Blake's Works Research Articles

The hidden mechanism of chemical fertiliser overuse in rural China

A comprehensive understanding of the reasons for over-fertilisation is critical to agro-environment sustainability, especially for the fast-growing farming areas under urbanisation. Previous studies are more quantitatively biased and in most cases, merely focus on demographical, economic and political factors whilst excluding in-depth qualitative and holistic investigation. To address this gap, this paper attempts to construct a conceptual framework to investigate the hidden mechanism of chemical fertiliser overuse through an empirical study in the Dancheng county of China. Such a framework is based on Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002), and Blake's (1999) works, but incorporates demographical factors and external barriers for explaining the awareness-behaviour gap. Results indicate that environmental awareness is not necessarily related with chemical fertiliser overuse as the reasons for farmers' inappropriate behaviours are embedded within an intricate network of economic, social-cultural and policy-influenced factors incorporating labour and time constraints, risk-averse decisions, intergenerational division, farm size, attachment to instant gratification, land attachment, peer pressure, distortion of agricultural and land use policies, which has roots in the agricultural marginalisation and urban-rural dichotomy. Based on the results, policy recommendations are provided.

The “Linnell” <i>Adam and Eve Asleep</i>: The Case for the Defense

With the combined condemnation of three of the most visually sensitive of Blake specialists, one is tempted to roll over and surrender. But doubts arrive, and a combination of misstatements, misunderstandings, and disputable arguments, to say nothing of actual contradictions of fact, has tempted me to return to the fray. To begin with, there is the problem of “copying.” Comparisons with the original watercolor from the Butts collection are one thing, those with the copies done for Linnell another. In the case of the first, as reflected in the relatively faint pencil drawing under the later work in pen and watercolor, it is hardly surprising, though not accurate, to talk of the copying as being “meticulous” or “slavish.” That is the usual intention when one copies another work. Both Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi go on to demonstrate details of where Blake departs from the original, usually for the worse. It would be tedious to go through every example they quote, but one may suffice. This is the small twig bearing leaves apparently with no connection to any branch or tree, on the righthand side of the picture, more or less on the horizon. I myself find the freedom of this motif rather refreshing, and there are precedents in other Blake works, in particular the first series of illustrations to the book of Job (Butlin 550 1 and 19; see also Butlin 551 19).

Northrop Frye and Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden (1896 to 1974) was Frye's tutor at Merton College, Oxford University, during the two separate academic years Frye studied there, 1936-37 and 1938-39. Blunden was poet, teacher, and critic, survivor of two years in the trenches at Ypres, Somme, and Passchaendaele in World War I, and close friend of Siegfrid Sassoon, another of the so-called war poets, who, like Blunden, was decorated for bravery. He was professor of English at the University of Tokyo (1924 to 1927), and on returning to England he had brief career as literary journalist, writing for the Nation and the Times Literary Supplement before taking up the position as Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College in 1931. Blunden was extraordinarily prolific as poet, prose writer, and journalist. Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick's bibliography of Blunden contains 3,988 entries, including more than three thousand contributions to periodicals and newspapers. Even so, Ms Kirkpatrick confesses that her bibliography is far from complete (xiii). In 1956 he succeeded Robert Graves as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, crowning achievement of life devoted to literature. Blunden was polymath, as Frye would turn out to be, and much, perhaps most, of his critical writing centred on the nineteenth-century poets and essayists. He wrote books and monographs, which we would characterize today as largely historical and biographical, on Clare, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys (Percy and Mary), Byron, and Lamb. In this respect, with Frye's obsessive attention to Blake, Blunden and Frye were congenial spirits who viewed the Romantic revolution as central turning point in European culture. (1) Blunden was small man. The editor and publisher Sir Rupert Hart-Davis recalls that when he first met Blunden in 1932 he was struck by the aptness of Robert Graves's description of Blunden as a cross between Julius Caesar and bird. Hart-Davis goes on to say that Blunden's tiny frame, his shyness, his quick-darting eyes and gestures, had all the grace and agility of wren, which his noble nose suggested the dominance of the Latin poets he read and loved (Rothkopf 4-5) The relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor was, like most human relations, complex. Frye's attitudes toward Blunden emerge from his correspondence with Helen Kemp (she became Helen Frye in 1937). This correspondence (CW 1-2) is our primary source. As for Blunden's view of Frye, this is more difficult to untangle. Other than Frye's statements about Blunden in the Frye-Kemp letters from 1936 to 1939, Frye makes only half dozen or so references to his tutor in his other writing, (2) all of which are inconsequential for understanding the Frye-Blunden relationship. In addition to the Frye-Kemp correspondence, our sources are limited to an interview, few letters from Blunden to Frye, and Barry Webb's excellent biography of Blunden. After Frye had completed his ba studies at Victoria College in 1932, he set out to complete second bachelor's degree, this one in theology from Emmanuel College, Victoria's sister institution at the University of Toronto. Following three years of study there, he received $1,500 scholarship from the Royal Society of Canada to spend year at Oxford studying the symbolism of Blake's prophetic works. This meant that Frye would enrol in program leading to still another bachelor's degree. (3) Pelham Edgar, Frye's mentor at Victoria, who saw Frye as potential colleague at Victoria, was the motivating force that pushed Frye's successful application for the Royal Society scholarship. After year at Merton College, Frye spent the academic year 1937-38 teaching at Victoria and then returned to Oxford for second year. His relationship with Blunden begins, then, in the fall of 1936. The present essay explores that relationship. Nazi sentiments? Frye set sail for England in early September 1936 to begin his Oxford studies, arriving in London on 15 September. …

The Laocoön and the Book of Job as Micrography: The Influence of Miniature Hebrew Illumination on the Work of William Blake

This article argues that the practice of micrography, an art form which creates designs and images using miniature Hebrew text, can be found in two of William Blake's late works, the Laocoön and Illustrations of the Book of Job. While Blake is known to have studied Hebrew and to have been influenced by Jewish mysticism, the influence on Blake of Hebrew micrography has been overlooked by scholars. By inscribing his works with this “Hebrew Art,” Blake rewrites the genealogy of western art history, claiming primacy for a unique and independent branch. The reclamation of a uniquely Hebrew art form in his prints allows Blake to pose an alternative to the narrative of classical influence on British art and poetry. It also allows for a new understanding of the breakdown between word and image in Blake.

Intimations of William Blake in On Beauty (2005)

The name of William Blake is nowhere mentioned per se in On Beauty--not even alluded to in the way one might expect of a novel that seems in so many ways a direct response to some of Blake's most passionate concerns. It is even possible that, while she certainly studied Blake's poetry at Cambridge University, Zadie Smith was not thinking specifically of Blake as she composed most of On Beauty. But abound of a deep connection. When she began writing On Beauty during the 2002-2003 academic year, Zadie Smith was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Boston, studying philosophy and thinking about her experience of America and of academia. Blake, too, had been thinking of America (and particularly of Boston's revolutionaries) as he composed his two intriguing and prophetic poems about trends in moral philosophy. The philosophical correspondences between Blake's and Zadie Smith's texts are arguably legion but, I admit, quite subtle--which is why I propose to examine hints only of Blake-like conceptualizations in Zadie Smith's hilarious send-up of trans-Atlantic academic life. (1) Blake and Smith, I propose, reached strikingly similar critical positions towards philosophical trends current in their respective eras. And while Smith's fictional Boston area is an especially bighearted tribute to the city and its environs--and especially to its most generous and spirited citizens, both Smith and Blake excoriate those who, for selfish ends, disparage beauty and in so doing sabotage justice, love, joy and genuine freedom. On Beauty, like Blake's two poems on America, indicts the reprehensible intellectual discourses of the day that undermine human happiness and corrupt the social order. (2) To discern the important common elements between Blake and Smith, we need first to look at Blake's fundamental concerns, to see the Blake afflatus in a holistic way. This is not easy. Scholars, until very recently, have long and obdurately and even rancorously debated what Blake was up to. Saree Makdisi (a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA; Edward Said's nephew) has tenaciously and meticulously addressed some of the most perplexing cruxes of Blake scholarship in William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s and brightly elucidated, there, (3) some of Blake's key passages in America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Makdisi disputes scholarship that--based on the rants against tyrants and the moaning over slavery and other injustices featured in Blake's works--lumps Blake with Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and their circles to establish Blake's bona fides as a and civil liberties advocate. Recent revisionists (Makdisi paramount among them) make the case that Blake was coming at these ideological issues from a completely different angle (a much more broadly moral and future-oriented angle), which enabled him to imagine where the rights revolutions set in motion by Paine and Locke and the others were bound to wind up in the fullness of time: in trouble, of course. Just as America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion specifically critique a wrongheaded sort of autonomy and the selfishness of claiming rights as sovereign individuals at the expense of oppressed others, so too does Zadie Smith's novel. (4) Coming some 212 years later, Smith wittily dramatizes a huge range of ideological discourses and antagonisms--many of them descended from Paine et al. Black and white and mixed-race characters from both edges of the Atlantic and from several Caribbean islands in between rant and rave (or sneer or simmer) against each other in academic circles (5) and outside of them (6) and in places like the Boston Commons. (7) The ideological jousting may be conveyed with humor, but the wit and the comedy do not conceal the historical accuracy of these representations or the sharpness of the author's barbs. We see liberal atheists score points against conservative Christians and vice versa. …

‘Catalogue of Some of Blake's Pictures at “The Salterns”’: Captain Butts as Exhibitor, Litigator, and Co-Heir (With His Sister Blanche)

Beginning in 1863, to a greater extent than has been recognized, Captain Frederick John Butts (1833–1905) controlled the lion's share of the largest Blake collection ever assembled, works that his grandfather, Thomas Butts (1739–1845), had commissioned or purchased from Blake himself. A proposed redating of a visit from William Michael Rossetti, an examination of previously unreported court records, and an analysis of newly accessible papers of Mary Butts in the Beinecke Library – including a list of at least ‘some’ of Blake's works in the Captain's home – help clarify the division of property between the siblings and offer a fresh perspective on the Captain's actions and likely motives as preserver, manager, and guardian of his and his sister's heritage.

Blake's Coded Designs of Slave Revolts

Haitian Revolution of 1791 reached the shores of all the slave colonies of the Americas. But the Saint-Domingue Revolt, as it was called at the time, was the most influential, harrowing, and longest (1791-1804) of the West Indian slave insurrections. slave revolts influenced the British emancipation movement (Matthews), and the literature. Blake was electrified by them, especially the Haitian Revolution (Wood, Slave)) 192; Poetry 143-144). It rolled through his 1790 prophecies: America: Prophecy (1793), Europe: Prophecy (1794), and Song of Los (1795). Critics name these the because they arc set on the four continents of America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. However, should signify not only the slave-owning colony that became the United States but also the West Indian plantation colonies with their constant revolts going back to the mid-1600s. Blake's familiarity with the experiences of slavery in other colonies of the Americas underlies his 1791-1792 engravings for John Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. Narrative itself contained graphic descriptions of the tortures by which the planters disciplined their slaves, and when Blake engraved the Continental Prophecies several years later he drew on a detailed knowledge of slavery in the sugar colonies. Sarah Salih suggests how problematic such fictions of atrocity (64) can be, for the viewer is situated at a safe textual remove from the enslaved people (70). However, Debbie Lee shows that Blake's engravings are subversive precisely because he brings his viewers close to the slaves (90) through their self-possession (107-111). They look out directly to the viewers in an intimate complicity. Critics have noted the striking parallels between the Stedman engravings and the designs for Blake's works of the 1790s (Linebaugh and Rediker, 344-47). Blake duplicates the image of the spread-eagled rebel from his famous plate #71, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack, in The Poison Tree of the Songs of Experience (Davis, 56) and the Preludium of America: Prophecy (Erdman, 231). Many designs of the Continental Prophecies belong to the larger context of his Stedman engravings that became iconic with the abolitionist movement. In a comprehensive and complex way, those engravings imply support of slave resistance as Stedman's narrative does not (Lee, 88-90). 1791-1792 engravings reach a high pitch in Blake's designs alluding to plantation slavery, and some of his later works parallel their key illustrations. Several of the most graphic were reproduced repeatedly in the popular abolitionist media: #11, A Negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows; #35, Flagellation of a female Samboe slave; and #71, The Execution of Breaking on the Rack. Figures duplicating the posture of Neptune in #71 (as Stedman names him, 285-6), who was thus being broken, appear often in different Blake works. His Stedman engravings in particular influenced designs for the Continental Prophecies. Indeed, if one looks at the designs of the Continental Prophecies as a whole, they strongly oppose West Indian colonial slavery. designs encode his real intent as the texts do not, specifically, his support for the rebelling slaves in the unfolding Saint-Domingue Revolt. This advocacy culminates in Europe: Prophecy, in which the designs present the capsule history of this Revolt up to 1794, when the French left and the British began their own attempt to take the colony and restore slavery. designs of the Continental Prophecies thus provide a significant dimension missing from the accompanying poems, save for the Preludiums of America and Europe. In them, Blake prophesies the end of the slave trade, initiated by colonial slave insurrections such as the Saint-Dorningue Revolt then underway for three years. As nearly all critics recognize, these Continental Prophecies present a vision of the point when forces of cultural repression grow unendurably constrictive and are broken down by the spirit of revolution. …

William Blake and the Hunt Circle

THE TENSIONS WITHIN ROMANTICISM ARE FULLY MANIFESTED IN THE ANIMOSITIES that existed between William Blake and the Hunt circle. The once marginal Leigh Hunt (and to a lesser degree his brothers John and Robert) has received due scholarly attention in recent years, (1) and we can now appreciate him for his own works, his commitment to reform, and his ability to cultivate connections among writers. Jon Mee has reminded us, however, that a significant part of Leigh Hunt's project was a fierce campaign again Methodism and religious enthusiasm. (2) Hunt's campaign was embodied in a series of essays for The Examiner, entitled An Attempt to Shew the Folly and Danger of Methodism, which appeared as a slightly revised pamphlet in 1809. The original publication of these essays overlapped with Robert Hunt's critical reviews of Blake's edition of The Grave on August 7, 1808, and of his exhibition of paintings on September 17, 1809. Blake, accordingly, became the most significant casualty of the Hunts' campaign against enthusiasm, and the campaign undoubtedly contributed to Blake's retreat into obscurity and poverty. But the clash also had an immensely fruitful influence on Blake's later works. Not only did it give birth to the villainous Hand, a major character of Blake's later mythology whose name plays on the indicator symbol used by the Hunts as a signature, it also shaped, as Mee notes, Blake's defense of Methodists and his conception of literary and religious enthusiasm in Milton and Jerusalem. (3) Since Mee focuses chiefly on what the conflict between Blake and the Hunts says about enthusiasm, I want to revisit this contentious relationship in light of an unrecorded reference to Blake by Leigh Hunt in the short lived quarterly The Reflector (1810/11--12), which is not found in Bentley's Blake Records. Dating from late 1810 or early 1811, this reference comes more than a year after the review of Blake's exhibition, and it shows that the Hunts maintained their interest in Blake for a sustained period. For Blake, the new attack would have come as he was working on several important projects, most of which were already in dialogue with the Hunts. These projects included the engraving of his Chaucer painting, his Public Address to the Chalcographic Society (a group formed for the encouragement of engraving and which was promoted by the Hunts and Robert Cromek, the publisher of The Grave), several notebook poems on the Hunts and his other enemies, Milton, and Jerusalem. (4) The Reflector influenced many of these works, and in light of the new reference to Blake, I also want to underscore Blake's awareness of the topics discussed in The Examiner and the degree to which Blake's circle of friends and acquaintances overlapped with that of the Hunts. While the Hunts were not Blake's only enemies, by figuring Hand as the eldest son of Albion, Blake signaled his recognition of the leadership of the Hunt circle in a new generation of writers. Blake clearly had an enduring interest in the activities and controversies of the Hunt circle, and his concern with Lord Byron, to whom he dedicated The Ghost of Abel (1822), may be an extension of this attention. Ultimately, the intersection of Blake's and Hunt's circles will help us better understand the personal and professional context of Blake's public engagement and the intended audience of his later works. I Blake and the Hunts had many avenues for information about each other. The Hunts were the nephews of Benjamin West, who, as President of the Royal Academy, subscribed to The Grave along with several other members of the Academy. The Hunts knew Cromek and worked with him on promoting several projects. The Hunts' friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, wrote an article on Blake in 1808 and attended his exhibition in 1810. Robinson's diary shows that Blake was a frequent subject of conversation; between 1811 and 1813, Robinson discussed him with William Rough, William Hazlitt, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Thomas Barnes, and Barron Field, all of whom knew Hunt. …

La profondità ipocentrale con metodi macrosismici

Aim of the present work is to determine the hypocentral depth of an earthquake by macroseismic methods. A short hystorical review of the main relations between macroseismic intensity, acceleration and hypocentral depth from Cancani to the present time has been carried out. Particular care has been pointed out to Kovesligethy and Blake works. Being the Blake's relation the basis of all modern methods the y experimental value has been investigated to apply in Italy in the formula (/„ _ /„) = y log (Dn/h) using some earthquakes with analitical depth known. There are singled of two intermediate values of y; one (y ) valid for Italy in general Y, = 4.382 ± 2.282 another (yc) more specific for central Italy Y„ = 3.989 ± 1.344 From the investigation the AA. deem that the macroseismic method cannot anyhow be applied, hence the AA. suggest the following application limits: 1) for the isoseismals to be used (not more than three around the epic.) 2) for the hypocentral depths (only within the crust: h 3) for the y value (y To determine quickly the depth (h + 5h), when the intermediate radii rc of the circles equivalent to the I, II, III isoseismal areas of an earthquake are been calculated (or measured), a table 3 has been calculated. In table 4 both the macroseismic and the analitical depths relating to untilized earthquakes, are compared. The results obtained in the present work can be improved when the researchers will have access to a greater lot of earthquakes with known analitical depth and will be able to associate to a general intermediate value Y, specific values of ± 5y; for each homogeneous structural unit. In any case, the results obtained by that, as well by different macroseismic methods, have always to retain approximate, even if the AA. tried to furnish a range of indetermination to h values.

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. …

Hallucinatory Vision and the Blurring of the Subject in Jeremy Blake's `Time-Based Paintings'

From the turn of the 21st century until his death in 200 Jeremy Blake worked at the convergence of animation, digital technology and painting, synthesizing them through the use of cinematic strategies. This article discusses the debt Blake's early abstract works owe to the experimental animated films of the Visual Music artists and American post-war Color Field painters. During this period, Blake applied his exceptional facility with emerging animation software to sequential figure/ground abstractions based on literary narrative structures. Subsequently, Blake shifted from `time-based painting' to richly textured non-narrative biographical sketches created in collaboration with maverick protagonists in contemporary popular music. The visuality of Blake's hallucinatory moving images intensified emotionally as new digital software became available. The deep hybridity of his visual compositions, transmitted through constant fades and overlays of photo-based images and abstracted color patches, doodles and animation characters, create a richly textured bridge between subjective consciousness and the world of appearances.

Blake's Heavy Metal: The History, Weight, Uses, Cost, and Makers of His Copper Plates

Blake's Heavy Metal1 The History, Weight, Uses, Cost, and Makers of His Copper Plates G. E. Bentley, Jr Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of Toronto 'Here alone I in books formd of metals Have written the secrets of wisdom' Urizen pl 4, ll 69–702 For Blake's work in designing and engraving, we know a good deal about the surface on which he worked. Usually, of course, it was paper, whether the record3 is explicit or implicit. For the graphic works, sometimes Butlin specified not only 'paper' but grey paper (no. 572), 'yellowish paper' (no. 634), 'Tracing paper' (no. 646, 754, 856), 'tracing-like paper' (no. 408), 'buff cartridge paper' (no. 254), 'prepared paper' (no. 407), card (no. 347 [miniature of Johnny Johnson], 635), and 'common thick mill-board' or 'pasteboard' (according to his disciple Frederick Tatham) for the Large Colour Prints (no. 289–329).4 For his drawings Blake also used Canvas,5 'Fine linen' (no. 667–68), Muslin (no. 811), Ivory (no. 376–78, miniatures of Thomas Butts, his wife, and son), Glass (Felpham Rummer [1803], not in Butlin), Panel (no. 750 ['Ghost of a Flea'], 810), Pine (no. 808–9), Mahogany (no. 674, 806–7), and a Wood-block (no. 773). [End Page 714] But for present purposes, the most interesting material is metal.6 It was of course copper on which Blake usually made his engravings and etchings. Scores of these pieces of copper survived Blake's death in 1827, and about 1831 Tatham printed Songs of Innocence and of Experience, America, Europe, For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, and Jerusalem. However, Tatham managed to lose most of the copper plates. The only surviving piece of copper <Illustration 10a> from Blake's works in Illuminated Printing is part of the abandoned version of America (1793) pl a <Illustration 1>. Copper was enormously important to Blake; as he himself wrote, 'Mr B ... during a Period of forty Years never suspended his Labours on Copper for a single day.'7 His own works in Illuminated Printing were etched on copper, and he might have written of them what Urizen says of his universal creation: 'Here alone I in books formd of metals Have written the secrets of wisdom' (Urizen pl 4, ll 69–70) In letterpress printing, one pass through the press prints several pages – four pages per side in a quarto, twelve pages in a duodecimo, &c. But in printing from an engraving in a rolling press <Illustration 3>, a single pass through the press normally produces only a single image. The copper plate had to be cleaned, re-inked, and printed twelve times to produce twelve copies of the image.8 The pressure of the roller on the dampened paper was so heavy that the engraved image was slightly embossed on the paper. Even when the ink was wiped off the plate, the obscured portions can sometimes be detected in a raking light; in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (copy M) the 'Chorus' of 'A Song of Liberty' was not inked, but embossed portions of it may still be seen.9 Text and engravings were printed in separate shops, sometimes at considerable distance and inconvenience. For Hayley's Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802), Seagrave in Chichester printed the text and sent it to Blake [End Page 715] Click for larger view Illustration 1 America (1793) pl a [Library of Congress] (16.1 x 22.8 cm), an alternative to pl. 5. It was kept by Blake for more than ten years and carried to Felpham (1800) and back to London (1803) – copper was valuable and money was scarce in the Blake household – until eventually it was cut up about 1805 [Illustrations 10a, b, c] to be used for apprentice engravings by Blake's student Thomas Butts. [End Page 716] in Felpham to add the prints, collate text and prints, stitch in wrappers, and...

‘He Who has Suffered You to Impose on Him’: Blake, Derrida and the Question of Theory

AbstractThis article discusses William Blake's relationship with contemporary literary theory, including an overview of Blake scholarship with particular regard to studies informed by deconstruction, feminism and Marxism. It is suggested that not only can Blake's works be viewed through the lens of theory, but they can also be seen to contribute to theoretical debates themselves. The paper argues in favour of a historically sensitive consideration of Blake as a theorist, contextualising his work not only within a larger history of ideas, but also within its social and political context. The final section of the article specifically examines the interconnectedness of key aspects of the works of Blake and Derrida – concerning the messianic, mental war, the friend/enemy dichotomy, the response to the other, and the relationship between the particular and universal – and argues that these cannot be understood without reference to the context in which we read today.

William Blake's Subsidiary Design of a Dog in his ‘Heads of the Poets’ Tempera of William Cowper (c. 1800–1803): an Identification

DURING his three-year residence in Felpham, Sussex, between September 1800 and September 1803 William Blake painted eighteen tempera portraits, the so-called ‘Heads of the Poets’, to decorate the library of Turret House, the seaside residence of his patron and neighbour William Hayley.1 In his Life of William Blake Alexander Gilchrist wrote, ‘The new library at Felpham, Blake during his residence at Sussex, decorated with temperas: ten [sic] heads of the poets, life size, some accompanied by appropriate subsidiary compositions.’2 Blake's most recent biographer, G. E. Bentley Jr has noted that, ‘The likenesses were traditional ones, but the background details were invented by Blake’.3 One poet included in the ‘Heads of the Poets’ series was Hayley's friend the late William Cowper. As Morton D. Paley has observed, although Blake can have had little interest in several of the eighteen heads commissioned by Hayley, ‘others – Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Cowper – do reflect genuine interests of his own’.4 Gilchrist recalled ‘The head of Cowper I remember as one of the most interesting, and the accompanying vignette, with its hint of landscape, in which appears Cowper's favourite dog, as being in Blake's best manner’.5 Blake's portrait of the head of Cowper derives from George Romney's pastel of the poet executed during August and September 1791 when Romney and Cowper were both guests of Hayley at Eartham.6 However, the sources for the two subsidiary designs on either side of Blake's head of Cowper have yet to be conclusively identified. William Michael Rossetti described the subsidiary designs on each of the ‘Heads of the Poets’ temperas as: ‘accessories, mostly coloured, within decorative limits, and, illustrative of the author's genius or works’.7 Indeed the designs featured on the majority of the ‘Heads’ can be fairly confidently identified as specific allusions to passages from the respective poets’ works.8 However, Rossetti's description of the Cowper tempera in his catalogue of Blake's works, which concludes Volume II of Gilchrist's posthumously published Life, provides no identification of either design as an allusion to Cowper's life or writing. Rossetti merely notes that the tempera includes ‘Accessories, a dog and a schoolboy’.9 Kenneth Povey in his systematic criticism and revision of Rossetti's identifications of each of the poets and accompanying subsidiary designs featured in the ‘Heads of the Poets’ series conclusively identifies Blake's subsidiary designs for the heads of Euripedes, Ercilla, Pope, Camoens, and Shakespeare.10 However, he has nothing to add to Rossetti's remarks on Blake's subsidiary designs for the head of Cowper. Povey observes: ‘Rossetti's notes on the heads of Milton, Homer, Chaucer, Dryden, Otway, Dante and Cowper do not seem to require any comment’.11 This note is specifically concerned with Blake's subsidiary design of a dog featured in his head of Cowper.12

Blake’s Virtual Designs and Reconstruction of The Song of Los

In this essay, I realize digitally the virtual designs that Blake evokes in The Song of Los and other illuminated books. Blake’s virtual designs are designs we create mentally by recombining an illuminated book’s related images. By visualizing mental images concretely, we reify the experiences of memory and imagination, comparison and contrast, that we employ when reading/seeing Blake's works. Moreover, by doing so, we engage in creative processes involving memory and imagination similar to Blake's own when inventing new designs from elements of others. I also realize digitally the original horizontal designs for Blake's “Africa” and “Asia” in The Song of Los before they were altered in printing. As originally executed, each poem functioned autonomously, with text superimposed on a landscape design. Digital recreations demonstrate how radically Blake fused poetry, painting, and printmaking, creating panels, broadsides, or scrolls rather than book pages, and how Song of Los, as printed, was Blake’s attempt to reconstruct an experiment about which he had changed his mind.

The Cyber Space-Time Continuum: Meaning and Metaphor

Various spatial metaphors related to cyberspace suffer from two major deficiencies. First, they do not take into account that cyberspace is not a preexistent territory, but an entity that emerges in the process of its development. Second, cyberspace is not a metric space, so that most of the ready-made constructs, like the topologic spaces, cannot be of much use. An interpretation of Blake's works helps one to understand that cyberspace is not a purely spatial entity; it also involves time, but not in the sense of Einstein's special relativity theory. The cyber space-time continuum is not a void waiting to be filled, but an aggregation of places (sites) that, similarly to Blake's plates, are multimedia architectures resulting from the blend of space and time.

Poetry, images and visions: William Blake.

This article focuses on the work of William Blake (1757-1827), British artist, poet and engraver. Blake is discussed as a thinker opposed to the 'tyranny of reason' interpreted as rational philosophies promoted with a religious zeal. The visionary, mystical character of some of Blake's works is contrasted with his eclectic reading and sharp social criticism. Blake's work is related to the early discourse on science. The article is supported by the images of his two works, the 'Ancient of Days' and the 'Newton'.

Resonating Resins: "Listning to the Voices of the Ground" in William Blake's "Book of Urizen"

y W Then, in chapter 2 of Blake's Book ofUrizen, the protagonist longs for a joy without pain, / For a solid without fluctuation, he could have been prophetically addressing his own future in Blake scholarship, where he has been anything but a stable symbol. As Robert N. Essick documents, 'Urizen' has been variously described as a pun on 'your reason,' the Greek 'ourizein' (from which the English 'horizon' is derived), 'is risen' in the first line of The Book of chapter 1, 'your eyes in,' 'ur reason,' and 'err reason.' Essick sees this multiplicity of meaning as encouraging: But no matter what sparked the invention of the word, Urizen's role as a polysemous etymon, one of Blake's linguistic 'Giant forms,' is only strengthened by our discovery (or invention) of further punning plays upon his name.' Here I propose yet another reading of Urizen's name: Urizen as a perfect anagram and near homophone ofUrezin, in which the Rezin refers to the resinous material found in the stopping-out varnish of relief etching.2 The character Urizen appears in many of Blake's works, and although he (it) occasionally undergoes a metamorphosis (as in The Four Zoas), he generally plays the role of the tyrannical ruler and bad father, in particular the Father of Old Testament notoriety. The following reading focuses on Urizen's debut as cosmic tyrant in Blake's 1794 illuminated work The Book of Urizen.3 While has been elucidated as a work parodying Genesis,4 this reading will demonstrate how The Book of can also be interpreted, at least in certain copies, in terms of

Rewriting Milton: Orality and Writing in Blake's "Milton"

MILTON IS A POEM HEAVILY COMMITTED TO THE GRAPHIC NATURE OF acts of writing and to its own writtenness. The only one of Blake's works specifically called a Poem, its subtitle--a Poem 2 Books-makes clear that its poetic status is specifically attributed to its form as a book. Moreover, its ostensible subject matter is rewriting of works and influences of an earlier writer and therefore presupposes a significant value word, its transformations and its transformative power. Within poem itself, Milton is depicted writing iron tablets (17:10) and in thunder smoke and fire (7:13); Shadowy Female wears a garment written all over ... Human Words (18:12), while Ololon descends to Milton at end of poem Clouds ... folded as a Garment dipped blood / Written within & without woven letters (42:12-13).(1) Yet, moment of action for character of Milton poem springs from a specifically event--a Bard's song.(2) The portrait of that appears at beginning of second book of Milton advocates power of breath and spoken word as forces behind Wars of Eternity (30:9), construction of the Universe stupendous (30:20) and creation of all Mental forms (30:20). In addition, Milton's journey is rewriting of more than just his record: object of correction is Milton's body of texts as transformed by discourses both and which influence and are influenced by cultural fields of religion, politics, and aesthetics (to name just a few).(3) The competing modes of representation and communication--writing and speech, graphic and oral, or what Ong has termed literacy and orality(4)--do not result a polarity of practices, however; nor do they resolve a privileging of one over other. Instead, conceptual fields which characterize writing and speech interpenetrate and form an apocalyptic discourse that incorporates important dimensions of both modes of representation. The refrain from Bard's song-- well my words! they are of your eternal salvation(5)--most forcefully manifests this interpenetration and overlap. It communicates orally urgent message that Milton must revise his legacy if he (and culture he influences) is to be prepared for Last Judgment; it also self-consciously represents work of a graphic medium to Mark or represent fleeting moments of orality for reader. The refrain draws both Milton and reader into a field of discourse which spoken is marked or inscribed by and is an agency of inspired moment of speaking prophecy. Robert Essick sees this interpenetration of and spoken, graphic and oral, as a fundamental dimension of Blake's model of verbal production.(6) By linking and spoken, Blake engages what Essick terms a form of oral writing [which] brings a printed text something of ... [an] increased presence of accidental productions of spoken language (191).(7) The recovery of kind of spontaneity which characterizes complements and revitalizes premeditated and fixed dimensions of graphic media, as Essick argues, and reincorporates immediacy of inspiration with studied reflection of execution. While Essick's arguments about Blake's model of verbal production inform background of my essay, I am here more directly engaged exploring way which graphic and oral, and spoken, are used as conceptual fields Milton. As a conceptual field, writing has been traditionally allied with permanence, rational reflection and dissemination of its content widely over material contexts of time and space. In contrast, speech has been characterized by immediacy, spontaneity and a passionate expressiveness. In facing this dichotomy, Blake resists temptation to make his own acts of writing conform to either one of these conventional oppositions. …

The Physicality of William Blake: The Large Color Prints of "1795"

I chose my title for this paper as a tribute to Robert N. Essick, the exhibition of whose collection was the occasion for the symposium at which this lecture was delivered.' Robert Essick is exceptional in his interest in the actual physical techniques of Blake's works, and this reflects a very important fact about any work of art which is perhaps neglected, that it is first of all, though not necessarily in its final essence, a physical object created consciously by the hands of the artist. There are also exceptions, sculptures carved by pupils under the eye of the master, pictures painted with the help of assistants, engravings done by a reproductive engraver after somebody else's design, or printed by somebody else, but Blake was, among other things, an artist who believed in seeing things through himself. Blake was, of course, also a master poet, but it is important to remember that his professional training, and his basic means of financial support, was as an engraver. This meant that, when he produced a work of art, he was not only consciously creating an object but also consciously choosing to work in a visual medium rather than in that of verse. Blake saw his works in both media as products of the poetic imagination but it is important not to confuse the two activities, and to recognize the conscious physical act that goes into the creation of the work of art. My title also reflects my own background as not just an art historian but as an art historian who works in a museum. This provides unequaled opportunities to examine the works of art as physical objects. One can take them up in one's hands, one can look at the backs, one can hold them up to the light to look for watermarks, one can even, if one's conservation department isn't looking, rub one's fingers lightly over the surface to feel