Blake and the Syntax of Sentiment: An Essay on ‘Blaking’ Understanding

Abstract

My subject is Blake’s relation to the literary movement associated with the emergence of the sentimental in late eighteenth-century literary culture, the period that Northrop Frye long ago christened ‘the Age of Sensibility.’ To locate Blake in such a context, I suggest, is indeed to engage in a practice of ‘historicizing Blake,’ as contributors to this volume’s predecessor did, but it is to do so in a way that they did not. For it also involves a sense of how to go about ‘Blaking understanding,’ to modify Blake’s own playful reworking of a title of one of Hume’s important contributions to the theory of moral sentiments.1 This is not a simple matter of influence exerted or resisted but rather of a deep and complex relationship to a literary and philosophical tradition, a relationship that, as far as I can tell, has not had the attention it deserves. How this relationship bears on a topic such as ‘Blake and the Nation’ becomes clearer when we consider the importance of ‘national sentiment’ to British nationalism in a period roughly corresponding to Blake’s life — national sentiment both as an emerging concept and as a significant fact on the ground. For Blake’s life spanned at once the early history of the sentimental as an acknowledged discourse and the emergence of a discourse of British nationalism in its recognizably modern form.2KeywordsTypical SongMoral SenseMoral SentimentVirtual RepresentationNational SentimentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.