William Blake

John Lucas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317892038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The collection of essays presented in this volume represents some of the best recent critical work on William Blake as poet, prophet, visual artist, and social and political critic of his time.The critical range that is represented includes examples of Marxist, New Historicist, Feminist and Psychoanalytical approaches to Blake. Taken together, the essays consider all areas and moments of Blake's career as poet, from the early lyrics to his later epic poems, and they have been chosen to reveal not only the range of Blake's concerns but also to alert the reader to the rich variety of contemporary criticism that is devoted to him. Although the majority of essays are devoted to Blake as poet, others consider his work as printmaker, illustrator, and visionary artist. However severely individual essays choose to judge him, ultimately all the contributions to this book affirm Blake as one of the great geniuses of English art and letters.William Blake provides a valuable introduction by one of Britain's foremost critics and will be welcomed by students wanting to familiarise themselves with the work of Blake.

1 Introduction

‘Mad’ Blake

When William Blake died in 1827, he was a largely unknown figure. As an artist and engraver he had some younger admirers, but few cared for, or were even aware of, his poetry. The diarist and friend of writers, Henry Crabb Robinson, paid Blake several visits in the poet’s last years and thought him a ‘remarkable man. Shall I call him artist or genius – or mystic – or madman?’¹ These questions continue to haunt students of Blake. For some, he is best thought of as a mystic-cum-genius whose preoccupations with religious matters place him in the tradition of the inspired prophet or seer, his visions transmitted through poems and visual images which, he told Crabb Robinson, had been granted him by ‘The Spirit’. He also told Crabb Robinson that the Spirit had commanded him ‘“Blake, be an artist and nothing else. In this there is felicity.” His eye,’ Crabb Robinson recalls, ‘glistened when he spoke of the joy of devoting himself solely to divine art…. Blake said: “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.”’ This claim to happiness is addressed by Yeats, in an essay of 1900, where he contrasts Blake with that other great Romantic visionary, Shelley. Yeats writes:

In ancient times, it seems to me that Blake, who for all his protest was glad to be alive, and ever spoke of his gladness, would have worshipped in some chapel of the Sun, but that Shelley, who hated life because he sought ‘more in life than any understood,’ would have wandered, lost in a ceaseless reverie, in some chapel of the Star of infinite desire.²

By the time Yeats wrote that essay, Shelley’s reputation, previously so high, had dipped far down. Blake’s by contrast was on the rise. The process of recovery, even of rediscovery, was most importantly signalled by the publication in 1863 of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life, although the early championing of Blake by Carlyle and later by the Rossetti brothers undoubtedly helped. Then in the 1890s Yeats undertook with a young painter poet Edwin J. Ellis an edition of The Works of Blake, Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, published in three volumes in 1893. Blake is here credited with Irish ancestry and Yeats undoubtedly saw in the English poet a spiritual predecessor. Blake was, he said, ‘a symbolist who had to invent his symbols…. He was a man crying out for a mythology, and trying to make one because he could not find one to his hand.’ This sounds very like W. B. Yeats.

But then it could be said that Blake has endlessly been made over into the image of those who write about him. He becomes his admirers. This is no doubt true of all great writers and artists, but it is especially true of Blake because his work – allegorical, symbolic, visionary, call it what you will – is capable of bearing a host of different interpretations. Such work can be made to mean whatever you want it to mean, the more so as much of it is not merely symbolic but also difficult to the point of opacity. Interpreting Blake has been for some a lifetime’s effort. For others, the study of Blake is as demanding and perhaps obsessive an exercise as ‘proving’ that Marlowe (or Bacon or whoever) wrote Shakespeare’s plays or that the key to all mythologies can be disinterred from the accretions of history. And, of course, there are those for whom Blake is himself a case study, a ‘madman’, to use Crabb Robinson’s term, someone who can best be understood in terms made available by twentieth-century psychology or, even, psychiatry. Many years ago now Allan Rodway argued that Blake can only be adequately accounted for if we assume ‘him to be – or to have imagined himself into the world of – a rare psychological type, the intuitive introvert to whom the inner world of the imagination is more vivid and actual than the outer world’ [Rodway’s italics].³ In an essay included in the present collection, Brenda S. Webster replaces Rodway’s Jungian model by a more familiar Freudian one, when she claims that ‘Of all the available psychologies, Freudian psychoanalysis is most productive for studying Blake. The psychoanalytic emphasis on Oedipal conflict and motives of “Love & Jealousy” is in many ways similar to Blake’s own…. Blake’s manifest emphasis begs to be described as Freudian’ (p. 132).

There is no doubt that Blake’s ‘wildness’ has caused some of his commentators to doubt his sanity. On one occasion when Crabb Robinson called at Fountain Court, where Blake and his wife lived in considerable poverty, Blake told him that ‘he had committed many murders …’, a remark he followed up by claiming that ‘careless gay people are better than those who think.’⁴ Which may remind us that Yeats once told Robert Graves that a poet-friend of Graves was ‘too reasonable, too truthful. We poets should be good liars, remembering always that the Muses are women and prefer the embrace of gay, warty lads’.⁵ That Blake was capable of mischief I have no doubt, and at one time this led some critics to caution against taking him seriously. More importantly, his disrespect for certain traditional values, whether in art, religion, politics or sexual relations, meant that other critics saw in him a dangerous rebel against social norms. The Catholic D. G. James regarded Blake’s mind as ‘extremely confused; and … the huge difficulty and obscurity of his work arises from an intellectual and imaginative disorder’.⁶ T. S. Eliot both registered what he, too, took to be confusion and more suavely dismissed it and by implication Blake himself when he remarked that

We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy … that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house. England has produced a fair number of these resourceful Robinson Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of culture if we wish them.⁷

Eliot of course writes from a position which might be defined as basically catholic. The knee must be bowed to the Church, for the Church bears a whole weight of tradition on which its unopposable authority rests. In absolute contrast to this conservatism, which is as much political and cultural as it is religious, Blake came out of the traditions of non-conformity, and though he was undoubtedly alert to, and informed in, the ways and beliefs of different sects which abounded in London during his lifetime, including the teachings of Swedenborg and Boehme, that is not what either Eliot or James would have thought of as forming either tradition or culture. In what follows I shall have little to say about critical and scholarly disagreements as to the exact nature of Blake’s beliefs, not so much because I do not think they can be resolved as that their bearing on the present state of Blake studies is comparatively unimportant.⁸

With one crucial exception. The various non-conformist groupings which had emerged at the time of the previous century’s Civil War had gone underground after the Restoration. But that does not mean that they had died, any more than had their variously radical or revolutionary convictions. These were based on interpretations of the Bible. The Bible, not the Church, was the ungainsayable authority on which non-conformity depended, including the authority of a social vision. The God of non-conformity, properly understood, offers his followers a new Jerusalem, a utopia to be achieved by struggle against false authority. Hence non-conformity’s contempt for priest and Church, who claim sole authority as interpreters of God’s truths in order to justify self-interest, and whose ‘sanctioned’ interpretation of holy writ is therefore a way of protecting that self-interest, usually at the expense of the poor and disadvantaged. It is probably too loose to say that the energies of the different non-conformist sects, long hidden after the disaster of 1660, burst into the light of day in July, 1789, with the opening up of the Bastille. It is, however, proper to note that in the closing years of the eighteenth century political and religious radicalism was once more becoming a powerful agency in the lives of many. This was especially so for those in the growing industrial-urban areas who were conscious of themselves as oppressed by new social arrangements which they needed to oppose and who, as a result, were developing a growing self-consciousness which would show itself, in E. P. Thompson’s classic formulation, as ‘the making of the English working-class’. Blake was very conscious of his artisanal status and in this connection we need to recognise that his religious convictions cannot be prised away from his politics. Until the last years of his life, when he seems to have accepted a more orthodox form of Christianity, he was as radical in his religious as in his political thinking. It is, then, scarcely surprising that he appeals to critics and commentators on the political left, nor that in recent years there has been much enquiry into the non-conformist groupings of late eighteenth-century London.

Marxist Criticism

Expressions of Blake’s appeal to left-wing writers first began to show themselves in the 1930s. This is to be expected. During the decade between the Wall Street Crash and the start of the Second World War, socialist and Marxist ideas came to influence many young writers and intellectuals. History had to be rewritten, especially the history of key moments in what was often called ‘the people’s struggle against their oppressors’, and, as a result, the period that roughly coincides with the years 1770–1825 became crucial as ‘A Revolutionary Era’. The phrase was coined by Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickword for their anthology, A Handbook for Freedom, first published in 1939. (It was republished two years later as Spokesmen for Liberty: A Record of English Democracy Through Twelve Centuries.)⁹ A two-page selection from Blake’s Songs and his Prophetic Books appears under the running title ‘Against the Satanic Mills’, although neither ‘Jerusalem’ nor ‘The Tyger’ is included. More importantly, Lindsay and Rickword follow their selection from Blake with a number of petitions. One of these, which comes from Northamptonshire and is dated 1797, tells of the privations caused by enclosure. Other petitions include one by sailors complaining of wretched conditions on board ship, which gave rise to the 1797 naval mutinies, first at Spithead, then at Nore. Lindsay and Rickword provide as a running title for these petitions ‘The Dispossessed Speak’.

Blake was not dispossessed, but in placing his poems in A Handbook for Freedom where they do, Lindsay and Rickword remind us that unlike nearly all the other great writers of the time, who were university educated, he came from the artisanal class, and all his life had had to work for a living. So, too, did John Clare, born to the life of agricultural day labourer, his circumstances far less fortunate than Blake’s. For Blake had more coherent and keenly articulated traditions of radical as well as artistic thought to draw on than did Clare, the Northamptonshire ‘peasant poet’, born four years before the petition protesting against enclosure which Lindsay and Rickword print in their anthology. And the enclosure of the common lands round Helpston, the village where Clare was born, was the single greatest grievance of his life. As the petition makes evident, there were undoubtedly traditions of rural protest on which Clare could draw – including oral transmission of ballad, of tale, of rural radicalism – but urban, artisanal experience made for a complex skein of intertwined radical ideas which Marxist critics in particular have set themselves to distinguish in order to recognise which threads run through Blake’s writing.

Here, the work of the Marxist historian, A. L. Morton, has been of great influence on all subsequent left-wing commentators on Blake. In 1958 Morton published The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake, in the introduction to which he remarked that his book had its inception when, several years previously

I was reading … a good deal of the pamphlet literature dealing with the religious sects of the seventeeth century. I found myself saying, from time to time, ‘Blake might have written that’: presently I said, ‘and why not – these men were only three or four generations earlier. London in his boyhood must have contained many old men who had seen and perhaps talked with Cromwell and Coppe, to say nothing of Muggleton and Kiffin.’¹⁰

Given that Cromwell died in 1658 and that Blake was born virtually a hundred years later, this is best thought of as a pardonable exaggeration. It enables Morton to recognise the importance of placing Blake’s writings in the context of what he calls ‘a revolutionary tradition, tenaciously held by the descendants of the small tradesmen and artisans who had formed the extreme left of the Commonwealthsmen’.¹¹ And Morton emphasises the importance of two facts about Blake which cannot, he says, be overstressed. One, he was born into the world of London dissenting radicalism, and apart from one disastrous episode he lived his entire life in the city. Two:

he was and remained all his life, a manual worker, one of the highly skilled craftsmen who formed a substantial part of the population of London in his time…. It was from the craftsman’s special standpoint that Blake regarded the rapid development of industrial capitalism in England.¹²

Put these matters together and we have three separate although inevitably interlocked issues of the greatest significance for socialist critics: the precise, or it may be problematic, nature of Blake’s involvement with the English radical tradition, the fact that he was a Londoner, and the equally important fact that he came of, and remained within, the artisan class. It is worth dealing with these matters in turn.

Blake and the Radical Tradition

In Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, E. P. Thompson spends some time tracing Blake’s thought back to its sources in antinomianism, especially as that emerged in the later years of the eighteenth century and took its stand on ‘carrying to an extreme the advocacy of grace, and bringing the gospel of Christ into direct antagonism to “the covenant of deeds” or the “moral law”’. (Thompson’s it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 E. P. THOMPSON ‘The Divine Image’
• 3 JOHN MEE Dangerous Enthusiasm
• 4 DAVID ERDMAN Infinite London
• 5 STEWART CREHAN Producers and Devourers
• 6 SUSAN MATTHEWS Jerusalem and Nationalism
• 7 JOHN BARRELL ‘Original’, ‘Character’ and ‘Individual’
• 8 KATHLEEN RAINE A New Mode of Printing
• 9 BRENDA S. WEBSTER Blake, Women and Sexuality
• 10 GERDA S. NORVIG Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading in(to) Blake’s Book of Thel
• 11 MICHAEL SIMPSON Who Didn’t Kill Blake’s Fly: Moral Law and the Rule of Grammar in ‘Songs of Experience’
• 12 MATT SIMPSON Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience
• Note on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index