WILLIAM BLAKE
“I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse,” says the peremptory William Blake. Robert Graves shares his impatience with the decorous couplet tradition from which Blake vigorously wriggled free. He praises Blake’s early Island in the Moon (1784, composed when the poet was twenty-seven) as worth “a thousand prophetic books”; he quotes with relish the cruel lines on Doctor Johnson and the whole Augustan crew. “The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life.” Edward Thomas is more judicious: “In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts”—and here Thomas chooses to ignore the rigors Blake believed he had transcended—“he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin.”
Blake is not often judiciously read. He polarizes readers, eliciting ecstatic enthusiasm from Allen Ginsberg and severe antipathy from poets repelled by the visionary and the Beats. Blake confuses poets—and readers. T. S. Eliot responds in a puzzling way. Speaking of Blake’s honesty, a quality peculiar to great poets, he declares: “It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.” Well, the whole world does not conspire against Blake. For more than half a century the world has seemed to take his side, parroted his aphorisms, adopted the simplifications with which he ridicules traditional discipline, scholarship and the fought-for (as against the asserted) truth. Blake’s visionary poems have pumped up their muscles with steroids into a pulsing simulacrum of moral and spiritual health. If we accept their terms we can cast out whole centuries of art and literature and revel in the dubious freedoms of our unbridled century.
Blake’s apprenticeship in a manual profession and his self-education, the fact that he was not lured into journalism or into the painting academy, secured his freedom. There was “nothing to distract him from his interests or to corrupt those interests,” says Eliot. Nothing except the limitation of those interests themselves, scorn for a culture that bred a different kind of intelligence, a different—was it a lesser?—order of imagination. Eliot makes a sentimental case against formal education. He distrusts “the conformity which the accumulation of knowledge is apt to impose.” He portrays learning in this context as corrupting, Blake as an innocent. He humors the tendentious naïf. In the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Eliot says, “The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.” Equally curious is Eliot’s claim: “He is very like Collins. He is very eighteenth century.”
Eliot praises the early work and the first mature work but can’t overcome his distrust of the excesses, the “automatic” writing of the later work. “We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy... that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house.” This condescension to a poet whose claims he is trying to advance sets the critic on a superior plane. He patronizes with the refinement of an education whose clutch he praises Blake for having eluded. There is more confusion to come. Blake is praised as a free spirit but also as a poet condemned in his freedom. “What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet.” Eliot is eloquently off-beam, and this last point is the most telling. In the end Blake lacks concentration: without stable givens, each idea, each constituent intellectual and imaginative element has to be asserted, set down, before a poem can begin to move. When a musician abandons tonality, he finds his scope altered, but what seems a freedom from leads into drastically narrowed technical terrain. Eliot compares Blake implausibly with the luminous Friedrich Nietzsche of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
The visionary poet commences his career with electrifying clarity.
For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
This is the best of him, archpoet of embodiment who strives to bring abstractions before our eyes as manifest, just as he allows us to glimpse, all too fleetingly, the streets and green places of a London undergoing dramatic change, the London where he spent all but three years of his life.
He was born there in 1757, and there seventy years later he died. His father was a haberdasher. What formal education he received was in art: he became an engraver’s apprentice and studied at the Royal Academy of Art. His graphic work is integral to his literary activity, and his literary activity invariably has spiritual dimensions, or pretensions. Even as a child he had visions. “Ezekiel sitting under a green bough” and—in Peckham—“a tree full of angels.” These figures stayed with him. And he became a vision for later poets.
In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a “dark night of the soul sort of,” his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him—“I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of ‘Ah, Sun-flower,’ and it suddenly appeared—the poem I’d read a lot of times before.” He began to understand the poem, and “suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,” he “heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.” This “apparitional voice” became his guiding spirit: “It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” On Ginsberg this “anciency” fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. “The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.” Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s. This is not the Blake who visited William Butler Yeats and gave him—a canceled line—“a terrible beauty.” For William Blake, as for Yeats, there were few serviceable shortcuts to wisdom. Spirits spoke to them, they did not doubt them for a moment; but they spoke to stimulate the spirit, not because the spirit had been pricked with a syringe or had swallowed a salad of grass.
The young Blake pursued his own passions in reading; he never followed a decorous Augustan curriculum. When he was twenty-four he married the illiterate Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market gardener. He taught her to read and she became his assistant in etching and binding. His first book was Poetical Sketches (1788). He etched, watercolored and bound most of his other books: Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Gates of Paradise and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Europe and Songs of Experience (1794) and The Book of Ahania (1795) and others. Later large ventures were Milton (i804–18) and Jerusalem (1804–1820).
At the suggestion of his painter friend John Flaxman, William Hayley invited Blake and his wife to Felpham on the Sussex coast in 1800. Hayley, the autobiographer and poet-biographer of Milton and Cowper, gave him three years’ work as an illustrator. The arrangement went badly wrong. Hayley chose an artist of greater imaginative integrity than he had bargained for. He tried to bring Blake to heel artistically in various ways—after all, he was paying the bills—but Blake could not oblige for long. Whatever the Blakes eventually came to feel about Hayley, a friend of Cowper and Southey, they enjoyed Felpham and the sea: it was their one extended stay outside the metropolis. In 1803 an infamous soldier turned up in the Felpham garden and sealed their fate. The gardener asked the soldier to cut the grass. Blake disliked soldiers and ordered him off, cursing (among others) the king, and speaking of Napoleon in terms insufficiently hostile. When he was tried on a charge of high treason at Chichester in 1804, he was acquitted thanks to Hayley’s testimony. Thus ended the Blakes’ not entirely unhappy seaside idyll.
As poet-illustrator Blake was too startlingly original to attract many admirers at the time. The neglect of his poetry became virtual oblivion after his death in 1827, and only Alexander Gilchrist’s Life, completed by his wife, Anne, and published two years after his death (1863), revived interest. (Anne wrote essays on Whitman’s poetry, too: her ears were open to the new cadences.) Since the Life Blake’s reputation has burgeoned.
In his last twenty-odd years, when he had occasional acolytes but no settled readership, intellectual isolation may have determined the development of his writing. F. R. Leavis remarks, “He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. One obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble.” This isn’t quite right. Judging by the manuscripts, Blake took considerable trouble; but trouble of an odd sort; Leavis rightly points to “the absence... of adequate social collaboration.” He’s also right to say that Blake’s “symbolic philosophy is one thing, his poetry another.” The more pronounced the philosophy, especially in the prophetic books, the more opaque and poetically inert the symbolism. Blake’s best poems work despite his symbolic philosophy.
Yet his genius produced that philosophy which hates the word “philosophy”; it generated what Leavis calls “a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique,” rendering the poet “individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence”—in his own age, in any case. This genius limited his large work. For all but the aficionado, Eliot’s verdict on the prophetic books rings true: “You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas.” Eliot perceives in Blake a loss of cultural and philosophical bearings, an eccentricity that ends in solipsism. Crabbe, a lesser poet, is a better teacher, at least about the world we actually inhabit. Crabbe’s ghost would never have strayed into Ginsberg’s postmasturbatory reverie or answered the call of Dexedrine: he would have been in the street outside, doggedly observing the lives of passers-by.
Blake’s prophetic and biblical pretensions are clear from his titles: “The Book of” this or that, and even “Songs,” suggest Old Testament prophets and King David. Biblical reference, allusion and cadence inform his work even when he tilts at conventional religion. Disillusion schooled him. Like Wordsworth, he regrets the direction the French Revolution took. Between Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) his social optimism faltered. Innocence speaks with a voice all transcendence, experience with a voice incapable of transcendence. Behind Blake’s poems is an apprehended social reality; he is conscious of evils and injustices in the ways of man to man. When he approaches such themes directly, as in “London,” he is among the first and fiercest poets of the modern city. In his prophetic books he translates perceived reality away from direct presentation, into a symbolism that sets out grandly to effect a process of regeneration. But the regeneration is itself symbolic: the actual world above which it hovers is perplexed but untouched by it. Blake, when he is “timeless,” becomes oblique, a poet demanding exegesis. His earlier work possesses immediacy that the older Blake forfeits for a brocade of symbols.
From his earliest Sketches, he has his own tone and method. In rejecting “imitation” of form and perception he established his originality. “An Immitation of Spenser” is quite un-Spenserian. He experiments with an archaic mode, looking for a way out of the eighteenth century: “That wisdom may descend in faery dreams.” The imitation fails because mythology and archaized language do not answer his needs. Eliot overstates the affinity between Blake and his eighteenth century. There are common epithets and strategies, but what is striking is Blake’s original formal imagination and his freedom from conventional diction.
Imitation is the shadow of a shadow; art for Blake is creation. What the eye sees as real is real, whether simple rain cloud or the weeping child within the cloud. Blake’s best poetry is a seeing and seeing into, with unconventional eyes. He does not describe, he projects. Man’s divine part is his ability to create, a faculty Blake exercised for over half a century. He sees what is and what is implicit. He rejects prescribed forms as part and parcel of his rejection of social institutions. In The Book of Thel he declares that Wisdom cannot be contained or simplified in “a silver rod” nor Love in “a golden bowl,” both ecclesiastical and sacramental allusions. The lines from Thel were originally included in Tiriel, a cry against the tyranny man imposes on man.
Remarkable among the early Sketches (“the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year”) is “To Autumn.” Here he proposes a collaborative relationship with Nature:
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof, there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe;
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
The conventional pastoral of a city boy becomes original poetry in the wonderfully paced second line. Autumn becomes a figure, walking, stained with autumnal juice. Is it sacrificial or Dionysian? The fifth line suggests the latter. The poem continues:
“The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.
The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.
Autumn sings through a young poet. Love, a substance flowing in the veins of flowers, is contained in imagery, not abstracted from it. Nature has an aspect: “brow,” “cheek.” The clouds are “feather’d” and active, strewing not rain but (the effect of rain on plants displaces the rain itself) flowers, and the “singing” of the line before turns clouds into birds. No simile is used: Blake evokes equivalences, connections, a natural wholeness. What in another poet would be abstraction in Blake breathes the air, though it would be impossible to paraphrase or draw a diagram of the scene. The images are visionary and transparent.
If the poem is conceptually impressive, prosodically it could hardly be more interesting. The enjambements throughout, but especially in the first line of the second stanza, dramatically affect ear and eye, enhancing the surprise of the vision. Other Sketches suffer from an excess of adjectives. Here adjectives pull their weight. Parallel syntax and rhythms from stanza to stanza produce the effect of rhyme, though the poem is unrhymed. There is “through rhythm” but no metrical regularity, despite the blank verse norm it plays away from.
Soon after completing the Sketches, Blake annotated Swedenborg’s Divine Love. We love what contains us most, what is most human, a dog more than a wolf. The poet leads the reader to love, the end of the golden chain that leads to Eden. “Think,” Blake writes, “of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.” Around this time he put a child in a cloud in the introduction to Songs of Innocence, a poem that recalls the procedure of “To Autumn.” When the child in the cloud weeps, with pity rather than sorrow, we are a little disconcerted by such rain; and the cutting of the reed or pipe and the making of a pen are equally perplexing. The poet forfeits a measure of independence when he consents (it is consent, unlike the introduction to Songs of Experience with its imperative “Hear the voice of the Bard!”) to write. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake says, “The Poet is Independent and Wicked; the Philosopher Dependent and Good.” The poet should be his own law, creating the world in which he walks. For him the world is an extension of the senses; he proceeds from sense to vision. The grandest poetry, Blake says, is immoral, as are the greatest heroes: Iago, Satan, Christ “the wine bibber.” When he set Milton in the devil’s camp he was praising the poet who outshone the theologian, his Satan over his God.
Annotating Wordsworth, Blake gives further evidence of the process of his imagination. Physical objects, he says, are at variance with the imagination: objects do not exist apart from perception. When we adapt this statement to Blake’s imagery, we resolve a problem. Many of his images are deflected from particularity into abstraction. In the opening of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, however, his imaginative process is vividly demonstrated:
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
The first three lines are figurative, moral language; the three that follow are images. Figurative and particular correspond rhythmically; rhyme connects “vale of death” with “barren heath”; and parallelism connects the rose and the meek man, the honey bees and the just man. The images body forth the figurative language. Here Blake does not deflect image into abstraction: he segregates two registers of language, bodiless and embodying. His language enacts the division between heaven (the word) and hell (the substance). In the stanzas that follow he mingles and then resegregates registers in pursuit of the theme.
In his best work he avoids simile unless its point of reference is contained in the poem. For example, in “The Echoing Green” he writes in line twenty-six, “like birds in their nests,” recalling “skylark and the thrush” earlier in the poem. He distrusts similes because they single out qualities—moral or otherwise—from a subject and the thing to which it is compared. Simile disembodies and is at variance with his vision. “The Sunflower” and “The Rose” are not referred back to human experience: they include it. Lamb and Tiger are not equated with Christ, though they include him.
Blake’s allegiance to the plain language of the King James Bible, his innocence of eighteenth-century diction and convention, and his social vision made it possible for him to write balladic lyrics (“The Little Black Boy,” “The Chimney Sweeper” and others) in an idiom more direct than Wordsworth’s in his deliberate, studied ballads. The effortlessness of Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience proceeds from a sensibility untroubled by decorum, and from a rhythmic tact that takes his poems directly to the pulse. They work at the deep level where “Lycidas,” The Song to David, “Kubla Khan” and very few other poems reach us.
In both sequences subject matter is similar. Tone, emphasis and conclusions differ. Innocence does not understand beyond its innocence (though what is beyond hovers near, as in “A Blossom,” “The Echoing Green,” “The Chimney Sweeper”); experience is melancholy because it remembers but no longer possesses innocence. Yet in the experience poems positive powers are at work in the gloom, as in “Holy Thursday” and “The Lily.”
Auguries of Innocence carries Blake’s aphoristic wisdom to extremes in a couplet monotony unrelieved by effective enjambement. The couplets, separately, are striking paradoxes; taken together they detract from one another. The poem asks to be read as a polemical creed, with all that that implies of willful devising. There is none of the transparency of the Songs. No couplets were ever less Augustan, despite meter and paradox. The paradoxes are (intentionally) discontinuous.
Among the prophetic books, The Book of Thel is most poetically lucid. It too considers innocence and experience from an original perspective. The unborn soul foresees her life and looks back from her grave. She travels through various states of creative innocence, symbolized successively by lily, cloud, worm and clod. Each, with its limits, terrifies free unborn Thel. She rejects such life, unable to comprehend the “curb upon the youthful burning boy” and the “little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire.” But The Book of Thel is not satisfactory. It demands exegesis in terms of Blake’s symbolic philosophy. So does Urizen, which enacts a process of reduction, from unlimited potential to human and natural bondage. “Like a human heart, struggling and beating, / The vast world of Urizen appeared”—but that world is by stages constrained, dwindling to the one-dimensional world of Ulro. Part of the concluding section is powerful and succinct:
They lived a period of years;
Then left a noisom body
To the jaws of devouring darkness.
The giants themselves diminish, their progeny are pygmies—in short, philosophers:
And their children wept, & built
Tombs in the desolate places,
And form’d laws of prudence and call’d them
The eternal laws of God.
They became the creatures of “non-entity” frequently evoked, particularly in Los.
For Blake, liberty, a state of mind and spirit, entails the ability to create. His philosophy connects with this belief. There are four states of perception, the highest with four dimensions, in descending order: Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro. Four antitheses rule the development of the prophetic books: imagination and memory; innocence and experience in religion; liberty and tyranny in society; outline and imitation in art—each pair, as Northrop Frye notes, is a variation on the antithesis of life and death. Yet knowledge of Blake’s scheme, or explication of figures, does not improve the poetry. If a poem lives on a primary level, knowledge and explication perfect understanding; without communication to the mind or senses, a poem becomes a game for exegetes.
Like the philosophies he rejects, his own philosophy obscures what was visible before and distorts the real. Milton opens with four of his best and best-known quatrains, sung by the Women’s Institute and by the nation: “And did those feet in ancient times...” He urges “mental fight.” Yet the prophetic chapters that follow are a poetic disappointment, quite apart from their philosophy. We feel the same disappointment in Jerusalem, despite electrifying lines, for example, “Trembling she wept over the space and closed it with a tender moon.” The later prophetic books are scattered with such moments but undercut by a rhetorical and philosophical scheme that corresponds remotely to the world it would illuminate. Failure of clarity is a failure of thought. Did Blake despair of an audience and write to expand his own consciousness, or that of his friends the angels? These works have served the careers of many critics and scholars. “In a Commercial Nation impostors are abroad in every profession.” They have answered to a number of modern causes because they will accommodate a variety of contradictory interpretations. “Thought alone can make monsters.” Blake forgot that early wisdom.