Songs Named "Song" and the Bind of Self-Conscious Lyricism in Blake

Abstract

From the Greek Anthology to the present, lyric poems commonly go untitled, becoming popularly known by their first line elevated almost to title's status. Often lyric poem will carry only its particular formal name, like the poems simply named Sonnet in Keats's volumes. The intent of such title is at least partly to stress that the poem is supposed to be fine or unusual exercise in the specific form named. Much more rarely do poets follow third course of giving work an extremely general name like Poem, which would have the effect of novelist naming his book Prose, like generic grocery item; and even more rarely do poems named Poem follow one another in concentrated sequence. Something very like this, however, occurs in William Blake's first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, in which seven poems merely named Song run one after another, broken only by the titularly related Mad Song. Song, unlike Sonnet, names no strict form and hence does not seem to announce the following poem bravura exercise. Rather, compact series of elements generally named Song calls attention to itself an equally general reflection on poetry, reflection the puzzlingly identical titles lead the reader to think somehow united. In the aftermath of Robert Gleckner's 1983 study of Blake's Prelude, the importance for the rest of Blake's career of his earliest poems, collected in Poetical Sketches, is hard to deny.1 Still, Irene Chayes points out in her review, Gleckner's book leaves untouched the question of pairs or suites among the poems, an omission that is strange, since Gleckner elsewhere talks about Blake's poem sequences as not merely collection of poems but as, in sense, one poem.2 Paul Youngquist feels on the whole that critics have tried but generally failed to find some principle of order among the scattered pieces of Poetical Sketches.3 The eight Songs in question, capped by an envoi To the Muses, would seem likely candidate for such an ordered sequence the volume's much more famous four seasons group.4 As Zachary Leader points out, the designation Songs without any article (the Songs, a Song) signifies careful organi[zation and] larger artistic unity, although even Leader in his study of Blake's Song form barely mentions the group in Poetical Sketches and certainly does not treat it