Emblem and Symbol in Blake

Abstract

IN THE movement from allegorical representation in arts toward symbolic identification of idea and image which became established approximately during lifetime of William Blake (1757-1827), one casualty was virtual disappearance of emblem literature that had flourished in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In emblem books, design, motto, and epigram or verse commentary specify an unambiguous relationship between visual and verbal conceit and an abstract idea. Either Occasion or Time, for instance, may be represented as baldheaded except for long forelock, signifying that unless one seizes moment as it approaches, it vill slip by and leave nothing to hang onto.' The point-for-point correspondences of emblem are usually contrasted with kind of Romantic and modern symbolic expression of Moby Dick, for example, in which cumulative, reverberative meanings of whale emerge only within novel and cannot be stated explicitly. For English-speaking world, Coleridge formulated critical assumptions underlying current preference for symbol above allegory; in The Statesman's Manual (1816) appears his famous statement that allegory is a translation of abstract notions into picturelanguage, while symbol is characterized by the translucence of eternal through and in temporal and always partakes of reality which it renders intelligible. Despite Coleridge's sharp distinction between two terms, there is borderland for artists like Blake, as Angus Fletcher observes, where one passes from allegory to myth, from allegory into what Goethe would have called 'symbol.'2 This essay is scouting expedition into' that borderland.