Book Of Thel Research Articles

Erasmus Darwin, <i>The Botanic Garden</i>, ed. Adam Komisaruk and Allison Dushane

Blake evidently read parts of The Botanic Garden by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, and certainly helped to illustrate it. The most striking verbal and pictorial responses in Blake are found in the Songs, The Book of Thel, and other early works, but if we count faint echoes of Darwin’s peculiar hybrid of natural science and poetry, his influence can be detected even in late projects, like Jerusalem. In Blake’s distinctive appropriative procedure, images were often derived from verbal sources and vice versa, as in the title page of Thel, in which he draws on Darwin’s Ovid-based account of the apparent sexual destruction of Anemone, the windflower, by Zephyr, the west wind.

The Romantic Concealment of Desire: Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s Poetic Voices


 
 
 
 The present study poses an interpretation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” so as to evince the subject of desire as the ulterior motif of these texts, even though the poetic voices of these works attempt to conceal such a theme. This reading interprets both poems as compositions that share the same thematic line as William Blake’s “The Book of Thel” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Consequently, the close reading of the poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge will be presented.
 
 
 

Seeing ecology: pollination and the resistance to Adam Smith’s Theory of political economy in William Blake’s Book of Thel (1789)

I love that something so beautiful could make you uncomfortable or, if you are the type of person who isn’t made uncomfortable about the frank display of sexuality by flowers, well, that says somet...

윌리엄 블레이크의 『델서』 : 낭만주의적 생태학을 넘어서

This essay is an attempt to read William Blake"s The Book of Thel as an ecocritical text that challenges two major ecological thoughts that emerged in the eighteenth century, an “arcardian” stance of British nature poetry and the idea of “economy of nature” that emphasizes wise human stewardship. Blake"s greatest contribution to the ecological thought is his continual sensitivity to the life of the body, which resists both the subjectless immersion into nature and imperial imposition of human values onto nature. The Poetic Genius is central to this essay"s understanding of Blake"s proto-ecological thought. Even though it differentiates the human from the non-human, its seemimg anthropocentrism is curbed by its promotion of malleability and fluidity, pushing the human subject to move outside the cave of the self and to help encounter other human and non-human life forms. Thel in The Book of Thel is seduced by nature to give up her human identity, including not only her anthropocentric idea of utility but also her life of the body as an embodied form of the Poetic Genius. Thel gives up the former willingly embracing experiential possibilities that her selfhood does not already know. However, she decide not to let the latter go, realizing it reduces her to a vegetable body with its five vitiated senses. Thel"s rejection of the vegetable body is directly related to Blake"s notion of the “spiritual body,” which benefits contemporary environmental thinking. The notion of the “spiritual body” limits the exercise of the human destructive will on nature, while promoting the emergence of new energy and possibilities in nature.

Beyond the Veil of Fantasy: “The Book of Thel” and the Critique of Romantic Ideology

Beyond the Veil of Fantasy: “The Book of Thel” and the Critique of Romantic Ideology

“Life exhal’d in milky fondness”—Becoming a Mother in William Blake’s <i>The Book of Thel</i>

Blake critics most often see The Book of Thel as a thwarted attempt to pass from the state of Innocence to Experience. Blake’s heroine is usually perceived as a somewhat naive, indecisive young female afraid to “be born” into the world of adulthood and maturity, or as a soul that refuses to enter the material world. Hence, there has been a tendency to pass judgment on Thel’s decision, to attribute it to weakness, immaturity, or fear, and to see it in pejorative terms. My claim is that Thel’s refusal to enter the world of Generation has nothing to do with relapsing into childhood, or with weakness and indecisiveness. Instead, I see it as proof of her maturity and independent spirit. My article is concerned with two problems. Firstly, I want to demonstrate how text and design in The Book of Thel enter a mutual semantic relationship of contradiction and/or redundancy rather than complementarity. Naturally, this claim is not new; W. J. T. Mitchell recognized this quality as early as 1978, writing that “the ‘unity’ of an illuminated book is a dynamic one, built upon the interaction of text and design as independent or contrary elements” (xviii). What I would like to examine, however, is how this dynamic interaction reinforces a feminist reading of Blake’s text. Secondly, although there are critical texts that deal with Blake’s attitude to women, the majority of Blake scholarship on The Book of Thel does not seem sufficiently feminist. While he did not manifest an unwaveringly feminist stance throughout his poetry, in texts such as Thel or Visions of the Daughters of Albion he dealt with women’s issues in a way that may be deemed progressive. Consequently, I intend to focus on the problems of motherhood and childcare as rendered by Blake in his poem, since I perceive these notions to be essential for our understanding of Thel’s decision. Also, part of my argument is that, contrary to a number of critical readings, the message delivered by Thel’s three interlocutors (the Lilly, the Cloud, and the Clod of Clay) should not be seen as a positive statement that Blake wanted Thel to accept. Finally, if we comprehend Thel’s dilemma—whether to become a mother—this can shed light on some actions taken by other female characters in Blake’s later texts, Oothoon and Enitharmon in particular.

Invitations and Withdrawals: Queer Romantic Ecologies in William Blake's The Book of Thel and John Clare's "The Nightingale's Nest"

Through close readings of William Blake's Book of Thel (1789) and John Clare's The Nightingale's Nest (1833), this article examines the concept of ecology, attending both to how these poems explore queerly ethical imperatives posed by the world and to the ways in which desires surface, in these poems, as fissures in their ecological imaginaries. Patterns of invitation and withdrawal in both texts confront the reader with their desirous, enmeshed, yet alienated relation to an inherently other world. Blake's and Clare's poems engage their readers in both a desire to enter an enclosed space, a habitat, and a recognition of the enclosure of that space as a textual effect—ecologically, these texts open out and destabilize a moment in which the human becomes aware of its interdependent relation to the nonhuman. As such, both poems trouble ecocritical tendencies to postulate queer and Romantic as ethical terms.

The performative potential of metaphor

AbstractThis article investigates metaphor, especially fresh metaphor, from a per-spective that integrates literary pragmatics, language as social semiotic,and cognitive linguistics. It proposes that such metaphor may be not onlythought but also forged by deliberate choice. It posits a performative viewof metaphor in use, that is, metaphor treated as possessing performativepotential — being able to perform force. To elucidate the performative po-tential of metaphor, this article will first discuss a list of thirteen functionsthat metaphors can perform and address the question of why metaphor issometimes used in favor of non-metaphorical language. It will then pro-ceed to characterize the performative potential of metaphor in the light ofHalliday’s theory concerning the metafunctions of language. The conceptof performative potential highlights the interpersonal function of languagewhile not disregarding its ideational and textual functions. The notion ofthese three functional components provides a perspective from which toconsider what can be performed by metaphor — to present and representthought, to enable the writer to articulate his notion of selfhood and itsrole, to interact with the addressee, and to exercise textual performance.By way of illustration, I will analyze two passages from William Blake’sThe book of Thel and juxtapose them with several passages from TheDhammapada, a Buddhist text consisting of aphorisms in verse form.Both texts articulate the nature of the struggle towards a meaningful life,and more importantly, both contain metaphors of love and wisdom.Keywords: fresh metaphor; functions of metaphor; metaphor as action;performative potential; social semiotics.

The Anxiety of Innocence in Blake and Kierkegaard

Which of William Blake’s “Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” innocence and experience, is more psychologically and philosophically complex? This essay examines the subtly melancholic tone that suffuses Blake’s Songs of Innocence through the prism of Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety, which the Danish philosopher defined as “fear without a definite object.” By positing anxiety as the necessary concomitant of free will, Kierkegaard enables us to see Blake’s innocents, both in the Songs and in early visionary works like The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in a new light. The sorrows and fears that creep into or hover just outside the sunny and happy worlds of the Songs of Innocence indicate that for Blake, as for Kierkegaard, innocence is neither an original perfection that’s swept away by experience, nor a half‐state waiting for its complement. Instead, anxious innocence is for both Blake and Kierkegaard the “possibility of possibility,” and the starting and end point of the individual’s journey of self‐discovery.

William Blake's Comic Vision by Nick Rawlinson (review)

200 Reviews Thomas Egerton; Johann P. Sommerville uses an analysis of Pseudo-Martyr to rebut modern accounts of Donne as politically subversive and residually Catholic; David Cunnington deals with 'professions' of friendship to female patrons; while Alison Shell provides evidence forcollaboration between Donne and Sir Edward Hoby. The second section, on 'Professing the Word', is perhaps the strongest and most focused in the volume. It opens with a piece by Jeanne Shami on Donne's vocational identity and the politics of labelling in seventeenth-century religious polemic?which incidentally offerssome pertinent reflections on modern scholars' own professional habits of ca? tegorization; Mary Morrisey offersan in-depth analysis of three sermons preached at Paul's Cross; and Peter E. McCulloch considers Donne as a preacher at the courts of James I and Charles I, looking at the complexity of the court as a venue, at Donne's theological position, and at the canon of his sermons. Finally, we have 'Professing the Body', in which James Cannon discusses Donne's 1623 Encaenia sermon and the theology of consecration, Stephen Pender investigates 'medical semiotics', and Jessica Martin examines Walton's Life of Donne as mediated through Donne's own self-representations and language. This is an intriguing collection of essays, lucidly introduced by David Colclough. It fully bears out his argument that scholars need to pay attention to the full range of Donne's writings, and also suggests a number of ways in which we might care to rethink the relationship between the amateur and the professional in seventeenthcentury culture. It is, finally,a handsomely produced volume, although something very peculiar has happened to the parentheses in chapters 6 and 11 of this re? viewer's copy. University of St Andrews Alex Davis William Blake's Comic Vision. By Nick Rawlinson. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. xiii + 292pp. ?40. ISBN 0-333-74565-5. It is true of Blake, as of Dostoevsky, that his intensity and scale of vision occlude a salient fact: that he is a hugely funny writer. In Europe, Isaac Newton (of all people) seizes and blows the trumpet of secular apocalypse, whereupon the angelic hosts (newly endowed with gravitational mass?) fall from the sky. From Songs of Experi? ence: 'My Pretty Rose Tree' is marital sitcom-farce; in 'The Fly' we hear the cosmic bitterness of a Gloucester as filteredthrough the mentality of a member of the Drones Club. Despite their vast symbolic freight, Urizen and Orc as they appear in America and The Four Zoas constitute one of literature's great comic duos. One comes to Nick Rawlinson's book, therefore, with great expectations. In one respect these are borne out: Rawlinson's mastery of the scholarship, both critical opinion and many dimensions of historical context, is overwhelmingly impressive. In most other ways, though, the book delivers far less than its title leads us to expect. It deals almost entirely with the early works of Blake and, of these, mainly with relatively minor ones. We get thirtypages on Poetical Sketches and Tiriel, sixty-five pages on An Island in theMoon, only twenty on Songs ofInnocence and ofExperience, and next to nothing on The Book of Thel (a work possessing, among other dimensions, a comic one) or the Lambeth prophecies. On the long epics we get only a few pages near the end. Since Rawlinson argues that comedy is for Blake a key visionary strategy, his argument is weakened to the extent that he focuses on relatively peripheral works. In making this argument Rawlinson means something rather idiosyncratic. For him comedy seems to have little to do with ordinary laughter; his book does not often invite us to experience hilarity,or even amusement. Nor is he much interested even in the hard-surfaced comedy that serves satire, a mode from which Rawlinson tends MLRy ioo.i, 2005 201 to distance Blake, satire being too exclusively negative, whereas Blake's intent is, ul? timately, to go beyond the corrosive to affirmativespiritual values. For Rawlinson, the heart of Blakean comedy is the 'carnivalesque', a kind of egalitarian, communally founded, celebratory social liturgy. (Rawlinson is at some pains to locate the origins of the carnivalesque in religion.) The question, for...

The speaking garden in William Blake's The Book of Thel: Metaphors of wisdom and compassion

Summary Responding to the reductionist and objectifying dualisms of scientific mechanism and authoritarian Christianity, Blake's work evokes a view of being in which “everything that lives is holy”. In The Book of Thel (1789) this is exemplified in the representation of an ecologically interdependent Garden of speaking subjects. In this environment, the insubstantiality and impermanence of all subjectivity (which for Thel is a source of distress) is shown to be the necessary condition for love and reciprocity. This article is an appreciative reading of Thel in relation to the late modern predicament of eco‐social crisis, and in conversation with (simultaneously deconstructive and affirmative) views of subjectivity and liberation in Mahayana Buddhism. My purpose is to represent it as what might be called a “teaching text” for contemporary readers with regard to both the dualisms of self versus nature which habitually carve up the nondual world, and the dualistic oppositions of absolutism versus relativism and essentialism versus nihilism. In the imaginative space of the Garden, the jewelled network of what in Buddhism are called emptiness (sunyata) and dependent arising (pratitya‐samutpada) is recognised as an interdependent network of care; for the speaking plants and animals, no‐self means selflessness; the radical insight into impermanence and interdependence is shown to be inseparable from love; wisdom and compassion are inextricable. Blake's metaphors for this are simple and instructive.

"Every Thing that Lives...": Anthropocentrism, Ecology, and "The Book of Thel"

Previous articleNext article No Access"Every Thing that Lives...": Anthropocentrism, Ecology, and "The Book of Thel"Kevin D. HutchingsKevin D. Hutchings Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 28, Number 3Summer 1997Romanticism and Ecology Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043943 Views: 9Total views on this site © 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading in(to) Blake's "Book of Thel"

Female Subjectivity and the Desire of Reading in(to) Blake's "Book of Thel"

The Question and "The Book of Thel"

The Question and "The Book of Thel"

"The Book of Thel" by William Blake: A Critical Reading

That name is derived from a Greek root meaning 'desire' is no news to any serious reader of Blake. above quotation appears in David Perkins' textbook anthology, where it is given as a footnote to the title, The Book of Thel. Yet the suggestive identity between and Desire is largely ignored. When W. J. T. Mitchell describes the poem's action as story of a young woman who questions own usefulness and purpose in a world where everything dies or fades away,2 he expresses a critical consensus. In the main, The Book of Thel is read as a Little Girl Lost/Found poem writ large. personification (Thel) is naturalized into character and the character's psyche is analyzed, its parts and processes used to support statements about Blake's view of human development. is treated as a psychological construct having ontological density; she is seen to figure either as the true subject of the poem or as a surrogate for the reader,3 that is, a character who feels, thinks, and behaves as we might. We read of her desire for Wisdom and Love as if Desire-the thing personified-were not synonymous with but a motivation impelling a rounded character. When Desire is thus regarded as the young woman's defining characteristic, or as the object of investigations, the poem presents itself as an allegory of psychosexual development. Although the Little Girl and Little Boy Lost and Found poems of the Songs of Innocence and Experience tend toward assuming this form, they are saved in the end from achieving allegorical fixity. Songs exist within a symbolic frame of reference; they appear under the aegis of a major symbol (Innocence or Experience) and a minor one (Piper or Bard).4 We cannot abstract event or character from idea because the symbol intervenes, preventing the two levels from disengaging. The Book of Thel, lacking this context, offers no obvious resistance to allegorization. Blake's notorious disdain for allegory5-specifically, for the dualistic ways of thinking it encourages-did not, evidently, prevent him from writing one. His remarks, however, should temper

The Book of Thel

The Book of Thel

W. Blake's “book of thel.”

W. Blake's “book of thel.” Get access W. Smith W. Smith Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s5-IV, Issue 101, 4 December 1875, Pages 449–450, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s5-IV.101.449i Published: 04 December 1875