Edward Young's Night Thoughts Research Articles

Dissenting from Edward Young's Night Thoughts: Christian Time and Poetic Metre in Anne Steele's Graveyard Poems

AbstractAlthough the Particular Baptist poet Anne Steele (1718‐1778) is little known today, this article argues that her poems on time and death offer valuable insights into wider religio‐poetical representations of time in the mid‐eighteenth century. Her verse both responds to and departs from the conventions of graveyard poetry as exemplified by Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742‐6), demonstrating close engagement with this popular subgenre as well as an intelligent critique of its devotional poetics. As such, Steele's writing foregrounds yet also problematises emerging distinctions between writing and religion, and thus argues for new methodologies in religious and literary history.

“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. …

Night in Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel

THE ABSOLUTE NIGHT INVOKED BY THE GERMAN ROMANTIC FRIEDRICH von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, might well have been more influential at turn of nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This image saturating his dithyrambic cycle Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to Night], published in 1800, continues to be read by some in terms of obscure private experiences despite twentieth-century work of Kate Hamburger, Martin Dyck, and others that show scientific connections. (1) This construal is especially popular in Enghsh-speaking world and has followed long tradition of interpreting Novalis that began with reviews of essayist Thomas Carlyle. In late 1820s, Carlyle had tied this poet not just to medieval German mystic Jakob Bohme but also to what he regarded as tenebrific constellation of Immanuel Kant and Kantists. (2) Common readers today tend to merge Novalis's night more with state of spiritual loneliness Christian mystic St. John of Cross had called the dark night of soul [la noche oscura del alma]. This inclination is not merely result of religious metaphor's familiarity; it derives its understanding from an incident linked to poem's inspiration, an epiphany Novalis experienced at grave of his first fiancre, Sophie von Kuhn, on 13 May 1797. (3) The subsequent view that Novahs's spiritual insight was inextricable from his vulnerability has led several critics to identify wide range of literary influences. Suggestions include August Wilhelm Schlegel's essay on Romeo and Juliet of 1797, Johann Gottfried Herder's mythic poems, religious writings of Karl von Eckartshausen and Johann Patti Friedrich Richter, or Jean Paul, and Edward Young's Night Thoughts of 1742-45. (4) Young's poem, which had numerous European translations by end of eighteenth century, is often cited in view of its thematic resemblance to Novahs's poem and its reputation among German writers such as Herder, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (5) Novalis might have turned to this reflection on mortality weeks before his graveside experience, but it seems rather excessive to proclaim Young's direct and deep impact. The British surrealist David Gascoyne expresses same doubt in his introduction to an English edition of Hymnen an die Nacht translated by American poet Jeremy Reed and published in 1989: Gascoyne notes that Young's poem exudes disgruntlement--its other tide being, after all, The Complaint--while Novalis's achieves a serene transcendence of bereavement and mourning through resolution of into rapture rather than resignation. (6) This distinction between two otherwise comparable nights demands that we not only make better sense of Novalis's design but also check our own assumptions about lyrical intensity. Well-meaning critics who rehash point of his anguish inadvertently perpetuate tiresome picture of sentimental artist so devastated by loss that he could barely order his thoughts, let alone argue for them. Even esteemed Friedrich Hiebel seems to have contributed to this impression when he found Hymnen an die Nacht deeply rooted in those months of grief and its emotional depth reached only after three years of recuperation. (7) Such views present an obvious interpretive problem: what ultimately saw print in Schlegel brothers' journal Athenaeum is taken to manifest both profound mystical self-transformation and contrary rehance on overcoming of trauma. Novahs's poem becomes both product of strong mind able to integrate and transcend thoughts and mark of irresolution and maladjustment to life, product of weak mind. The inconsistency here is wholly illusory; in what follows I will show that Novalis's main ideas reflect distinct intellectual currents of his time. His image of night is no casual aesthetic plaything and in fact provided heretofore uncharted series of reactions from both philosophers Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. …

‘Night’ in the Long‐Poems of Mallet, Savage and Thomson

Apart from Edward Young's Night Thoughts, a number of eighteenth‐century poets were attracted to dealing with both the figure of the ‘sable Queen’ of ‘Night’, and the phenomena of shade, darkness a...

Women's Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America

Women's Nature:Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America Susan Scott Parrish (bio) In the section of his Natural History of Barbados (1750) devoted to shells, Griffith Hughes defended the inclusion of women in his audience by stating: "I have heard several of the Fair Sex, who are fond of Shell-work, frequently ridiculed, as wasting their Time in a trifling and useless Manner." On the contrary, he argued, configuring shells into designs not only answered Mr. Addison's idea of "The Beautiful," but it particularly suited the "Genius of Women," who have a facility for putting "Shape and Colour artificially . . . together."Moreover, it was so much better than "murdering their Time in Gaming!" Hughes imagined instead that "one of our modern Calypso's, after having thus adorned her Grot, would no doubt chuse to reap the Fruits of her Labours, by making it a Place to cultivate her mind in by Musing." Of the various pursuits of natural history, he went on, this one was the most appropriate for women, for "we cannot suppose, that our Cynthia's and Flavia's can leap a five-barr'd Gate, or walk half a Day with a Gun in quest of a Wood-cock." He thus offered his description of Barbadian shells not only to "gratify the Curiosity of the inquisitive Philosopher, but to improve the Imagination of the Female Artificer" (267– 69).1 In these remarks, Hughes included women in his audience and in the heterosocial scene of natural history, yet he delineated for them a distinct relationship to nature and to knowledge, associating men with natural philosophy and its central attribute of disinterested curiosity while associating women with imagination, artifice, and the need for improvement. Male naturalists might range deep into the woods with rifles, while a female did better to adorn a contained natural site ("her Grot") and hence cultivate her mind's analogous inner realm. Hughes's defense of female shell-work stands at the rhetorical crossroads of a number of eighteenth-century discourses concerning women, [End Page 195] knowledge, and nature that are the subject of this essay: in particular, promotions of scientific and imperial endeavors, and conduct literature (addressed to women) that conflicted with popular science texts (intended for a mixed audience) and with Augustan pastoral poetry. Apologies of the New Science2 and of New World exploration, in often overlapping ways, adapted the narrative template from Romance to give heroic credentials to their projects and practitioners:3 in this narrative—originating in Bacon's manifestos and Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana (1596) but sustained, for example, in James Grainger's The Sugar Cane (1764)—a male leaves the place of complacent familiarity, travels far away to penetrate and lay claim to the hidden recesses of Nature (imagined as female and exotic), retrieves new resources and information, and returns to his point of origin, which he now enriches. The female, in this formula, is equated with the fixed ground that gets broken open, like a mine or virgin soil, for treasures.4 A separate discourse that likewise excluded women from the subject-position of the explorer or investigator, also rooted in Renaissance thought but continuing through the Enlightenment, was the condemnation of female curiosity produced in conduct books like Banabe Rich's My Lady's Looking Glass (1616), William Kenrick's Whole Duty of a Woman (1737), and fairy tales like Blue Beard (1729). Conflicting with these rhetorical traditions and genres were two others. First, books and especially journals, like Noel Antoine Pluche's Spectacle de la Nature (1740–48) and Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1740s), produced in the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth in Europe (and imported to the British colonies) that popularized the advances of the New Science for a mixed audience, represented women taking part in scientific societies and projects, even if sometimes needing the guidance of a fraternal figure. Second, pastoral poetry, from modern translations of Virgil to Augustan examples like James Thomson's Seasons (1730) and Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1743), provided models for women to imagine themselves living in a particularly female-centered green space that was authorized...

The ‘Divine Image’ and ‘Human William Blake's Illustrations to Abstract’ in a Selection of Edward Young's Night Thoughts

(1985). The ‘Divine Image’ and ‘Human William Blake's Illustrations to Abstract’ in a Selection of Edward Young's Night Thoughts. de arte: Vol. 20, No. 33, pp. 4-22.

William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts: A Complete Edition. David V. Erdman , John E. Grant , Edward J. Rose , Michael J. Tolley , Edward Young

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWilliam Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts: A Complete Edition. David V. Erdman , John E. Grant , Edward J. Rose , Michael J. Tolley , Edward Young W. J. T. MitchellW. J. T. Mitchell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 80, Number 2Nov., 1982 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/391210 Views: 1Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1982 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Michael Farrell Night Thoughts, (Jan 2014): 112–132.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455505_7Jeremy Tambling Young and ‘Weary Night’, (Jan 2005): 44–70.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505612_3

BLAKE AND THE INTERPRETERS

The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake by Martin Butlin, New Haven and London: published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1982, 1408 pp, 919 ills, 239 colour pls, 2 vols, £125William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts edited by David V. Erdman, John E. Grant, Edward J. Rose, Michael J. Tolley, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 868 pp, 580 ills, 78 colour pls, 2 vols, £150William Blake's Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton by Pamela Dunbar, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980, 208 pp, 92 ills, £20

William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A Complete Edition.

Sometime in year 1795 a young bookseller by name of Richard Edwards had a bright idea. Why not bring out a new edition of a recent, but firmly established English classic, Edward Young's Night Thoughts, embellished with illustrations by a promising young English artist who could be counted on to be grateful for commission and not to charge much for his work? It was a time when London art world was stirring with grand ambition of founding a native school of history painting based in classics of English literature (Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery most famous symptom of this craze), a time when booksellers like Edwardses were filling their elegant showrooms with magnificent illuminated manuscripts and handsome new coffee-table books; a time, most important, when a talented, impoverished young painter-poet who had known Edwards family for many years was available and in need of a commission. For prosperous and well-connected Richard Edwards it was easy to indulge his inclination, as he said in Advertisement to project, and not to be too curious about the estimate of profit and loss. For Blake, whose recent attempts to speak as a prophet in his own illuminated verse had left him with nothing but his own Song of Los (among other works) as a consolation, commission must have looked like main chance that had so far eluded him, chance to secure some worldly success while pursuing his own visionary inclinations.

William Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A Complete Edition. Vol. 1. Vol. 2. David V. Erdman, John E. Grant, Edward J. Rose, and Michael J. Tolley.

Previous articleNext article No AccessWilliam Blake's Designs for Edward Young's Night Thoughts. A Complete Edition. Vol. 1. Vol. 2. David V. Erdman, John E. Grant, Edward J. Rose, and Michael J. Tolley.Karen MulhallenKaren Mulhallen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 12, Number 3Summer 1981 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24040585 Views: 1Total views on this site © 1981 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.