Andrew M. Cooper, A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry

Abstract

Andrew Cooper’s A Bastard Kind of Reasoning: William Blake and Geometry is a thorough and complex examination of the illuminated books alongside geometry, Enlightenment science, and phenomenology. It claims that “Blake did not simply reject Newton, geometry, and science” (2) and positions itself alongside Donald Ault’s Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (1974). Cooper, with his provocatively tongue-in-cheek title, is eager to differentiate his views from Ault’s and offers “a less binary, more interinvolved, yin-yang or Blakean-Contrary view of the relation of Eternity to three-dimensional existence” (12). His main argument hinges on the suggestion that geometry is in fact “cosmology,” a term that will be familiar to scholars working on the illuminated books. Cooper establishes that “Blake’s engagements with geometry were not incidental but key to how he understood the workings of the universe” (6), and that prophecy is a transmission of a geometric vision (235).