Blake's Work Research Articles

"Apocalypse Now" : Blake et le millénarisme

Blake belongs to the end of a century. He also witnessed two upheavals : the French Revolution that was already germinating before 1789, the taking of the Bastille, and that began rotting with the massacres of the Terreur ; in 1793, it could no longer please those the Revolution had seduced. Meanwhile, the American colonies first coveted, then conquered, independence. Blake, though politically minded, offers another interpretation of the byways of evolution. To him, "Apocalypse"," that is to say "Revelation," is not a God-preempted date in a planetary future, but a moment in time that may be now for the individual man, the meeting of one — and self— he unbearable "all" Blake's work endeavours to contain, and the final unity (which may not be much more bearable) of the Divine, beyond religions and particular perceptions of an oppressive God. "Apocalypse Now, " beyond dates and millenarist trends is, to Blake, a way to individual freedom that transcends theologies and religions.

Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s

Dangerous Enthusiasm considers Blake's prophetic books written during the 1790s in the light of the French Revolution controversy raging at the time. His works are shown to be less the expressions of isolated genius than the products of a complex response to the cultural politics of his contemporaries. William Blake's work presents a stern challenge to historical criticism. Jon Mee's well-received study meets the challenge by investigating contexts outside the domains of standard literary histories. He traces the distinctive rhetoric of the illuminated books to the French Revolution controversy of the 1790s and Blake's fusion of the diverse currents of radicalism abroad in that decade. The study is supported by a wealth of original research which will be of interest to historians and literary critics alike. Blake emerges from these pages as a 'bricoleur' who fused the language of London's popular dissenting culture with the more sceptical radicalism of the Enlightenment. Dangerous Enthusiasm presents a more comprehensively politicized picture of Blake than any previous study. Mee...places Blake well and correctly...Dangerous Enthusiasm will do much to take Blake out of the somewhat attenuated discourse of analytic academicism and to put his back in a credible place. ' 'a general, incontestable conclusion that, whatever their personal relations, Blake's political opinions, expressed in both his writings and his engravings, were much more Paineite than has ever been previously appreciated. Here in these pages Paine grows in stature, with the eager Blake at his side,,, [a] splendid volume...'

Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake

'Short copy entry, for Eng Lit 91' This book focuses on the tension in Blake's poetry between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of belief: it offers a new account of the way in which Blake's major prophecies work and of the stratagems they employ to consolidate error and so open their readers' eyes to 'otherness'. Central to Peter Otto's reading is a re-definition of the role of Los and Jesus in Blake's work, emphasising Blake's prophetic intent. In the course of a radically new reading of Milton and Jerusalem, it is argued that in these poems the autonomous, world-forming imagination (that is staple to many accounts of Romanticism) is subject to visionary deconstruction. Rather than subordinating existence to perception, Blake's poems attempt to induce their readers to act. Constructive Vision is the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of Blake's work to draw on a radically new understanding of Blake's view of humanity.

A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of William Blake

William Blake, poet, artist, and mystic, created a vast multidimensional universe through his verse and art. Spun from a fabric of symbolism and populated by a host of complex characters, Blake's comprehensive world has provided endless inspiration to subsequent generations. For the reader of Blake, background knowledge of his symbolism is a necessity. In this volume, first published in 1965, S. Foster Damon, father of modern Blake studies and a professor at Brown University until his death, has assembled all references to particular symbols or aspects of Blake's work and life, so that readers can see the entire spectrum of Blake's thought on a variety of topics. For this edition of S. Foster Damon's classic reference work, Morris Eaves has written an updated annotated bibliography and a new foreword, included here along with his original 1988 index.

Authority and Vision: William Blake's Use of the Gospels

The purpose of this paper will be to clarify the treatment of authority and figures of authority throughout Blake's work by examining it within the context of his reading of the New Testament, and, in particular, of the Gospels. Depending on their attitude towards his work, critics celebrate or lament its imposing originality, but often lose sight of the fact that nothing of genius is ever concocted by an individual out of a vacuum, and that Blake not only insists that the Bible is 'The Great Code of Art,' but echoes, comments upon, alludes to, parodies, or quotes Scripture in practically every passage he ever wrote. It has now been over forty years since Northrop Frye, relying heavily upon Blake's use of the Bible, magisterially demonstrated the consistency of the logic underlying Blake's treatment of metaphor and narrative, along with the essential coherence of Blake's poetic thought. In doing so Frye made clear the connection between the radical messianism that Blake derived from his reading of the Bible, and his faith in the redemptive capacities of art and vision. Given the extent to which virtually all of Blake's subsequent critics acknowledge their debt to Fearful Symmetry, it is difficult to explain why the explosion of Blake criticism that has continued since this book includes relatively few important works devoted to Blake's use of the Bible. One area that remains largely unexplored, and which becomes substantially clarified when examined within the context of Blake's reading of the New Testament, and, in particular, of the Gospels, involves the treatment of authority and authority figures throughout his work. Included here is the pervasive conflict between spiritual and temporal forms of authority upon which so much of his poetry is structured, together with the relationship, in turn, of these antithetical forms of authority to different modes of perception.

Apocalypse and Recuperation: Blake and the Maw of Commerce

The paper is a materialist reading of Blake's illuminated works. It examines the copperplate method itself as the main theme of Blake's work, and also as a potentially practical means of conveying Blake's art to its intended audience. The question of audience must be at the center of any avowedly prophetic project. Did Blakean production actually facilitate reception? Are we the audience it sought? What forms of supplementary reproduction are necessary for modern discourse on Blake, and what are the effects of such mediation? To what extent does reproduction undermine. sublate, cancel or recuperate Blakean priorities even as it seeks to represent them? What do we actually read when we read a reproduction? The paper also thinks through the Blakean problem to a broader consideration of artistic projects operating marginally to the predominant cultural economy. and of their relation to criticism.

The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake: Part II — Silence, Syntax, and Spectres

A contemporary reading of Blake's later wo rk needs to begin w i t h an unrecoverable element of the textual p roduct ion , its silence — and Blake's. The prophetic books stand almost alone, w i t h very little of the accompanying wr i t ten material such as letters and essays that surrounds the work of the other Romantic poets. This silence goes even deeper because these poems were not read for many years, and it was nearly a century before readers began to be capable of generat ing the 'prophet ic ' texts in more than a random fashion. This silence must make us especially aware of the way that w e are n o w making these texts speak, and it is necessary to hear that silence as part of the textual p roduct ion , not merely an unfor tunate abeyance, delay whi le crit ical method developed. These texts have arrived in our history w i t hou t having acted in it for much of the t ime since they were wr i t ten , unlike the texts of other Romantic poets, wh ich have been product ive in our history since their incept ion. Blake's silence poses special problems for those tracing the relationship of economic and social format ions to the product ion of the texts, but it is also an element impor tant for all readers now, even those using the texts prospectively. The silence is as material as the pictorial spaces of the pages of the i l luminated prophecies. It is an unrecognisabil i ty that can never be ful ly familiarised or spoken for . A silence that any crit ical intervent ion must al low to art iculate the harmonies of its o w n performance.

BLAKE’S SYSTEM AND THE CRITICS

THE dramatic re-evaluation this century of Blakes poetry rests on a set of assumptions and procedures which have never been subjected to detailed criticism. These first found definitive expression in S. Foster Damon's pioneering study William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, which attempted to refute Blake's reputation as a madman and obscurantist by demonstrating his work's intelligibility. To do this Damon assumed that Blake 'himself had systematized his thought so carefully that one clue led to another, until at last the general structure of each book was clear.'l Supporting evidence for this notion of ~ Blakean system, or consistent body of symbols and ideas informing the poetry, was provided by analogous images and concepts in the poet's works and, where necessary, further elucidation was sought in putative sources which reflected Blake's interests in philosophy, politics and the arts. Thus in a single work Damon not only did much to advance Blake's critical rehabilitation, but he also established what became the accepted methodology of Blake scholarship, and opened up areas which subsequent studies have systematically examined. These findings have from time to time been challenged; but the indisputable illumination afforded by systematic approaches to Blake's work, together with a defensive legacy from the critical past, has meant that Blake specialists tend simply to close ranks against

Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral: Williams and the Precisionists

Of all the poets who have been influenced by the visual arts, William Carlos Williams may present the most complex case. Blake, Rossetti, and Pound turned paintings into poems and saw poems become paintings. But none seems able to match the combined range and depth of Williams' involvement in the arts. Blake's work represents a one-man movement in both painting and poetry. Rossetti and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites had a much more uniform style and subject matter than did the artists Williams knew. Pound's artist friends were certainly as diverse as those of Williams, but they exerted a more problematic influence, and it is not surprising that the single most important visual influence on Pound-the ideogram-is largely his own invention. Williams, on the other hand, paid close attention to three quite different art movements. He followed the innovations of Stieglitz' school of straight photographers and of the American Precisionist painters, such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, who were influenced by Stieglitz. He also was aware of European cubism and John Marin's American adaptations of the style; studied Dada and surrealism through 291, Duchamp, and later little magazines like Contempo and transition; and kept track of the experiments of a younger generation of Americans who had been influenced by surrealist automatic writing and his own Kora in Hell. Bram Dijkstra was the first critic to take seriously Williams' debt to the visual arts, and he extensively documented Williams' connections with Stieglitz and the artists and intellectuals in his circle.'

Blake and the Philosophy of Literary Symbolism

Blake as a symbolist, first with the proviso that he had to invent Lhis own symbols, later with the argument that his symbols were archetypal, whether of Jungian or fundamentally literary shape.1 Along with this appellation, Yeats's phrase describing Blake as a too literal realist of the imagination has tended to stick.2 But Yeats's phrase has such variable meaning that unless carefully applied it obfuscates or misleads. Though he may be regarded at some very high level of abstraction as belonging to the same tradition as Baudelaire, Blake is not a symbolist at all in the obvious sense implied by the famous sonnet Correspondances, and his techniques have little in common with Mallarm6's or with those of any of the poets discussed by Arthur Symons in one of the first studies of the symbolists.3 Yet Blake may be treated as a more complete symbolist than those who have gone under the symboliste banner, if one means by symbolist a poet who regards literature as a symbolic form of experience, in the sense that has become common since Cassirer.4 The view of Blake's work as more

William Blake

William Blake will always be an interesting figure to the psychologist and alienist because he represents the essential qualities of genius carried to that extreme point at which the question of its sanity became a delicate and difficult problem to consider. The material for reaching a solution of this problem has never been so clearly and fully presented as in the attractive and important volume which Mr. Arthur Symons has lately devoted to Blake. Mr. Symons has adopted an admirable method. In the first half of the book he presents his own finely interpreted version of Blake's life and Blake's work; in the second half he brings together without comment, and for the first time in a fairly complete shape, all the first-hand biographical material on which every estimate of Blake must be founded. We are thus enabled to form an independent opinion.