William Blake 2015

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History of English Literature ~The Eighteenth Century~ English Romanticism WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) Portrait by Thomas Phillips, 1807

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Transcript of William Blake 2015

  • History of English Literature ~The Eighteenth Century~

    English Romanticism

    WILLIAM BLAKE

    (1757-1827)

    Portrait by Thomas Phillips, 1807

  • William Blake a rebel artist Born in 1757 in the family of a Dissenting London tradesman Since early childhood: a peculiar gift for drawing he was

    sent to a drawing school at the age of 10, and then apprenticed to a London engraver.

    After 1792: admitted to the Royal Academy of Art as a student he never felt at home in this institution which was the guardian of tradition he was a natural rebel

    For young Blake, the classical style, cultivated in the Academy = the embodiment of error, the equivalent of thought systems that, in a rationalistic age, bounded the imagination

    During his apprenticeship, he became acquainted with Gothic art, which he saw as the supreme expression of truth

  • His literary tastes: Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Collins, Gray, Thomson and Macpherson their influence is reflected in his earliest poetic compositions, gathered in 1783 in the volume Poetic Sketches.

    1789: Songs of Innocence 1794: Songs of Experience Both collections: the theme of childhood the opportunity for

    fierce social criticism the denunciation of an unjust system in which children were the foremost victims

    Both creations were gathered in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

    Attempt to reconnect English poetry to a tradition that was basically popular rhythms and tones echoing Biblical psalms, religious hymns, popular ballads and songs

    Rebellion against the polished great cage of the Augustan couplet

  • Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Balke inaugurated a special method of producing his work relief-etching The use of copper-plates to strike off the impression on the sheet of paper then he coloured it by hand with water colours. His work: a unique combination of PICTURE, DECORATION and TEXT, all illuminating one another and reminding of the work of medieval miniaturists. His method: an explanation for Blakes obscurity in his own age very few copies, circulated among friends Rediscovered in 1850s, by the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters and published in conventional print

  • Blake the myth-maker: the Prophetic Books Like the other Romantics, Blake venerated Milton his character

    Satan, in Paradise Lost: the prototype of the REBEL against all authority and attempt to restrain desire (i.e. energy, creative spirit).

    Blake identified poetry with the revolutionary impulse embodied by Milton.

    The Prophetic Books: a series of strange impressive poems, in which he creates a mythology of his own

    The result of his deep conviction that true poetry = prophecy and of his acute sensitivity at the events of the age a sense of poetic responsibility

    In these poems, he links in a complicated system of analogies and correspondences a symbolic geography, aspects of Divinity, states of mind, psychological impulses, and levels of consciousness

  • Blakes prophetic Books Tiriel (c. 1789) The Book of Thel (c. 1789) America, a Prophecy (1793) Europe, a Prophecy (1794) Visions of the Daughters of Albion(1793) The Book of Ahania (1795) The Book of Los (1795) The Song of Los (1795) Vala, or The Four Zoas (begun 1797, unfinished; abandoned c. 1804) Milton (18041810) Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion (18041820)

  • America. A Prophecy (1793) celebrates the American Revolution as a triumph of life and liberty over the oppressive rule of Guardian Prince Albion.

    The combat between America and England = a symbol of the developing life of man and of his possibilities to free himself through the creative energies of revolution.

    Protagonists: Urizen, the creator of religion, the bringer of the stony law, and Orc, the lover of wild rebellion, transgressor of Gods Law, the embodiment of the spirit of revolution

    Contemporary history merges with universal history in the cosmic antagonism between them

  • His most ambitious Prophetic Book: The Four Zoas (1797) a four-dimensional universe in which contraries coexist necessarily, governed by four principles which Blake calls Zoas: Tharmas, representing the earth, sensations, the body, God the

    Father; Urizen - reason, the fallen aspect of divinity, sometimes

    appearing as an Angry God, the God of this World; Luvah - emotions, God the Son, Jesus; Urthona - imagination, or the Holy Ghost.

    In their fallen forms (Spectres), they all have their Emanations, their feminine counterparts.

    In Eternity/Eden, there is no sexual division, Man is a harmonious whole, but in the world of generation, the split between male and female leads to the appearance of the notion of sin and of the sense of guilt and jealousy.

  • Urizen

  • The individual stories of the Zoas: told in a series of shorter epics: The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of

    Los (1795). They rewrite and invert some of the central biblical episodes, such as the

    Genesis and the Crucifixion. The view of the act of creation as a fall, the idea of the miscarried

    universe the influence of Gnostic myth The places of Gods and demons: reversed The Book of Urizen Urizen: the demonic portrayal of the traditional God

    of the Old Testament as a tyrant, who catches mans mind in his nets and gins and traps and surrounds him with cold floods of abstraction and with forests of solitude.

    An inverted, diabolical or infernal reading of the Biblical Genesis Mans fall: the dissociation between reason and the passions, an

    unnatural split which destroys the harmony of mans being. Blakes creation of myth: linked with the Romantic preoccupation with

    origins the attempt to understand the causes of mans Fall from Innocence, his loss of Eden

  • Los The fallen (human) form of

    Urthona a representation of the Artist/ Imagination as a blacksmith

    His hard labor: that of restoring universal unity.

    I must Create a System, or be enslavd by another Mans;

    I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.

    (Los, in Jerusalem, the Emanatio of the Giant Albion)

  • The theme of childhood in Blakes Songs The same Romantic preoccupation with origins Interest in childhood: first developed in the 18th century by

    philosophers preoccupied with establishing theories of knowledge. Enlightenment rationalist-empiricist philosophers (e.g. John Locke,

    David Hartley): confident in the perfectibility of man through the application of Reason to human institutions

    Great emphasis on education as a means of eradicating moral imperfections and of dispelling superstition.

    John Locke: the infant mind was a tabula rasa, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas education can condition the individual, can mould his intellect and moral nature.

    The child was seen as a small adult, who needed to be trained into manhood no real attention to the peculiar nature of the child, to childhood as a self-contained period in mans life

  • Romanticism: the emergence of a new perception of childhood closely related to the rise of the cult of sensibility

    The establishment of childhood as a literary theme William Cowper, James Thomson, Thomas Gray the emergence of a minor tradition of verse about children, anticipating the preoccupations of William Blake and William Wordsworth

    The theme of childhood: always in close connection with that of the creative influence of Nature (spontaneity, authenticity)

    The nostalgia for the lost joy of childhood: related to the more general Romantic interest in primitivism.

  • The great influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his treatise on education, mile (1762).

    Rousseau: childhood has ways of seeing, thinking and feeling peculiar to itself; nothing can be more foolish than to substitute our ways for them.

    He condemns those who are always looking for the man in the child, without considering what he is before he becomes a man,

    True education is simply the development of the original nature of the child (Preface to mile).

    Opposition to the pessimistic religious view of human nature as originally corrupt especially Calvinism, with its terrifying doctrine of Predestination

  • Rousseau insists on the original innocence of man, on his natural tendency to virtue

    A proper education (i.e. preparing the child for the demands of social existence) should nourish this tendency carefully

    The natural state of grace of the child: destroyed by the cultivation of the intellect at the expense of the soul and the inculcation of moral virtues through strictures and punishment

    Rousseaus ideas: the most authoritative expression of the Sentimental Revolution that took place in the latter half of the 18th century the tendency to see mans true nature as residing in his instincts, intuition, emotions and feelings, and not in his reason.

  • Blake: acquainted with the ideas of Rousseau through them, Blake attacks Locke and the Deist philosophers

    He rejects Lockes idea that all knowledge comes through sense-experience, as well as the exaltation of reason as a supreme faculty

    Blake proclaims the importance of the Imagination, of the Poetic Genius as the true essence of Man.

    Blake identifies Jesus with the Imagination since the birth of Jesus is repeated in every childs birth, every child is a manifestation of the Divine Imagination in the human world.

    E.g. the poem The Lamb (Songs of Innocence): the confidence of the child, his intuitive knowledge, that he, the Lamb, and Jesus are aspects of the same divine essence.

  • Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Gave thee life, and bid thee feed, By the stream and o'er the mead; Gave thee clothing of delight, Softest clothing, woolly, bright; Gave thee such a tender voice, Making all the vales rejoice? Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee?

    Little Lamb, I'll tell thee, Little Lamb, I'll tell thee. He is called by thy name, For He calls Himself a Lamb. He is meek, and He is mild; He became a little child. I a child, and thou a lamb, We are called by His name. Little Lamb, God bless thee! Little Lamb, God bless thee!

  • The world of INNOCENCE: allegorically represented by the green (pajite), where children can play unhindered under the loving and responsible eyes of the nurse.

    Innocence: the paradise of gratified desire, lack of frustration, complete freedom, love, and redeeming imagination.

    Childhood: THE UNFALLEN STATE OF MAN, characterised best by the feeling of joy laughter and delight: present in all poems of Innocence

    The pastoral setting of Songs of Innocence stands for Eden mans life is governed by the virtues of delight that constitute the human form divine: mercy, pity, peace and love (The Divine Image)

    These virtues give life a sense of security and completeness, which protects the child from the aggression of the world outside.

    The Little Black Boy: the oppressed child slave adopts the logic of the Imagination to comfort himself for his condition he accepts the fact of slavery as a disguised form of Gods eternal benevolence

    Innocence could thus be defined as the absence of human suffering, the capacity of the Imagination to redeem the injustice and evils of the world.

  • My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white; White as an angel is the English child: But I am black as if bereav'd of light.

    My mother taught me underneath a tree And sitting down before the heat of day, She took me on her lap and kissed me, And pointing to the east began to say.

    Look on the rising sun: there God does live And gives his light, and gives his heat away. And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.

    And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

    For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice. Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

    Thus did my mother say and kissed me, And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me.

  • The lapse (fall) from innocence to experience: the entrance into the world of institutions, systems, stony laws, which oppress the individual, cripple his imagination and teach him envy, hate and deceit.

    The world of experience: the city, the industrialised space, where the furnaces, hammers and anvils of the Dark Satanic mills suppress free energy, turning them into dreadful symmetries (e.g. The Tyger).

    Experience: the world of slavery, interest, usury, war and corruption, of cynical reasoning and hypocrisy.

    The world of the lapsed (i.e. fallen) soul the four virtues from The Divine Image have no longer a self-sufficient meaning, because the human is dissociated from the divine

    The Human Abstract: a cynical speaker pity exists only because some people are made poor by others, we can boast mercy only because there is the unhappiness of the others, peace is possible only because there is mutual fear, and love is another form of cruelty, masked by hypocritical humility.

    The tone in Songs of Experience: one of angry protest and indignation The illustrations accompanying the poems show death, weeping, menace

    and desolation.

  • Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forest of the night What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

    In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?

    And What shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? and what dread feet?

    What the hammer? what the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

    When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?

    Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

  • The Garden of Love

    I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen; A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green.

    And the gates of this Chapel were shut And Thou shalt not, writ over the door; So I turned to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore.

    And I saw it was filled with graves, And tombstones where flowers should be; And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires.

    The impediments to human happiness lie as much in the systems regulating social life as in the individual human heart or mind, in the human brain.

    The Garden of Love ambiguity is the loss of Eden is due to the imposition of an external authority (here, the church), or does it consists in an altering of perception, in the individuals impossibility to preserve the vision of paradise?

  • Several ways of interpreting Blakes distinction between Innocence and Experience:

    a) Necessary stages in the evolution of the individual, forming a dialectic of contraries which will be transcended by a higher innocence, tested by suffering, epitomised by Jesus.

    b) The contrast between Nature and Civlisation/Society freedom, spontaneity (associated with Imagination) vs. constraint, oppression, social and political injustice (associated with Reason)

    c) The two sides of a double vision, diverging aspects of the same truth many explicitly paired poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which represent contrasting visions of the same reality e.g. Holy Thursday, Nurses Song, The Chimney Sweeper E.g. the Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Experience, even if still a

    child, is not capable of having saving visions like his fellow in Songs of Innocence he displays a curious double awareness of his own innocence and of the hypocritical and cruel world around him.

  • Blake, the visionary Romantic

    Blake believed that human emancipation is threatened by mind-forged manacles (London, SoE)

    the failure to renew imaginative vision and to open the doors of perception keeps us prisoners of the material world, which is a fallen world

    Our senses constitute a limitation our ordinary perception is a source of frustration

    Imagination: the only thing that can restore man to Paradise, by healing this rift between body and soul, between spirit and matter

  • Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow; and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when this vegetable mortal bodies are no more (Jerusalem).

    Imagination: the faculty capable of reconciling the conflicting forces in mans nature

    Art: capable of mirroring the original wholeness of man. Blake opposes the Daughters of Memory (the Muses in

    traditional representation) to the Daughters of Inspiration Imagination has nothing to do with Memory

    He proclaims the spontaneous nature of poetic creation (cf. Milton and his unpremeditated verse, the result of revelation)

    Blake repeatedly insisted on the visionary and inspired quality of his writings: I copy imagination, I write when commanded by spirits.

  • The opening lines to Auguries of Innocence (1803-1805): a concentrated poetic comment on the nature of visionary experience enabled by the Imagination, which affords access to ultimate truths:

    To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.