Blake's Work Research Articles

SPIRITUAL THEMES AND POETIC STYLE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS IN YASAWI AND BLAKE’S WORKS

This article is a comparative analysis of the works of AhmedYasawi, a representative of the Kazakh literary tradition, and William Blake, a great poet of the English Romantic school. The study aims to identify common spiritual themes and artistic strategies in the works of these two poets, as well as to search forpossible interrelations in their poetic styles. Both poets address deep spiritual issues such as love, mysticism, and the meaning of human existence. The analysis identifies unique traits and similar motifs in Yasawi and Blake's work, demonstrating how they use artistic techniques to express their philosophical beliefs.The article helpsreaders a deep dive into the world of Yasawi and Blake's poetry, revealing the common themes and symbols that permeate their works. Not only are the texts themselves analyzed, but also the context in which they were created, reflecting the influence of cultural, religious, and philosophical factors on their work.The study intends not only to broaden our understanding of Yasawi's and Blake's poetry, but also to emphasize the universality of the themes addressed by the literature of different cultural traditions. It invites readers to immerse themselves in a world of mysticism, love, and spiritual quest, providing new keys to interpreting the works of these outstanding poets. Methodological approaches such as textual analysis, comparative analysis, semiotic analysis, literary review and critical theory were used throughout the study.The comparative analysis of the works is a relevant study that enriches cultural dialog andreveals the deep spiritual aspects of their works that are relevant to the contemporary global context.The study of these authors works has practical value for a deeper understanding of cultural and spiritual contexts, as well as theoretical value by providing a basis for a broader discussion of the influence of literature on intercultural dialog.

"A larger vision": William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese

"A larger vision":William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese Clare Broome Saunders (bio) In the 1888 essay "English Poetesses," Oscar Wilde considers that the chief qualities of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's1 work is its "sincerity and strength" and hails EBB as "an imperishable glory to our literature."2 He praises particularly the sociopolitical and cultural function of her poetry, which, as Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor suggest, is "especially notable in an author himself known as an apostle of aestheticism."3 However, Wilde also considers EBB's ambitious and visionary poetic ideal, which he cannot find in work by her contemporaries, such as Christina Rossetti, "the very delightful artist in poetry" (p. 81). The poetics of force and energy that he finds in EBB's work make her "unapproachable" by her peers: "Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the consecration of the priest" (p. 81). Four years later, when the Edinburgh-based artist Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936) embarked on an ambitious and intricate project to illustrate EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), which she would eventually complete in January 1897, she focuses precisely on this visual excess of EBB's poetic imagination.4 Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Dublin, Traquair was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed at Trinity College, particularly to see the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art. This led to her introduction to her future husband, the Scottish paleontologist Dr. Ramsay Heatley Traquair, who was seeking an illustrator for his research papers; the two married and moved to Edinburgh in 1874, and Traquair illustrated her husband's papers for the next thirty years.5 However, Traquair's main artistic inspiration came from [End Page 521] literature: fascinated by the interaction between the poetic and the visual imagination, she forged a career as an illustrator and illuminator, grounded in her early experience of medieval manuscripts. In 1887, Traquair wrote to John Ruskin for advice on medieval illumination, sparking several months of correspondence during which Ruskin loaned her several thirteenth-century manuscripts from his library for studying and copying, which Traquair returned with copies, along with original works of her own and discussions of poets like Walt Whitman (Cumming, pp. 18–19). Traquair's long artistic career saw her move to work on large-scale murals, embroidery, and enamel jewelry as well as book illustration, and she became one of the first women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920. Throughout all her work, her main creative purpose was to celebrate the potential of the human mind and spirit: she was drawn to authors such as Dante in whose work she saw the ideal synaesthetic combination of the visual, poetic, and musical. From the 1890s, Traquair was increasingly inspired by the work of D. G. Rossetti, whose The House of Life was, for her, "a modern counterpart to Dante's La Vita Nuova" (Cumming, p. 41). Like Rossetti, she valued William Blake's poetry and art as inspirational, using his illustrations repeatedly as sources for her illuminations and murals (Cumming, p. 34).6 Blake appears alongside John the Baptist, Tennyson, Lord Lister, and Louis Pasteur in her final mural scheme, commissioned for the Manners Chapel, All Saints Church, Thorney Hill in 1920; as Traquair wrote to her sister Amelia, the portraits she included were of those who "sing the Te Deum, tho' they don't often know it." To her, the "Te Deum" meant "every beautiful and every fine thing" (Cumming, p. 90). Traquair's illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese expose striking connections between Blake's work and EBB's sonnet sequence, illuminating the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake's celebration of excess and the visual imagination. There are many obvious connections between the...

Travels from Dostoevsky's Siberia: Encounters with Polish Literary Exiles

Elizabeth Blake's latest work affords Dostoevsky scholars an intriguing and captivating glimpse into the experience of Polish political prisoners whose time of exile in Siberia overlapped or coincided with Dostoevsky's own incarceration in Siberia. Blake states her task is “to introduce new avenues for understanding Fedor Dostoevsky's experience of incarceration and exile” (p. 1). Indeed, Blake's translations do just that. But they also forge a new path toward a broader examination of the construction of political and national identity.The book begins with a general introduction that situates the Polish memoirists against the larger context of the Polish uprising and the ongoing Polish resistance to the repressive Russian empire. Three sections follow, each devoted to a Polish author: Józef Bogusławski, Rufin Piotrowski, and Bronisław Zaleski. All three are “Dostoesvky's contemporary peers in the Russian Empire,” and all “were arrested and deported to Siberia and Orenburg for their political activism” (p. 1). Blake provides a biographical and literary background on each author at the start of each section, as well as commentary on the work of the author. Bogusławski's piece A Siberian Memoir is an unfinished manuscript that was published in the Kraków journal New Reform. Bogusławski had “extensive knowledge about a number of prominent agitators in the Congress Kingdom before 1863” (p. 29). This longest of the three memoirs, provides abundant and rich detail about numerous aspects of his experience as a political prisoner, notably, the journey to Siberia and the day-to-day existence of the prisoners. He also includes accounts of his arguments with Dostoevsky. Piotrowski's Memoirs from a Stay in Siberia “captured the imagination of the European reading public with [its] escape narrative” (p. 133). For Dostoevsky scholars this narrative provides “additional portraits of several influential officials who attempted to alleviate the living conditions of political prisoners” (p. 133). The third section, entitled “Beyond Omsk,” attempts to “situate Dostoevsky within various communities of exiles” (p. 158).The general introduction and the short biographical background Blake provides on each author was very much appreciated by this scholar who will openly admit a woeful knowledge of Polish history and literary tradition. Blake has fulfilled an unenviable task here. She has a large cast of characters to introduce, and a great deal of significant history to condense in a short introduction. If, like myself, you are unfamiliar with the events of the Polish uprising and the Polish luminaries who populate the backdrop to the memoirs, Blake's compact and dense style will take some unpacking. Taking the time to reread a few passages here and there was well worth it. By the time I reached the author biographies, names, events, and time frames were beginning to stick. Blake's tapestry leaves little out and functions as its own history primer, one which I will return to as a reference.Blake's introduction also touches upon the Russian imperial penal system and its techniques of incarceration and punishment. Blake also directs attention here to the construction of identity as a prisoner. Despite numerous commonalities in the experiences of all prisoners—charges and conditions of the trial, corporal punishment, in particular, whipping and running the gauntlet, the hardships of being transported to Siberia, forced labor, sickness, hunger, infestation of vermin—the Polish memoirists sharply delineate the prisoners into two categories, the Russians, and everyone else. The latter includes the Poles and other oppressed nationalities in the empire such as the Kirghiz and the Circassians.The construction of the prisoners’ identity in opposition to “Russianness” as a mark of oppressiveness, rather than along traits of shared experience, opens a new avenue to examine nationalism and xenophobia in the writings of the memoirists and their contemporaries, Russian, Polish, and others. It provides a looking glass for Dostoevsky's xenophobic and chauvinist attitudes to Poles and Poland. The Polish authors in this volume expose their own prejudices and snobbery by depicting Russia and Russians in a manner similar to Dostoevsky's depiction of them. Was Dostoevsky's depiction of the Poles across his post-Siberian fiction as much a tit for tat as a visceral knee-jerk?

Roots, shoots, fruits: William Blake and J M Robertson: two key influences on George Spencer-Brown's work and the latter's relationship to Niklas Luhmann's work

PurposeBlake is relatively well-known, but who was J M Robertson? What's his connection with George Spencer-Brown? And how exactly did J M Robertson influence George Spencer-Brown?Design/methodology/approachGeorge Spencer-Brown (1923–2016) is the author (among other works) of the undeservedly little-known book, Laws of Form (1969/2011), which was a key inspiration for Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). But what inspired George Spencer-Brown? This paper explores two key influences on George Spencer-Brown and his work: the English poet and artist, William Blake (1757–1827) and the Scottish rationalist, politician and author, J M Robertson (1856–1933).FindingsThe paper points to a broken link between George Spencer-Brown's work and Niklas Luhmann's.Originality/valueThese questions are explored from two perspectives: first, George Spencer-Brown's works and their debt to (1) Blake's work, from which he quotes in a number of instances and to (2) J M Robertson's (in particular, the latter's Letters on Reasoning (1905) and Rationalism (1912)); second, my personal connection to Spencer-Brown, who mentored me through Laws of Form and with whom I developed a close friendship involving regular weekly telephone conversations for the greater part of the last four years of Spencer-Brown's life. I share anecdotes and stories that connect George Spencer-Brown and J M Robertson that span George Spencer-Brown's lifetime – from his school days to his dying days. Both Blake's and Robertson's influences are relevant to Spencer-Brown's view of morality. The paper looks at specific connections between Blake's work and J M Robertson's on the one hand and George Spencer-Brown's on the other.

BLAKE'S POISON TREE OF LIFE AND THE PERFECT FRUIT OF CRIME

This paper investigates and realigns William Blake's short, little known but hugely enigmatic poem “A Poison Tree” along the indices of his complex relationship with the Christian doctrine. A Poison Tree published in 1794 is a poem that is little understood even today given its cryptic and aporic imagery laden with irony and allusion. The unbridled vindictive passions of Blake's double work draw unapologetically from his views on temperance and restraint. I shall try to read Blake's poem like a detective suspecting the worst in literature as in life – without deception there is no plot and no progression. That the poem inverts the schema of good and bad, God and devil, Heaven and Hell, friend and foe, speaker and listener, writer and reader is the major argument of the paper.

William Blake and the Age of Aquarius ed. by Stephen F. Eisenman

Reviewed by: William Blake and the Age of Aquarius ed. by Stephen F. Eisenman Jade Hagan Keywords William Blake, Romanticism, American counterculture, 1960s', 1970's, art history, cultural studies, abstract expressionism, the Beat Generation, psychedelic subculture, utopianism, millenarianism, the Age of Aquarius, Maurice Sendak, occultism, esotericism stephen f. eisenman, ed. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 248 + 137 color illustrations. Perhaps the most striking fact about the English poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827) is that until the middle of the twentieth century, almost no one had heard of him. Stephen Eisenman's edited collection William Blake and the Age of Aquarius makes significant headway toward recovering and revaluing the popular origins of Blake's current celebrity and mainstream status. In particular, it focuses on Blake's pivotal influence on the American counterculture [End Page 433] of the 1960s and '70s, which, as this collection convincingly demonstrates, was as much a visual culture as it was a political movement.1 The book forms the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name that ran from September 2017 to March 2018 at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art, and features 137 high-resolution images of works in the exhibition.2 Together, the book and exhibition aim to explore the art and ideals of key figures in the 1960s through the lens of their engagement with Blake (vii). More specifically, the essays in the collection examine how Blake shaped the era's struggles against oppression and the various ways that he was understood and misunderstood in the process (viii). The collection is significant for its recovery of Blake's place in the visual culture of the 1960s and the ways in which Blake's imprint reshapes traditional categories of art history. Tracing Blake's influence on this culture brings together high and low art, placing psychedelic concert posters for The Doors and the formal experimentation of abstract expressionism on a continuum of responses to the same figure and the same political and cultural moment. This is fitting for a figure who himself bridged so many divides—between, for instance, text and image, marginal and mainstream, copyist and visionary. This collection grapples with three divides in particular: the past and present, politics and religion, and Blake's academic and popular reception. Although the authors have varying degrees of success in complicating these divides, the book's treatment of these issues expands our understanding of Blake and his proper historical location. The collection consists of a lengthy introductory chapter, a chapter on the historical contexts of Blake's work and life, four chapters that serve as case studies of Blake's influence on specific figures and coteries, and a final chapter that offers a methodological reflection on what it means to conduct the sort of trans-historical study laid out in the book and exhibition. Some of the [End Page 434] chapters offer a new interpretation, through the prism of Blake, of an artist or writer we thought we knew. But many of the artists and writers discussed in these pages will be new to most readers outside of the academic study of art history or postwar American cultural studies. Some of these figures will be new or surprising even to those who do study the 1960s. This is by design. In fact, one of the book's innovations is to suggest a new way of structuring or defining the counterculture vis-à-vis a new pantheon of countercultural figures. The chapters oscillate between panoramic overviews of Blake's impact on postwar American popular culture on the one hand and more focused studies of Blake's influence on specific movements and figures on the other. The four case studies narrow in focus as they progress, moving from Elizabeth Ferrell's chapter on a group of seven San Francisco-based writers and artists, to Jacob Henry Leveton's chapter on four abstract expressionists, to John Murphy's chapter on avant-garde artists Æthelred and Alexandra Eldridge, and finally to Mark Crosby's chapter on Maurice Sendak. At the same time, each of these four chapters speaks to a broader trend or cultural context of the '60s. The...

William Blake: The Eighteenth- century Genius of Intermediality as a Character in Mad Girl’s Love Song.

The focal point of this work is the appropriation of William Blake’s persona as a character in the novel Mad Girl's Love Song , by the Indian post-colonial writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair. We discuss initially, the intermedial character of Blake's work, as a poet and painter, with emphasis on his copper engraving technique, the so-called illuminated impression, which constitutes the differential feature of his art. From the concept of remediation of previous media explained by Bolter and Grusin, Blake's work is seen as an eighteenth-century example of the immediacy and hypermediacy that characterize today's digital media. Leo Hoek's concepts of simultaneity and successiveness in intersemiotic translation are used to analyze the phases of production and reception of the text-image dyad The relationship between Bhaya Nair's writing and the Western literary canon is seen not only as the appropriation of its themes, characters and writing techniques but as an instrument of protest against the subaltern position of the post-colonial subject. KEYWORDS: Blake. Appropriation. Illuminated printing. Rukmini Bhaya Nair.

William Blake Translated: The Creation of Blake's Literary Fame in Spain

André Lefevere highlights the central role of translations in the creation of literary fame, that is, in ‘the general reception and survival of works of literature among non-professional readers’. Through translations, the image of an author is shaped and projected in different national, historical and cultural contexts. The analysis of the selection of poems translated, and the introduction, notes and annotations that usually accompany those translations, can provide us with a preliminary overview of the presence of an author in a specific country of reception. This is especially true in the case of the reception of William Blake in Spain. The part played by translations, especially the earliest ones, is remarkable because some not only made Blake's work available to a Spanish readership but also provide readers with long introductions that constituted the first and, for a long time, sole critical approach to the British poet in Spanish. This article traces the progressive creation of Blake's literary canon and fame in Spain through the comprehensive analysis of the existing translations, both in Spanish and Catalan.

Reposisi CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) di Indonesia

CSR discourse (Corporate Social Responsibility) emerged as an effort to built corporate responsibility to the social neighborhood. Accidentally temporal CSR practices rise the stereotype and skepticism of its worked by some ecologists. This paper attempts to reposition CSR in Indonesia as the scutum protecting entity of corporate exploitation. Through an ecopolitical study inspired by Piers Blake's work and concludes with the ethics of care developed by Carol Gilligan, this paper extend the interpretation of CSR as a ‘zoon politicon’ that demands the transformation of its role and practices in symbiotic mutualism with their neighborhood.

The Uncollected Letters of William Blake

This essay focuses on the most recently unearthed letter by William Blake—one that is known but has hitherto been inadequately discussed. Blake's letter illustrates how aspects of the correspondence, previously considered mundane, in fact can play a crucial role in unearthing key minute particulars and ultimately bringing into fuller focus Blake's life and work. At the same time, the ever-increasing corpus of Blake letters little addressed by researchers underlines the need for a revised and fully annotated, historically and biographically attuned scholarly edition of the correspondence of the artist, poet, and printmaker.

Dream and Material

Dream and Material Charles Alexander (bio) The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner Robert Grenier & Curtis Faville, eds. Standorf University Press www.sup.org/books/title/?id=8058 1868 1,868 Pages; Print, $155.00 'Five windows light the cavern'd Man: thro' one he breathes the air;Thro' one hears music of the spheres; thro' one the Eternal VineFlourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro' one can lookAnd see small portions of the Eternal World that ever groweth;Thro' one himself pass out what time he please, but he will not;For stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.' So sang a Fairy, mocking, as he sat on a streak'd tulip,Thinking none saw him: when he ceas'd I started from the trees,And caught him in my hat, as boys knock down a butterfly.'How know you this,' said I, 'small Sir? where did you learn this song'?Seeing himself in my possession, thus he answered me:'My Master, I am yours! command me, for I must obey.' 'Then tell me, what is the Material World, and is it dead?'He, laughing, answer'd: 'I will write a book on leaves of flowers,If you will feed me on love-thoughts, and give me now and thenA cup of sparkling poetic fancies; so, when I am tipsy,I'll sing to you to this soft lute, and show you all aliveThe World, when every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.' William Blake's work (here, the opening of his long poem Europe [1794]) is a dream with startling clarity. Europe: A Prophecy begins with an illuminated print of God dividing the heavens (division not being much of a plus in Blake's sense of all things being joined in ultimate freedom and relationship). Blake (the speaker of the poem) listens to a fairy song and captures the fairy, who tells him "My Master, I am yours! command me, for I must obey!" The fairy is the spark of the imagination, which should be used well. The key question he asks the fairy is "Then tell me, what is the Material World, and is it dead?" The answer is a resounding no, i.e. that the world is full of leaves, flowers, music, and each flower is eternal, though they are plucked and whimper (denied their true nature, perhaps like Man to Blake). Then the fairy "dictated" the rest of the poem to Blake. The "material" world is the actual PHYSICAL world—this question has different ramifications in our own digital age, and in our own shrouded age of pollution and man-influenced natural disasters, disease, and ruin (pretty much all of which Blake predicted, or at least warned us about). Does this world still exist, and/or are we just, as the poet Charles Olson would have it, so "estranged from that with which" we "are most familiar," that we miss out on its pleasures? And even in poetry and the arts, are we too invested in conceptual ideas and theoretical difficulties and the veneer of electronic and digital presentation, that we forget some of the simple pleasures? In seeking connections between the material world, and specifically poetries that help to create and respond to such a world, I have been attending to the massive four-volume collected poems of Larry Eigner in the last several months, and finding there an example of such physicality, one to some degree defined by Eigner's cerebral palsy, but one in which the poetry, in part through the circumstancess of that condition, enacts an attention, constantly, from a singular viewpoint, and works with a method of writing the poem on the typewriter that continually reflects on the world, one key (letter) at a time, one vision at a time, and in so doing collapses time to appear as a window, and collapses space to become what the eye can see and the ear can hear and the body can feel, through the acts of seeing, hearing, perceiving and noting perception. Let me track a bit backwards. The name LARRY EIGNER should be written and read large...

Preserving Jeremy Blake's Archives

Jeremy Blake (1971-2007) was an American digital artist most well known for his animated video installations, “time-based paintings” and large-scale digital C-prints. Blake's evocative work combined 8mm film, vector graphics, and hand-painted imagery to create a distinctive aesthetic: color-drenched, atmospheric and even hallucinatory. His acclaimed work was a defining example of new media art. The artist worked primarily with Adobe's Photoshop software, saving his work in its native PSD format. Working from an archival perspective in collaboration with technologists, curators, and individuals familiar with Blake's artistic process, this paper highlights the challenges, as well as the opportunities, for preserving and creating access to complex born-digital formats like PSD.

Canon Formation and the Reception of William Blake's and Dickinson's Poetry in Korea

In her article "Canon Formation and the Reception of Blake's and Dickinson's Poetry in Korea" Hyesook Son examines a range of aspects with regard to the reception and scholarship of William Blake's and Emily Dickinson's poetry. Son demonstrates by what process these two poets have become canonized and what intellectual factors and ideologies have produced this canonization. The reception of Blake's and Dickinson's work has symptomatically displayed the characteristic Korean interpretive frames working through the last six decades and their limits and inherent possibilities. Today, Korean scholars are examining both their literary inheritance and reconstitute literary scholarship in general in order to reflect the shifting historical and cultural conditions to meet the need for change and diversity.

William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media by Roger Whitson, Jason Whittaker

Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker. William and the Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 211. $93.56. In this study, Roger Whitson and Jason Whittaker do an excellent job of describing in popular culture (Whittaker's forte) and in social media: Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube (Whitson's). Chapter 1 focuses on Virtual Blake, offering its core theorization of the virtual and then tracking editions of from Blake's lifetime to digital media, especially William Archive. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on editions and adaptations of Blake's The Tyger, while Chapter 3, on Jerusalem, describes the uptake in popular culture, particularly rock music and political organizations, of Blake's Hymn Jerusalem from Milton. Chapter 4, Digital Creativity: Teaching William in the Twenty-First Century, describes the process of using Twitter to teach and asking students to use software programs to create a final project that appropriates Blake's work to create a meme of sorts. Chapter 5 purports to discuss Blake and His Online Audiences, but what it really does is demonstrate how digital media make it possible to trace and characterize Blake's audience, even though the uses of are not always digital (e.g., poems by Chamber music organizations, articles in newspapers). By contrast, Chapter 6, Folksonomies and Machine Editing: William Blake's New Aesthetic on Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube, does describe digital uses of Blake's work. This chapter explores how the semantic web will make use of rdf triples, metadata about each of its resources that could link disparate digital resources into one big giant billion-editor of Blake's work, resulting in a text constituted by the Internet as a whole. Excellent concerning the relationship of to popular culture and digital media studies, this book calls for discussion because it purports more largely to bring a message from Humanities (DH) to traditional disciplines of English literature and history: [W]e suggest ... that the humanities and literary studies should practice what calls 'self-annihilation.' We should, in other words, abandon institutional and embrace experimentation (25). Even given that Blake's version of might not be as destructive as the term suggests, these are fighting words. book as a whole attempts to delineate a way forward for literary studies, a way that they imagine DH to be leading us, and opposes academic to the spirit of collaboration. In this review essay, I will deal with DH's relation to traditional literary studies first, looking especially at the history of editing and the impact of collaboration on current editing practices, asking whether DH in fact preaches self-annihilation to the humanities as currently constituted. I will conclude by discussing disciplinary egos and their relation to expertise. Part of the that Whitson and Whittaker imagine has to do with changing what humanists do: we should be, instead of merely interpreting and critiquing, producing digital media. kind of digital productions they advocate are enabled by Web 2.0 and semantic web technologies, to which this book provides a good introduction. But there are distinctions to be made. Many of the new social media allow users to shape the content of any particular web site and/or text, whereas other editions may simply gather all available digital resources made by myriad hands distributed across the Internet. Older web sites tend to be more like the Archive, presenting what is essentially a digital edition of a printed text, its digitization allowing users to perform some things with greater ease. It is much easier, for example, to search Blake's illuminated books for images of bats using the Archive than it is to fly all over the globe looking at all of his illuminated books housed in various collections to find those images. …

Myth and the creative imagination in The Book of Urizen

William Blake is best known and admired forSongs of Innocence and Experience. The same year as he completed it, he also published the earliest in his series of so-called ‘prophetic books’ that explore creation. Etched in double columns in imitation of the Bible,The First Book of Urizen(1794) is about the creation of earth, the first female, her son and his near sacrifice and what humankind lost when separated forever from Eternity. It tells of horrendous pain and disillusionment. Ever since the 1970s, critical interest in the work has been dominated by new historicist approaches that relate its interactions to events in the outer world of Blake's time. This article explores them as an expression of an autonomous process unfolding in hisinnerworld. Its objective is to show not only how Jungian theory helps to identify and follow its concerns and intrinsic logic, but also how Blake's work broadens our understanding of the nature of unconscious processes.

“Cracked Across”: Blake, Milton, and the Noise of History

For Joseph Wittreich ... he stood, as one who pray'd, Or some great matter in his mind revolv'd. --Samson Agonistes, 1637-38 when I was on the Other Side, I received no instructions. Guide pressed me, and when I was about to enter trance I would pray to be given an order to give [the church], so they could take action. I wanted this so much, and I prayed as I went into trance, and it was all quite painful and trying. In the end when I returned, completely spent, the message that Guide heard me and reworked into ordinary language told them neither to take action nor to desist. --Patron, in Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault (1999; English trans., 2003; second emphasis mine) GIVEN BLAKE'S ENDURING PASSION FOR MILTON, IT IS REMARKABLE THAT he never illustrated Samson Agonistes. Over many years he visualized every other major work of Milton's except Lycidas, and some texts (such as the Nativity Ode and Paradise Lost) he illustrated multiply and variously. The dramatic poem's omission becomes even more puzzling when we consider that Blake did execute several paintings on the Samson cycle the Book of Judges, including Samson Pulling Down the Temple mentioned by William Rossetti, now regrettably lost. On the rare occasions when Blake does link one of his images to Samson Agonistes, he does so obliquely. Around 1804 he inscribed caption beneath the famous rose print, the figure of youthful exuberance he had first sketched almost twenty-five years earlier (fig. 1). Rising from where he labourd at the Mill Slaves, Albion clearly recalls Milton's Samson, Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill slaves, (1) but the relationship between image and source text is by no means clear and has led Blake scholars to strikingly different conclusions. David Erdman, for instance, was convinced that this naked youth expresses the collective political spirit of the American Revolution and the Gordon Riots; properly understood as a terrific social utterance, rose provides Erdman's Prophet Against Empire its first corrective lesson in how to read Blake historically. Others have suggested the picture is more personal, representing either the renewed ecstatic visions Blake experienced after returning Felpham to London in 1803 or the artistic freedom he desired after many years of being mired in the drudgery of commercial copywork. (2) The image that lies closest to Milton's Samson at the pillars is the last of the 537 watercolors Blake prepared for an illustrated version of Edward Young's Night Thoughts (fig. 2), where his representation of an open-eyed Samson directly contradicts the biblical narrative and instead echoes Milton's description of Samson with inward eyes illuminated (1689). But despite its oblique, secondary reference to Samson Agonistes, this picture primarily refers to the final, apocalyptic lines of Young's poem: like Him of Gaza in his Wrath, / Plucking the Pillars that support the World. (3) Samson Agonistes sneaks in under cover, leaving us again to wonder why Blake never illustrated it directly. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] The absence of direct visual representation by no means indicates that Milton's tragedy was unimportant to Blake. In fact, I believe it indicates the opposite. Blake was haunted by Samson Agonistes, especially by Samson at the pillars, and he returned to that moment almost obsessively. He never represents it directly because he Cannot; that is, he cannot form that moment into unified image or series that would achieve comprehensive interpretation of the dramatic poem, as his other illustrations of Milton's poetry brashly attempt to do. Despite Manoa's concluding promise to build his son monument, Samson Agonistes leaves its reader heap of ruins, tangled wreckage of bodies and building, and the poem likewise enters into Blake's work in collapse, as multitude of fragments we can view only serially and collectively, in pieces, but never unified into single whole. …

Remediating William Blake: Unbinding the Network Architectures of Blake's Songs

The poetic parallels, figurative overlaps, and thematic frictions between the pages of William Blake's dynamic Songs of Innocence and of Experience establish a local area network architecture that is both complementary and antagonistic to the traditional pathways generated by/through bookspace. While this tension between connective paradigms contributes to the revolutionary vitality of Blake's work, its full implications have been stultified by generations of reproduction that privileged the organizational paradigms related to the printed book and its circulatory systems. However, flexible and fluid digital distribution, primarily via the William Blake Archive and its participation in NINES, extends the material bounds of Blake's printed work into a wide area network. This not only transcends Blake's distributive frustrations, but the sharing and communication functions engendered by network architectures encourage a more explicit recognition, re‐imagining and extension of the networked features and applications of Blake's multimedia Songs. Unfortunately, as Blake's work has migrated to the digital arena, traditional doors of print‐based perception have often been reinforced by unimaginative and anachronistic interfaces. NewRadial, a data visualization application, more fully illuminates the network architecture at the heart of Blake's Romantic creativity, and demonstrates the ways in which our current technological networks can extend interpretative possibility.

William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis (review)

Reviewed by: William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis Mark Lussier (bio) G.E. Bentley Jr. William Blake's Conversations: A Compilation, Concordance, and Rhetorical Analysis. Edwin Mellen. liv, 298. US$119.95 Perhaps no other scholar has made as lasting a contribution to the material conditions and contexts of Blake studies than G.E. Bentley Jr, who has spent a distinguished and productive career documenting virtually every aspect of Blake's life and work (e.g., in the indispensable Blake Records) and analyzing the significance of the gathered information (e.g., in the splendid biography Stranger from Paradise). William Blake's Conversations provides a fine supplement to the prior work, especially since it continues Dr Bentley's tendency of offering extremely useful reference works for any critical undertaking. As Mary Lynn Johnson succinctly states in her foreword, 'By gathering all known records of Blake's oral remarks, making each word accessible in a concordance, and subjecting the whole to a provocative rhetorical analysis, Professor Bentley has performed a significant scholarly service.' While only fifty or so of Blake's contemporaries recorded his voice in script, the spirited tone of utterance, as Bentley suggests in his in-depth introduction, will only confirm past impressions of the painter/poet/prophet as 'brilliant and bold, profound and perverse, eloquent and enchanting, idiosyncratic and wise.' As presented in the primary section of the work ('Thus Spake William Blake'), Bentley covers an impressive span of Blake's life (from 1767 to [End Page 427] 1831), although as this temporal range indicates, the earliest impressions are offered by those repeating his own recollections while the later are offered by those reporting after the fact his final passage to eternity. Bentley has chosen a rather broad definition of conversations to include memorable fancies from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and depositions for his trial for sedition, which in general works well. However, while the impetus for inclusion is admirable, the broad range itself becomes occasionally problematic. For example, I and other Blake critics have tended to read the 'I' of The Marriage as characterized and dramatized to achieve certain textual and narratological ends, rather than simply tracing Blake's tendency of speaking with the eternals resident in thought; thus, the presence of the dinner-party conversation with Isaiah and Ezekiel in a 'Memorable Fancy' seems inherently problematic. Otherwise, the broad parameters of the book provide an exemplary widened context within which to gauge the reception of Blake's words and acts. The materials gathered manifest an admirable hyper-organization designed to offer maximum benefit for subsequent scholarship, and Bentley's analytic prose, primarily on display in his superb introduction, reflects as well an engaging style both welcoming and, upon occasion, self-deprecating. The largest section for the book, for example, is taken up by a concordance of all included conversations, which will be of obvious use to scholarly endeavours, but Bentley also explores the play of language, in appendices dedicated to 'Blake's Imperfect Rhymes' and a 'Table of Rhyme Sounds,' that connect the public and private dimensions of a complicated and eccentric conversationalist. As well, the introduction unfolds in thirteen interrelated yet nonetheless discrete thematic subsections - from 'The Tao of Blake' to 'Descriptions of Blake as a Conversationalist' - to allow rapid progress toward a sought scholarly end. For this reason, among many others, Bentley's William Blake's Conversations will join his other foundational works in exerting an enabling influence on future research and generating admiration by those who follow where Blake's conversations lead. Mark Lussier Mark Lussier, Department of English, Arizona State University Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Blake’s Poetry and Designs: A Norton Critical Edition (review)

Johnson, Mary Lynn, and John E. Grant, eds. 2008. Blake's Poetry and Designs: A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition. New York: Norton. $22.50 sc. xxvi + 628 pp.Mary Lynn Johnson's and John E. Grant's update of their 1979 Norton critical edition of Blake's Poetry and Designs represents a significant step forward in the presentation of Blake's work to the reading public. Consistent with newer Norton editions, Blake's Poetry and Designs is more compact, colorful, and better typeset than the first edition. It also incorporates significant updates to its content, now arranged with the most widely circulated editions of Blake in mind: while their 1979 edition followed the chronological arrangement of Keynes's edition of Blake - which had been the standard edition of Blake since 1925 - the new edition follows the now-standard Erdman edition, placing the text of the illuminated books first and following it with manuscript material, marginalia, and then letters. However, the effect of this change is to shift from a study of Blake oriented around the development of his thought through time to a perhaps too focused emphasis upon the illuminated books.This emphasis is reflected in the new edition in its inclusion of all of Jerusalem. The first edition had less than half of what is now considered Blake's great work, so that all of Blake's illuminated books are now presented in a Norton Critical Edition. Johnson and Grant expand For the Sexes:The Gates of Paradise from only the concluding To the Accuser Who is the God of This World to the complete text, add Blake's marginalia to Spurzheim's Observations on Insanity, and approximately double the text of Blake s letter to Thomas Butts of 26 April 1803. But where the editors giveth, the publishers taketh away: as a partial trade-off for the inclusion of all of Jerusalem, the editors cut all of Hayley's letters from 1800 and approximately ten pages from their selections from Blake's notebook, which is no longer thematically organized. The first edition's sections on Drafts and Love from the notebook suffered the fewest cuts, while its section on Visions is about half its previous length and Art and Artists is barely represented at all.The net effect of these cuts is to reduce the notebook to a reading companion to the illuminated books emphasizing the themes of sex, love, and vision, a reasonable decision given the new edition's greater emphasis on the illuminated books and the consequent cuts. Johnson and Grant are not as concerned with separating Blake's poetry from his prose as Erdman was, but I wish they had chosen to follow their original chronological arrangement of Blake's work. As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of Erdman's New and Revised Edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, a chronological presentation of Blake's poetry and prose would now be a departure from Erdman's norm, one conducive to the new approaches to Blake's material which have been increasingly historically oriented.One radical departure from all prior presentations of Blake is this edition's reliance upon The William Blake Archive for transcriptions of the illuminated books (Erdman's text, cross referenced with originals, is used for Blake's other works). The William Blake Archive serves as an online companion to this edition, and is continually referenced in notes and introductory material. Reliance upon the archive for transcriptions brings readers closer to Blake's self-published illuminated works as they appear in the material objects he actually produced. In the past, readers of Blake did not read Blake, but one editor's ideal text developed from collating a number of variant prints. The new Norton edition for the first time presents the particularities of Blake's individual manuscripts, bringing the reader as close as possible to Blake's text as it would be read in one of the illuminated works themselves. The temptation to revise and correct Blake is for most editors of Blake difficult to overcome, but the Grants resist as much as possible. …

An Unpublished Letter by Ezra Pound on William Blake

IN 1956, more than a half century ago, I wrote to Ezra Pound, who at that time was incarcerated by government authorities at St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington DC, where he was committed, being found ‘insane’ in facing charges of treason for activities during the Second World War in Italy. As an enthusiast of William Blake's work, I asked Pound, who had been legally declared incompetent, if he had any supplemental thoughts on his remarks about the sanity of the poet-artist Blake. Pound in his Literary Essays, first published in 1918, in a jeremiad on ‘MR. HOUSMAN,’ satirically mentioned that ‘Willie’ Blake ‘occasionally [was] sent off to do a week-end in an asylum’ (p. 71). A page later, Pound also castigated ‘Blake's metric’ in ‘The Tyger,’ although Pound added ‘That there was a fountain of poetry somewhere inside dippy William, I would be the last to refute …’1 My letter to Pound was impertinent—and I got an impertinent reply. I did not expect an answer from Pound, and therefore I did have the presence of mind to keep a copy of my original inquiry, and, unfortunately, when I got the letter by Pound, I did not save the envelope, which had the logo of the hospital were he was being confined. Pound's reply to my inquiry was typed on a torn half sheet of a scrap of paper, 8½ × 11. Although the letter was unsigned, its authenticity can easily be confirmed by comparing the typescript with other letters of this period, as many are extant (see the collections in the Yale Library). Pound's letter is as follows: 9 Lug/ 56 No interest in retrospect. No energy for people who Aren’t trying to get necessary history back into Univ. Curricula. Order of precedence: some studies are NEEDED at particular times. Anyone of yr/ generation who is not paying more attention to Beria Than to Blake Is purty nigh being detrimental, Or at least don’t give a damn for his possible progeny. Why don’t yu go talk to ‘Alfalfa’ at Tichimingo / lot more lively than Blake.