultaneously, biologists increasingly tried to accommodate their discoveries to acceptance of the absolute uniqueness of every individual organism. Meanwhile linguistics turned back to long antiquated scientific models, seeking abstract universals, taking little interest in actual processes of linguistic interactivity, and seldom looking for explanations in the proliferating complexities of language in action as unique dynamic historical processes. To me, especially striking in recent linguistics is the absence of any significant studies of the processes of conversation, because even simple self-analysis, let alone recent findings by neuroscientists, suggest, for example, that in heated debate (every one of which is intensely individual in character) response frequently precedes reception. That is, I anticipate my opponent’s reply, and very complicated and variable feed-back loops are put into operation— explaining why we are able to “learn” so much from vigorous verbal controversy. I have no hesitation in predicting that within a decade or two advances in neuroscientific imaging will provide us with concrete evidence that Blake was correct in believing that in conversation the human mind realizes some of its most spectacular powers.⁷⁶

Foregoing prophecy, I want finally to draw attention to an astonishing failure not merely among contemporary linguistic philosophers but among virtually all literary humanists who put themselves forward as theorists. None of these have addressed the significant issues posed by their universal acceptance of the principle that linguistic signs are arbitrary—that there is no connection between the sound of a word and the phenomenon to which it refers. This principle, first clearly and effectively articulated by [Page 110] Ferdinand de Saussure, is quite properly treated as the foundational principle for study of the historical development of languages: neither “arbre” nor “tree” has any significant relation to the plant to which both words refer with equal precision. As I've observed, Robert Essick has done all of us a valuable service by demonstrating how and why, 200 years ago, Blake was much attracted to the now discredited idea of what Essick calls “the motivated sign,” the belief that words do somehow have a connection to the phenomena to which they refer. But even Essick fails adequately to pursue the possibilities of motivated signs, most probably because, although literacy is a recent phenomenon in human history, most critics have forgotten that language is first and foremost sound.

Let us start simply with fictional proper names. Joyce could perfectly well have called his young protagonist Hank Oatfield, but one feels Stephen Daedalus was a better choice. Likewise Sylvester Endicott is what Dickens might have called the tortured, murderous beneficiary of expanded public education in Our Mutual Friend, yet Bradley Headstone seems far more powerful. Or Thackeray might have named his vital if ruthless, self-creating social upstart Amelia Blunt, but wisely chose instead Becky Sharp (the Becky, somehow suggesting sharp edges, being particularly adroit), saving the more squishy pillow-like name of Amelia Osborne for her rival/friend. The point of course is that all these names are dramatically motivated signs (what Essick calls secondary motivation (Language of Adam 29-30)). The names are not arbitrary: there is a powerful connection between them and the human entities to which they refer.

One small step further. “The face that launched a thousand ships,” “tender is the night,” “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright! / In the Forests of the Night”—these are merely familiar reminders that people we call poets have been busily at work motivating signs as intensely as they can. The old fashioned term for the motivated sign is poetry. And the poets are doing what we all do, although better than most of us can, in breaking down the arbitrariness of inherited language by endowing it with sensual, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual meaningfulness. This is the activity Blake refers to when he speaks of “Poetic Genius.” As Saussure understood better than most of his followers, languages are vital and continue to exist by growing and sloughing off, self-transforming, forever changing. Why is the English we speak differs from Chaucer’s? Because the language has changed. How has it been changed? By various means, not the least important of [Page 111] which has been the choice of individuals, like the young people who prefer “different than” to my “different from” and “awesome” to my “fantastic,” and who feel it a waste of time to distinguish between “lay” and “lie.” Most of these choices are “unconscious,” but they are individual choices, and in the vanguard of those who more deliberately labor to extend and intensify the power of a given language are very conscious poets.

The simple illustrations I have offered are rooted in the deepest levels of language—its sounds, where the sensual and the intellectual co-exist interpenetratingly. The “fallacy” of the motivated sign refuses to go away because it also embodies the enduring truth that our language is not merely received but created by us in keeping with our personal motivations. In the contemporary world of literary humanism where one reads of nothing but messages and texts (iPod intellectuality), where the sounds of beautiful languages are forever silenced, and where any possibility of something that might be imagined as spiritual is pre-anathematized, there may be no place for Blake’s poetic genius. But I have written to suggest that in another world, a bigger and brighter one, he prospers famously.

Appendix One: Blake and Science

Karl did not draft his first appendix, but he did leave notes for a cursory bibliography on Blake and science, focusing primarily on biology, evolution, and neuroscience. He was particularly interested in the science of cognition, as is evinced by his own Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (Columbia, 1994) and the “two purely literary studies” that would “investigate the biology of the mind,” studies that he was planning to write in his retirement. Had he lived another year, I am sure he would have listed Alan Richardson’s The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2010).

Ault, Donald. Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. Print.

Barrow, John D. The World within the World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Bronowski, Jacob. Science and Human Values. 1956. Rpt. New York: Harper, 1965. Print.

—. William Blake and the Age of Revolution. New York: Harper, 1965. Print.

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—. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978. Print.

—. The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science. Cambridge: MIT, 1985. Print.

Davies, Paul, and John Gribben. The Matter Myth: Dramatic Discoveries that Challenge Our Understanding of Physical Reality. New York: Simon, 1992. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Print.

Eichner, Hans. “The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism.” PMLA 97 (1982): 8-30. Print.

Greenberg, Mark, “Blake’s ‘Science.’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 12 (1983): 115-130. Print.

Greenberg, Mark, and Lance Schachterle, eds. Literature and Technology. Bethlehem: Lehigh UP, 1992. Print.

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam, 1993. Print.

Hilton, Nelson. Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Print.

Jones, R. V. “Complementarity as a Way of Life.” In Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume. Ed. A. P. French and P. J. Kennedy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.

Lussier, Mark. “Blake’s Deep Ecology.” Studies in Romanticism 35 (1996): 393-408.

—. “Shelley’s Poetics, Wave Dynamics, and the Telling Rhythm of Complementarity.” Wordsworth Circle 34.2 (Spring 2003): 91-5. Print.

—. “Blake and Science Studies.” In Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Ed. Nicholas M. Williams. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 186-213. Print.

Minahen, Charles D. Vortex/t: The Poetics of Turbulence. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992. Print.

Olsen, Richard. Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture. Vol. 2. Vol. 2. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.

Peterfreund, Stuart. William Blake in a Newtonian World. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Print.

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Profitt, Edward. “Science and Romanticism.” Georgia Review 34.1 (1980): 55-80. Print.

Redhead, Michael. From Physics to Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

Shlain, Leonard. Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. New York: Harper, 1991. Print.

Stewart, Ian, and Martin Golubitsky. Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer? London: Blackwell, 1992. Print.

Sullivan, Walter. Black Holes: The Edge of Space, The End of Time. Garden City: Warner, 1979. Print.

Zee, A. Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Print.

Appendix Two: Blake and Contemporary Popular Culture

Blake’s influence on and presence in modern Anglophone literature has been well documented, as Karl notes and demonstrates in his bibliography below. Karl was, however, also keenly aware that something new and unprecedented was happening in Blake studies as we entered the new century, something he wanted through his students to learn more about: Blake’s influence, despite his radical Protestant Christianity, had become pervasive across all media in contemporary popular culture—or to put it another way, Blake’s audience had increased enormously in size and diversity, almost entirely outside academia. And as he notes, the paradox of a religious artist’s influence increasing in an increasingly secular context made him look at Blake anew. A year after Karl died, Jason Whittaker, a Blake scholar who has chronicled Blake’s influence in the arts and popular culture, created Zoamorphosis.com, “a magazine-style blog that provides updates on various uses of Blake in the arts, media, popular culture and some areas of scholarship, with news of Blake sightings in the press and elsewhere.” Karl, I am sure, would have enjoyed this website and included it in his bibliography, as well as Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth Century Art, Music and Culture, eds. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker (New York: Palgrave 2011).

I suspect that many academics studying and writing about William Blake have no idea how broadly and deeply his influence extends into today’s popular culture—and it appears to be growing more rapidly and pervasively than it has done for the past forty years. To fully document this phenomenon would require a substantial bibliographic monograph, because Blake’s presence appears not merely in traditional literary forms, such as novels, plays, and poems, but also in a wide range of musical compositions, in various forms of the visual arts from murals and oil paintings to graphic novels and comic books, and in various video productions and traditional movies—and it is currently penetrating the Internet in a variety of experimental forms.

Blake’s practice in lyrics and prophecies, as well as in his religious and aesthetic commentaries, continuously insists that genuine religion and genuine art are both in essence acts of imagining. In his view, whatever any seriously devout person believes to be “God” is a manifestation of imaginative activity. That is why Blake, and many people like myself who do not believe in any “God,” may have respect for those who so believe, even those committed to highly institutionalized forms of religion. But such respect may be limited to the imaginer, his power to imagine, as opposed to what he imagines. With art, respect focuses first on the work created rather than on the creator. For the unique manifestation of the artist’s imaginativeness is directed to evoking my imagining. Confronted by a work of art I respond individually to what another individual has imagined. Because for Blake imagining is the exercise of the divinity in each singular human being, it offers the possibility of dynamically interpersonal experience that may appeal to our spiritual capacities.

This possibility is signified through Blakean terms such as “imagine,” “divine,” and “spiritual,” and we must register it to understand both the pervasiveness and the [Page 116] unusual nature of Blake’s impact on post-secular culture. I say “impact” in preference to “influence” because the conceptions of imagination and religion manifested in his art are such that the effects of his art on later artists are likely to differ from those of other earlier artists in the Anglophone literary tradition. Most obviously, he is the only major English writer all of whose most significant work is entirely hand-wrought in a multi-media form, so it is not surprising that his impact is most apparent among innovative and experimental writers, visual artists, musicians, and, particularly in more recent times, various kinds of multi-media artists. And the spiritual or “extra-aesthetic” dimensions of his artistry make it reasonable to expect that it would also impinge on the thinking of diverse other groups—of people with little special concern for the arts and, on the opposite side, of literary critics with particular interests in the relations of art to political ideologies, psychology, and the physical sciences, but not theology.

Blake’s totally “anti-self-expressive” view helps to explain why his impact on later artists differs so strikingly from that of other canonical poets in the Anglophone literary tradition, most notably in its breadth. Because not limited by self-expressivity, Blake’s art readily serves as a stimulus to invention and experimentation: one is free to be influenced by Blake without the necessity of “following” him, or imitating any of his practices. This freedom is accentuated by his work’s multi-media form. That can inspire multi-media experimentation, but it is just as likely to encourage a poet or musician with no desire to engage in etching and engraving: poets like Hopkins and Donne can stimulate only through their language.

Blake was not deeply troubled by accusations of madness, such as the angels make in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and such as are rejected in the Laocoön and Milton. Especially in his later works his prophecy consists in imagining the sickness of modern society (which is fundamentally mental sickness, insanity), to “give Error a body” that healing may begin. Blake imagines and wants us to share in that imagining of what Freud only reported as stories told him by others. I think this is a major cause for Blake’s influence on many post-World War II poets, starting of course with Allen Ginsberg: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an [Page 117] angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night . . .” (1-3).

Some hint of the richness of the subject of Blake’s impact today is given by two simple references. An undergraduate student in my seminar on Blake in the spring of 2009 had no difficulty in setting up within a week interviews with thirty contemporary musicians who professed allegiance to Blake, from “classical” composers such as William Bolcom, distinguished singers such as Patti Smith, and well known rock bands, down to various “indies” so far of little notoriety. All were nearly unanimous on two points: that Blake encouraged them to try for whatever they imagined, and that he was a model of professionalism, never doing less than his best at whatever cost. Second, Wikipedia is not exactly the ultimate research tool, but it does seem important that its Blake entry appears to be the only one on a dead poet that includes a section on the poet’s relevance to “popular culture.” These circumstances are especially startling when one considers that only a tiny percentage of contemporary writers, musicians, and visual artists have any religious concerns, whereas Blake throughout his career was a passionate Christian, tirelessly striving to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. As I've said, that paradox is the origin of my arguments in this work.

I realize that most academic Blakeans are primarily interested in his poetry. For them, fortunately, there are now several excellent books and collections of essays illuminating the range and depth of Blake’s impact on Anglophone literature since the second world war.

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Bertholf, Robert J. “Robert Duncan: Blake’s Contemporary Voice.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 92-110. Print.

Bertholf, Robert J., and Annette S. Levitt, eds.William Blake and the Moderns. Albany: SUNY, 1982. Print.

Cary, Joyce. The Horse’s Mouth. 2nd ed. London: Michael Joseph, 1951. Print.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print.

Clark, Steve, and Masashi Suzuki, eds. The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Continuum Reception Studies Series. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Clark, Steve, and Jason Whittaker, eds. Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Print.

Conradi, Peter J. The Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch. 2nd ed. London: Harper, 2001. Print.

Cunningham, Allen. “William Blake.” From The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 2nd ed. London: 1830-46. II, 143-88. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Accounts of William Blake. Ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970. 149-94. Print.

Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Idea and Symbols of William Blake. Providence: Brown UP, 1965. Print.

Damrosch, Leopold, Jr. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Print.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Dir. Peter Care. THINKFilm, 2002. Film.

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Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Miramax, 1995. Film.

Dent, Shirley, and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Influence and Afterlife from 1827. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Print.

Duncan, Robert. Derivations: Selected Poems 1950-1956. London: Fulcrum, 1968. Print.

—. Roots and Branches. London: Cape, 1970. Print.

Eaves, Morris. The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Print.

Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 7th ed. London: Methuen, 1950. Print.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl, and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1959. Print.

Goode, Mike. “Blakespotting.” PMLA 121 (May 2006): 769-786. Print.

Greco, Norma A. “Mother Figures in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and the Female Will.” Romanticism Past and Present 10 (1986): 1-15. Print.

Green, Matt. “‘This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular Friend’: Diabolic Friendships and Oppositional Interrogation in Blake and Rushdie.” Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture. Eds. Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 127-139. Print.

Hamilton, Paul. “From Sublimity to Indeterminacy: New World Order or Aftermath of Romantic Ideology.” In Romanticism to Postmodernism. Ed. Edward Larrissy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 13-28. Print.

Hilton, Nelson. Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. Print.

Hilton, Nelson. “Blake & the Play of ‘Textuality.’” Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Ed. Nicholas M. Williams. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 85-105. Print.

Hilton, Nelson, and Thomas Vogler, eds. Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Print.

Horn, William Dennis. “William Blake and the Problem of Self.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 260-285. Print.

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Hughes, Ted. Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. London: Faber, 1973. Print.

Johnson, Mary Lynn. “Feminist Approaches to Teaching Songs.” In Approaches to Teaching Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Eds. Robert F. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989. 57-66. Print.

Larrissy, Edward. “Blake and Postmodernism.” Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Ed. Nicholas M. Williams. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 254-273. Print.

—. “Spectral Imposition and Visionary Imposition: Printing and Repetition in Blake.” Blake in the Nineties. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999. 61-77. Print.

Levitt, Annette S. “‘The Mental Traveller’ in The Horse’s Mouth: New Light on the Old Cycle.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 186-211. Print.

Levin, Susan. “A Fourfold Vision: William Blake and Doris Lessing.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 212-221. Print.

Lundeen, Kathleen. Knight of the Living Dead: William Blake and the Problem of Ontology. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP, 2000. Print.

Lussier, Mark. “Blake Beyond Postmodernity.” Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture. Eds. Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 151-162. Print.

Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

Mellor, Anne K. “Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience: A Feminist Perspective.” Nineteenth Century Studies 2 (1988): 1-18. Print.

Mitchell, W. J . T. “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond'rous Art of Writing.” In Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Eds. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986. 46-85. Print.

Moore, Alan, and Eddie Campbell. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Paddington, Australia: Campbell Comics, 1999. Print.

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Oe, Kenzaburo. Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! Trans. John Nathan. New York: Grove, 2003. Print.

Ostriker, Alicia. “Blake, Ginsberg, Madness, and the Prophet as Shaman.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 111-134. Print.

Parini, Jay. “Blake and Roethke: When Everything Comes to One.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 73-91. Print.

Party Monster. Dir. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. ContentFilm, 2003. Film.

Pease, Donald. “Blake, Whitman, Crane: The Hand of Fire.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 15-38. Print.

Pechey, Graham. “1789 and After: Mutations of ‘Romantic’ Discourse.” In 1789: Reading Writing Revolution. Eds. Francis Barker et al. Colchester: U of Essex, 1982. Print.

Robinson, Henry Crabb. Diary. Rpt. in Nineteenth-Century Accounts of William Blake. Ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970. 55-108. Print.

Searle, Leroy. “Blake, Eliot, and Williams: The Continuity of Imaginative Labor.” William Blake and the Moderns. Eds. Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt. Albany: SUNY, 1982. 39-72. Print.

Senaha, Eijun. Sex, Drugs, and Madness in Poetry from William Blake to Christina Rossetti: Women’s Pain, Women’s Pleasure. Lewiston, NY: Mellen UP, 1996. Print.

Sinclair, Iain. Suicide Bridge: A Book of Dead Hamlets: May 1974 to April 1975. London: Albion Village, 1979. Print.

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Sinclair, Iain, and Angela Carter. “Postmodern Myths and Lies.” Blake and Modern Literature. Ed. Edward Larrissy. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 125-145. Print.

Stepto, Michele Leiss. “Mothers and Fathers in Blake’s Songs of Innocence.” Yale Review 67 (Spring 1978): 365-67. Print.

24 Hour Party People. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. MGM, 2002. Film.

Vine, Steven. “‘THAT MILD BEAM’: Enlightenment and Enslavement in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.” In The Discourse of Slavery. Eds. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring. London: Routledge, 1994. 40-63. Print.

Viscomi, Joseph. William Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Vogler, Thomas A. “Re: Naming MIL/TON.” In Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality. Eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas Vogler. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 141-76. Print.

Whitson, Roger, and Donald Ault, eds. “William Blake and Visual Culture.” ImageTexT 3.2 (Winter 2007). Web. 23 June 2011.

Whittaker, Jason. “From Hell: Blake and Evil in Popular Culture.” Blake, Modernity, and Popular Culture. Eds. Steve Clark and Jason Whittaker. New York: Palgrave, 2007. 192-204. Print.

Williams, Nicholas M. “Eating Blake, or an Essay on Taste: The Case of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.” Cultural Critique 42 (1999): 143-70. Print.

—, ed.Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Print.

Worrall, David. Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance, and Surveillance, 1790-1820. New York: Harvester, 1993. Print.

Wright, Julia M. “‘And None Shall Gather the Leaves’: Unbinding the Voice in Blake’s America and Europe.” European Romantic Review 7.1 (Summer 1996): 61-84. Print.

Notes

Explanatory notes in brackets and bibliographic notes are by the editor; all other notes are by Karl.

Note: ¹ “An interview with Karl Kroeber.” Published in the newsletter of the Department of English & Comparative Literature of Columbia University, fall 2009. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/an-interview-with-karl-kroeber-fall-2009/

Note: ² Mark Jones collaborated with Karl on Wordsworth Scholarship and Criticism, 1973-1984: An Annotated Bibliography, with Selected Criticism, 1809-1972 (New York: Garland, 1985).

Note: ³ “Karl Kroeber, Teacher, April 2009.” Madeline Dangerfield-Cha, Columbia College 2011. Friends and Students of Karl Kroeber blog. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/karl-kroeber-teacher-april-2009/

Note: ⁴ “Karl Kroeber, or living and dying in the present.” Philip Petrov. Published in the Columbia Spectator, 11 November 2009. Friends and Students of Karl Kroeber blog. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/karl-kroeber-or-living-and-dying-in-the-present/

Note: ⁵ Adam Katz and Josh Schwartz, “Interview: Karl Kroeber.” Bwog.com, December 14, 2006. Friends and Students of Karl Kroeber blog. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/the-bwog-interview-december-2006/

Note: ⁶ “An interview with Karl Kroeber.” Published in the newsletter of the Department of English & Comparative Literature of Columbia University, fall 2009. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/an-interview-with-karl-kroeber-fall-2009/

Note: ⁷ “Karl Kroeber, Teacher, April 2009.” Madeline Dangerfield-Cha, Columbia College 2011. Friends and Students of Karl Kroeber blog. http://karlsfriends.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/karl-kroeber-teacher-april-2009/

Note: ⁸ [For a discussion of “post-secularism,” see Simon During and Jürgen Habermas. It is interesting to note that while Karl was conducting his seminar, Yale University hosted a conference, on 3-4 April 2009, entitled “Exploring the Post-Secular,” which focused on [Page 124] religion and the social sciences. (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/exploring-the-post-secular.pdf)

Note: ⁹ Contributing to this presence has been the establishment and continuous enhancement of the William Blake Archive under the guidance of Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, probably the most important scholarly literary/artistic website, which also offers productive access to amateurs, from high school students to professional writers, artists, and musicians. For a professional scholar the Archive is the only resource offering immediate access to the original forms of Blake’s “illuminated poetry,” in which each etched and engraved calligraphic text is accompanied by a rich variety of graphic features (on occasion a plate that is mostly or entirely graphic). Beyond this the Archive offers the only easy access to the variations, particularly in graphic elements, in the different printings of each of Blake’s multi-media illuminated works. For this reason, particularly because my purposes in this essay—alas!—require almost exclusive attention to Blake’s verbal texts, all my references to illuminated works are to their plate numbers in the Archive [which follow those in G. E. Bentley’s Blake Books]. The copies I used are: All religions are One copy A, There is No Natural Religion copy L, The Book of Thel copy H, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell copy H, Songs of Innocence and of Experience copy Z, Visions of the Daughters of Albion copy G, and The Book of Urizen copy G. [The Blake Archive’s transcriptions of these copies are used by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant in Blake’s Poetry and Designs.] But in most cases I deliberately refrain from citing a specific copy, hoping readers will explore the differences (made easily available by the Archive’s “compare” feature), because their existence is the most compelling evidence of how Blake’s attack on Modernism’s rationalized institutionalizations gives his art special relevance to the artistry of many contemporary writers, painters, musicians, and film makers. Blake’s other writings are taken from David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, cited as E throughout this essay.

Note: ¹⁰ “Identical Twins’ Genes are not Identical,” Scientific American, 3 April 2008.

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Note: ¹¹ Humanists need to examine the nature of biological research carefully, because in the last half century it is the area of science that has produced the most exciting new understandings of how the world works and (especially in fields such as medical science) the most valuable practical discoveries for ameliorating the sufferings of humankind.

Note: ¹² Frye’s 1957 essay celebrating Blake’s 200th birthday (“Blake After Two Centuries”) justifiably satirizes Eliot’s weirdly ambivalent essay on Blake (whom Eliot finds “terrifying” but unimportant, because ignorant that the fundamental traditions of English literature are “Mediterranean” [Eliot 96]). Frye’s remains in my view the best brief essay on Blake’s achievement as an artist.

Note: ¹³ See Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire.

Note: ¹⁴ [At this point in his text, Karl inserted: “[Simmel. Giddens].” He is referring to Georg Simmel, a German sociologist and one of the earliest theorists of modern urban life. Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) examines the “mental life of the city” and is discussed in Sociology by Anthony Giddens. “The deepest problems of modern life,” asserts Simmel, “derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life” (409). Simmel examines those features of modern life that create a sense of strangers living alone together in a quickly and ever changing environment, features that include division of labor, urbanization, and a market/money economy. Works on Blake that treat these subjects include: Julia M. Wright, Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens: Ohio UP, 2004); Jennifer Davis Michael, Blake and the City (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006); Charles Williams, “Blake and Wordsworth” in The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford UP, 1958); Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009); Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985); Morton Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); Jerry Caris Godard, Mental Forms Creating[:] William Blake Anticipates Freud, Jung, and Rank (Lanham: UP of America, 1985); Cyril Smith, “Marx and the Fourfold Vision of [Page 126] William Blake” in Karl Marx and the Future of the Human (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); William B. Thesing, “The Celestial City in the Poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, and Tennyson,” and “Blake’s Urban Vision: The Poetry of Communal Renewal,” in The London Muse[:] Victorian Poetic Responses to the City (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982).]

Note: ¹⁵ See David Jasper, ed., The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher, and Romanticism.

Note: ¹⁶ See Leopold Damrosch, Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth; E. P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast; Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm; and David Worrall, Radical Culture. For Robinson, see his Diary, 2:25.

Note: ¹⁷ See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics.

Note: ¹⁸ See Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952).

Note: ¹⁹ See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Dewey, Art As Experience; Jameson, The Cultural Turn.

Note: ²⁰ See Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, and Frye’s “Blake After Two Centuries.” [In the latter work, Karl underlined the following statement: “What is so obviously true of most of his paintings is true also of his poetry: it is the work of a man whose Bible was his textbook” (169-170).]

Note: ²¹ See also A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake.

Note: ²² See Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul; see also David Punter, “Blake and Psychology,” Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies. Ed. Nicholas M. Williams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 167-185. Punter has an excellent bibliography on the subject, including one entry marked by Karl: Mark Bracher, “Rouzing the Faculties: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the Reader,” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Eds. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, Donald Ault (Durham: Duke UP, 1988).

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Note: ²³ Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton. See also Stuart Peterfreund, “William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science” (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998). See Appendix One for a fuller list of works on Blake and Science.

Note: ²⁴ See Richard C. Lewontin, “The Organism as Subject and Object of Evolution.”

Note: ²⁵ Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, ch. 2: “Blake’s Living Form: Jerusalem.” [Karl read the work in manuscript.]

Note: ²⁶ [In a letter to Dimock, dated 1 June 2002, Karl wrote: your point on Newton’s serialization of time is very cogent—it helps to account in a newly effective way for the fact of the wide spread anti-Newtonianism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. My own attention has focused on the appearance of the idea of evolution, which pushes against mechanical time-keeping in a different way. Interesting support for your view of Blakean resistance to spatializing of time emerges ironicially in Keats, who, even in Lamia, begins the victorian-modern spatializing of time against Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, who if anything temporalize space, even in their preference for narrative forms. What I especially admire in your discussion is your perception that literary history is complex, that Blake’s attack on Milton, for example, is not simple rejection (why I think of the romantics as part of a counter-enlightenment, which is very different from anti-). Your approach allows for the excellent perception of Milton “fighting” Urizen workmanlike not warrior-like—as Blake acknowledges Newton’s geometry without giving it authority, as he appreciates that the body is bound to serial time—hence your excellent analysis of the painting of Newton. My only quibble is that you don't emphasize enough for me that the reason Milton gets Messiah and Satan mixed up (a rather serious confusion) is that Blake thinks he has got the fall wrong— it results not from disobedience but the promulgation of a prohibition—Blake’s hatred of prohibitions in fact, I believe, supports [Page 128] your view of his capacity to critique and accept. But you are certainly right that he crucially sees dynamic continuities as beyond the physiological body, the vegetable body. Though your focus is “literary history,” I think you get to the heart of Blake’s difficulty in his insistence on eternity—he says the most pernicious mistake one can make is not to believe in eternity—thinking, as Wittgentstein observed, that if one disabuses oneself of the idea of eternity as infinite duration it becomes the timelessness of a dynamic present. I think this is helpful to your fine point about building time, which is our escape from the merely sequentiality of linear chronology. And you are absolutely right about how this leads into an emphasis on language— but I'm not sure I follow exactly your sentence on page 3 “Wrested from the lock-stepped unidirectional flow of the life-cycle, literary history is cumulative, but not sequential. . . .” I'm unsure about the cumulative.]

Note: ²⁷ Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, with probably eleven plates engraved by Blake, consisted of two poems, “The Loves of the Plants” and “Economy of Vegetation” (1791). LaMarck (1744-1829) published Zoological Philosophy in 1809. An early proponent of the idea of evolution, he believed that it proceeded in accordance with natural laws. Darwin’s chapter on “Generation” in Zoonomia (1794-96) anticipates LaMarck and foreshadows the modern theory of evolution.

Note: ²⁸ [Apparently Karl is thinking of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, to which he explicitly refers later. At its core the principle is that one can't measure both, say, the speed and location of an electron at any given moment.]

Note: ²⁹ As Morton Paley rightly observes, at the end of the eighteenth century “energy” had not yet been defined as “work” (Energy 8).

Note: ³⁰ [Regarding immaturity and imagination, I reminded Karl of Mozart. He responded: “There’s Mendelsohn also—but with both, the later works, guys at 28, 29, more imaginative—you don't learn the most important human ability, language, by imagining but by imitating” and you know “how much music is repetition and imitation that gets [Page 129] made imaginative.” I had also reminded him of a saying from Blake’s Laocoon, in regard to his ideas about the synonymous nature of imagination and kinesis: “Practice is Art If you leave off you are Lost.” To which he replied: that is “what the musicians say.”]

Note: ³¹ Guillory, Poetic Authority. See also Guillory’s Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (U of Chicago P, 1993), and “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate” (Journal of English Literary History 54, 1987): 483-527. See also James Engell’s The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism.

Note: ³² Shakespeare’s famous passage is particularly relevant for Blake because, as Paley points out (212), Blake corrected another writer’s mis-attribution of the words to the play’s author (E 601). Blake recognizes that Theseus is unimaginative, and that his description requires the too seldom noticed additions and modifications of Hippolyta’s complex response for Shakespeare’s conception to be articulated.

Note: ³³ The term “imagination” recently has been degraded by being equated with daydreaming, idle reverie, wool-gathering—the kind of self-indulgent mental laziness that brought Emma Bovary to ruin. But genuine imagining, such as Flaubert labored at in creating Emma, and on which Copernicus staked his reputation against the obvious sensory fact that the sun moves around the earth, is cruelly demanding work because it is a rigorous exploration into real possibilities, never an escape from actualities. The sign of genuine imagining is to arouse rigorous and exploratory imagining in others, what goes on in the psyche of any serious reader of Madame Bovary, or anyone struggling with the mathematics of Copernicus’ great work. What the serious imaginer puts forth originates in the most intense subjectivity, but the purpose of the imaginer is to share, to affect the subjectivity of others so that they can and will participate as intensely and rewardingly in what originally is the utterly personal mental construction of someone else.

Note: ³⁴ [The idea that “imagining is the continuous renewing of productive energy through its exercise” accurately describes Blake’s behavior as an original graphic artist, his continuously re-conceiving illuminated plates, color print drawings, even original intaglio plates, through each new printing. In Blake’s reprinting of his original (as opposed to [Page 130] commercial) plates, invention and execution are mutually generative, with the initial invention, the plate, reconceived in a new impression that repeats exactly neither plate nor other impressions. In other words, even the repetitious acts of the printer at his press become in Blake’s hands a means of reinvention and renewal, a means of denying constant repetition, and thus an anti-Newtonian gesture. Both Robert Essick and I in separate emails to Karl made these points, to which Karl responded with “yes,” “good,” “yes,” and “imp[ortant].”]

Note: ³⁵ See Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience.

Note: ³⁶ See Smith, Believing: An Historical Perspective.

Note: ³⁷ [The full quotation is: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” http://thinkexist.com/quotation/imagination_is_more_important_than_knowledge-for/260230.html. Web 4 July 2011.]

Note: ³⁸ See William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets.

Note: ³⁹ In one respect at least Blake’s view is conventional: there is no significant religious teacher who has preached that one can gain spiritual enlightenment solely through an exercise of the reason. But none that I know of has so absolutely as Blake identified the possibility of any religious experience as dependent on imagination.

Note: ⁴⁰ See Williams, Culture and Materialism, ch. 3.

Note: ⁴¹ [Kenosis, a Greek word designating “an emptying,” is defined in the OED as “The self-renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation.” It refers to Christ’s relinquishing of godhead to suffer death and thereby be more exalted; Philippians 2: 4-8. Thomas J. J. Altizer was first to point to the importance of kenosis for Blake. See his The Genesis of God.]

Note: ⁴² [Blake’s technique of inverting inversions is comparable to printing copperplates, or to any sort of printing, and not just writing backwards, because printing inverts the matrix. See notes 34 and 46 for other instances in which Blake’s ideas about imagination and [Page 131] individuality appear mirrored—or grounded—in his practices as a graphic artist.]

Note: ⁴³ [The order of There is No Natural Religion is now believed to be: plates b9 (section VII), b11 (Conclusion), b10 (Application), b12 (“Therefore”), which means that the Application follows—or applies— the Conclusion. See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, ch. 22, and Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Blake: The Early Illuminated Books, vol. 3.] It is worth noting the word “bounded” in proposition IV of the b (or second) series. Here it denotes a limit, a boundary—as when Blake describes reason as the outer circumference of energy, the outer edge that must be expanded if imagination is to advance. As a participle, “bounding” (“leaping forward,” “springing up”) is positive; Blake will use the same word to denote the kind of line, the “bounding line,” that is for him the essential feature of superior graphic art. This exploitation of words’ double meanings is characteristic of his writing’s demand for an energetic response from the reader.

Note: ⁴⁴ Sir Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica (1687). Scholium on Absolute Space and Time.

Note: ⁴⁵ [Blake’s earliest poems, written while he was an engraving apprentice, were collected and printed by Blake’s friends in 1783 as Poetical Sketches, a seventy-two page octavo pamphlet given to Blake in sheets. About twenty-four copies are extant, about half with minor corrections. Manuscripts of illuminated books are not extant, but many of the songs for Experience are in Blake’s Notebook and were revised; the manuscript for the Four Zoas mixes clean copperplate hand and a hand much reworked.]

Note: ⁴⁶ [Blake’s relief etching technique is more amenable to “impulse” than intaglio, because it is autographic in the manner of writing and drawing. Essick and I pointed this out to Karl, who recognized that its autographic nature “allows development, improvisation, play,” which he felt he had to make “clear because, 1. it ties into the ideal of conversation, crucial; 2. connects to issues of relation to music” (email 9.6.09). Here, however, Karl appears to have in mind Gilchrist’s description of Blake working up a drawing rather than a relief etched plate: “He felt his way in drawing, notwithstanding his love of a ‘bold determinate outline,’ and did not get this at once. Copyists and plagiarists [Page 132] do that, but not original artists, as it is common to suppose: they find a difficulty in developing the first idea. Blake drew a rough dotted line with pencil, then with ink; then colour, filling in cautiously, carefully. At the same time he attached very great importance to ‘first line,’ and was wont to affirm:—‘First thoughts are best in art, second thoughts in other matters’” (I 370). Gilchrist is correct to see Blake’s invention evolving from execution, to see him as feeling his way through making marks on paper and staying with the process till he found his image. Sometimes Blake used the word “organization” as an appositive for execution (E 637), which implies that having something to organize and organizing it are part of the “extended process” of execution: “Nor can an Original Invention Exist without Execution Organized & minutely Delineated & Articulated [...]” (E 576). Moreover, because execution incorporates organization and involves decisions, it is also inseparable from intellect and invention: “A Facility in Composing is the Greatest Power of Art & Belongs to None but the Greatest Artists i.e. the Most Minutely Discriminating & Determinate” (E 643). Though Gilchrist cites no documentary evidence for Blake’s statement about “first thoughts,” Allen Ginsberg was wont to attribute the saying to Blake, usually shortening it to “first thought, best thought.” For a discussion of Blake’s drawing style, its relation to sketching, and his views of sketches and “first thoughts,” see Viscomi, Book ch. 4. For a discussion of the neoclassically trained Blake as a transitional figure in Romantic art, embracing the aesthetic of the sketch, that is, of spontaneity and impulse, while rejecting its indeterminate form for strong and determinate line, see Eaves.]

Note: ⁴⁷ See Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism.

Note: ⁴⁸ [Karl photocopied “Children’s Animals: Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge and the Instruction/Imagination Debate,” the second chapter of Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Quoted therein is Charles Lamb’s famous letter to Coleridge, 23 October 1802, on the subject of buying books for the poet’s son Hartley, then six years old: “Goody Two-Shoes” is almost out of print. Mrs. Barbauld[’s] stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery; & the Shopman at Newbery’s hardly deign'd to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when [Page 133] Mary ask'd for them. Mrs B’s & Mrs Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant & vapid as Mrs B’s books convey, it seems, must come to the child in the shape of knowledge, & his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of its own powers, when he has learned that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like: instead of that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to Poetry no less in the little walks of Children than with Men.—Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural history? Damn them. I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man & child.]

Note: ⁴⁹ See both Richardson and Glen.

Note: ⁵⁰ See Angela Esterhammer, Creating States.

Note: ⁵¹ See Milton, plate e, lines 22-23: “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. / States change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease”; and “Vision of The Last Judgment”: “These States Exist now Man Passes on but States remain for Ever he passes thro them like a traveller who may as well suppose that the places he has passed thro exist no more as a Man may suppose that the States he has passd thro exist no more Every Thing is Eternal” (E 556).

Note: ⁵² See F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis, “Dickens and Blake,” in Dickens, the Novelist.

Note: ⁵³ [According to William Harmon, editor of The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry: The 100 Top Poems (Columbia UP, 1990; reissued in 1998 as The Classic Hundred All-Time Favorite Poems) and The Top 500 Poems (Columbia UP, 1993), “The Tyger” came in at number one. At some point after 1998, Keats’s “To Autumn” took the number one spot and currently “The Tyger” is number six.]

Note: ⁵⁴ [In my initial comments to Karl’s drafts, I questioned this statement: “not sure I understand how it is an oxymoron; is it because symmetry connotes calmness?” Karl’s [Page 134] response is worth recording: “ok fearful symmetry is not an oxymoron (though I know of no usage of symmetry as fearful before Blake—so what the hell is it?—is it B doing things to traditional tropes like metaphor that nobody’s analyzed seriously—like nobody has said, have they, that Blake writes dramatic monologues that differ from the usual idea of dms?”]

Note: ⁵⁵ See Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus. [I do not know the translation Karl used, but the F. Storr translation has: “Not to be born at all / Is best, far best that can befall, / Next best, when born, with least delay / To trace the backward way” (London, Heinemann, 1912-13).]

Note: ⁵⁶ Isaiah’s “the lion shall eat straw like the ox” (11.7) is the opposite of Blake’s view; from his perspective Isaiah’s utopian vision depends on having the Lion repressed, concealing his desire for meat. If we know the Bible quotation, then we can read Blake in the diabolic sense: by making his aphorism allude to a celebration of repression that he rejects, he urges an ideal more complex, a condition in which laws would repress, or oppress, nobody. Surely this is a recipe for mere anarchy. But Blake does not believe so; he believes that our problem is having failed so far to imagine a way of organizing human communities that foster rather than infringe on the inalienable rights of each and every individual as an individual being. We have so far failed in this imaginative task because we have not attended carefully enough to the complexity of true individuality that, for example, includes the unconsciousness that consciousness spends a lot of time keeping out of sight.

Note: ⁵⁷ See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

Note: ⁵⁸ See Simpson, The Academic Postmodern.

Note: ⁵⁹ Plate 8 of Thel and plate 4 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were cut from the same large sheet of copper, which means that Blake finished Thel while more than half way through executing the Marriage (see Viscomi, “Evolution” 302, 326-27). [Nevertheless, in his essay, Karl placed Thel after Marriage and just before Visions of the Daughters of Albion to reinforce Thel’s close relation to Oothoon.]

[Page 135]

Note: ⁶⁰ It is helpful to regard Blakean prophecies as efforts to represent contemporary social and psychological conditions as literally as possible—to represent in Jerusalem, for instance, the central problems of English society with a literal realism far exceeding that even of contemporary novelists. Milton, equivalently, represents with literal realism the central problems confronting any serious artist of Blake’s day. We must respect the importance of Blake’s conception of the primary functions of imagining as the exploration of the reality of this world and the communication of these actualities to the understanding of others. He preferred—indeed, thought it his obligation—to draw human beings naked.

Note: ⁶¹ [Karl suggested a note here on himself and “Indian myth,” presumably to assist in defining Blake’s narratives by referring to such recent works of his as Artistry of Native American Myths (Nebraska, 1998); Jeremiah Curtin's Creation Myths of Primitive America (ed., ARC-Clio, 2002); and Native American Storytelling (ed., Blackwell, 2004).]

Note: ⁶² The present and the immediate future are the concern of all of Blake’s important poetry. Like all superior artists, he is intrigued by the techniques and successes of artists who preceded him, but where he feels this interest intensely, he brings the earlier artist into the present day, as he does with biblical prophets in the Marriage, and of course more spectacularly in Milton, and at the end of his life with his illuminations of the Job story and, finally, of Dante. His final “Laocoön” engraving is a dismantling of history as well as of prevalent art theory. Never are the daughters of memory the focus of his interest, which remains always the immediate present as the gateway to Eternity.

Note: ⁶³ Karl Kroeber, “Graphic–Poetic Structuring in Blake’s Book of Urizen.” [See also the first chapter, “Inventing the Unconscious,” in his British Romantic Art.]

Note: ⁶⁴ [Karl wrote “N” here, apparently alluding to Shelley’s last line of “Mutability,” “Nought may endure but Mutability,” combined with the evanescent imagery of Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc.”]

Note: ⁶⁵ [Among Karl’s sketches is a note about using the concept of the “noosphere” to help “distinguish . . . Blake’s ‘natural’ from our ‘natural.’” I believe he intended to place the note here.] Noosphere as way of distinguishing B’s ‘natural’ from our ‘natural.’ == [Page 136] Perhaps in relation to Eternity—Thel question—if body and mind unified, is destruction of body destruction of mind? Blake not interested in transcendental—to live imaginatively is to participate in noosphere as well as biosphere, a la [Red] Cloud, [Philip] Pullman, etc., again literally. But how about the hunting and wars in heaven? We do not lose our identity? Key perhaps is energy: if everything is energy, always transforming, then body destruction not important if—and only if—we are participating in eternal life—that is, with the death of the body we become pure energy—which is perpetual transformation—in this state uniqueness takes a form different from what we have known in “normal,” natural existence— why it is difficult but essential to imagine Eternity. Noosphere idea might be relevant because it suggests that Blake’s image of organization of life is very complex. [In the original theory of Validimir Vernadsky, according to Wikipedia, “the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. . . . For [Pierre] Teilhard [de Chardin], the noosphere emerges through and is constituted by the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This concept is an extension of Teilhard’s Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Teilhard argued the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point, which he saw as the goal of history. The goal of history, then, is an apex of thought/consciousness.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere (Web. 29 June 2011).]

Note: ⁶⁶ Essick, ed., Blake: Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Note: ⁶⁷ For example, we hear Bromion speak contemptuously, apparently to Theotormon, yet the significance of his words (which bear directly on a question often returned to by Blake, what is the difference between a wife and harlot?) shifts dramatically when we recognize that Bromion and Theotormon may be the same person.

[Page 137]

Note: ⁶⁸ The destructive waste of volcanic energy announces what it conceals, institutionalized religion’s true motive, personal lust. I would not presume to say what Pope Benedict the 16th would make of this passage, but to me it seems cogent prophesying.

Note: ⁶⁹ It is difficult to stay with Blake in the specificity of his critiques; it is easier to take refuge in generalization, as I and all other critics have done in discussing Visions—e.g., to speak of his attack on “institutionalized religion” to evade the directness of his attack on the sacrament of marriage in truly praising freedom of love.

Note: ⁷⁰ See Mitchell, “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s Book of Urizen” and Blake’s Composite Art. See also Kroeber, “Graphic–Poetic Structuring in Blake’s Book of Urizen.”

Note: ⁷¹ Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, and admired by Blake, asked: “what evidence can there be, that the mind is not dependent upon the body for its existence also? that is, what evidence can there be, that the faculty of thinking does not inhere in the body itself, and that there is no such thing as a soul separate from it?” (Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (London, 1782), 1:163). Blake: “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul . . . Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Marriage pl. 4).

Note: ⁷² [“Self-sacrifice” (that is, of the Selfhood) is a major theme in Blake’s later poetry. Apparently, Karl means here the true, intrinsic self, not the “Selfhood” that he has earlier described as a false encrustation or objectification.]

Note: ⁷³ [Karl does not cite a particular poem, but many treat this idea. See, for instance, Emily Dickinson, Poems (London: Faber, 2004) nos. 313, 354, 378, 515, 552, 633, and 798.]

Note: ⁷⁴ See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Note: ⁷⁵ Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). See his Essay on the Origin of Language trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: F. Ungar, 1966). See also F. M. Barnard’s Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, [Page 138] 2003). [Karl wrote “[N—Roman Jakobsen and current texting]”; Roman Jakobson was a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, influenced by Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, and communication theory and cybernetics, and was an important influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. He died in 1982 and would not have witnessed texting via phones, but Karl no doubt has in mind Jakobson’s “linguistic universals,” which are patterns that are universal across all languages.]

Note: ⁷⁶ See Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

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Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies

Karl Kroeber

Edited and with a Foreword by Joseph Viscomi

Romantic Circles

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Source

Karl Kroeber. Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies August 1, 2012. College Park, MD: Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu, University of Maryland.