Thomas Phillips, “William Blake” (1807)
Friday
Richard Holmes in The New York Review of Books recently wrote about “The Greatness of William Blake,” including an account of how he was saved from utter obscurity in the mid-19th century by a fan. While we like to think that the test of time will save the great authors and bury the not-so-great, Blake is one of those cases that makes you wonder. Then again, his sweep was so great that he probably would have survived.
Holmes notes that there are many doors into Blake. His own Blake is not far from my own: a radical visionary who protested against various forms of oppression, especially that of the Church, the State, and industrial capitalism. Holmes and I both encountered Blake in the 1960s, when he was seen as the quintessential protest poet. Holmes remembers thrilling to one of Blake’s “Proverbs from Hell” painted on a London wall:
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
He also remembers bonding with two soldiers, on leave from Vietnam, over the terrifying stanza from “London”:
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning church appals;
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
If I had been British, I would probably have encountered Blake first from the hymn “Jerusalem,” which practically functions as a British national anthem. (See my essay on it here.)
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my
hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and
pleasant land.
As it was, I was introduced to the song in high school while watching the 1962 British New Wave film Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. In one scene, the camera crosscuts between boys in a reform school angelically singing “Jerusalem” while another kid gets beat up by the school authorities. Given that Blake always stands up for children, he would have appreciated the irony, even though he probably wouldn’t have liked how his revolutionary verse was being used to stoke patriotic passions.
I also encountered Songs of Innocence and Experience in high school English and found “The Lamb” to be infantile. I was captivated by the dark energy of “Tyger, Tyger,” however, even though I didn’t entirely understand it. I’m more impressed with “The Lamb” now.
It made sense that Blake would appeal to college students in the 1960s and early 1970s. After all, he manages to combine protests against social injustice—say, in the chimney sweeper poems—with protests against sexual repression and guilt. He covers all bases.
Today I teach Blake in my “Nature in Literature” class. We talk about his “dark satanic mills” and appreciate his insight that our fear of nature underlies our compulsion to dominate it.
Holmes notes that there are many other Blakes as well, however:
My Blake, the radical visionary poet of the 1960s, seems almost old-fashioned now. I realize how many other Blakes there have been, both before and since. They include the bardic mystic popularized by the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne (1868) and W.B. Yeats (1893); the Marxist protester championed by the scientist Jacob Bronowski (1944); the inspired London dreamer summoned up by the biographers Mona Wilson (1927) and especially Peter Ackroyd (1995); the great psychological mythmaker analyzed by the critics Northrop Frye (1947) and Harold Bloom (1963); the agitator and revolutionary of the political historians E.P. Thompson (Witness Against the Beast, 1995) and David Erdman (Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 1974); and the man of “minute particulars” slowly and meticulously assembled by the inexhaustible scholar-researcher G.E. Bentley Jr., the author of two editions of Blake Records (1969, 1988) and A Stranger from Paradise (2001), a monumental compilation- biography, aimed to subdue “the factual Laocoön” of the life.
Add to these Blake as the protagonist of innumerable Freudian, Swedenborgian, Neoplatonist, Zen Buddhist, and, more recently, excellent feminist studies (Women Reading William Blake, 2007, including essays by Germaine Greer, Tracy Chevalier, and Helen Bruder). Nor can we overlook Marsha Keith Schuchard, the author of Why Mrs. Blake Cried (2006), with her detailed explorations (and illustrations) of Blake’s supposed excursions into ecstatic tantric sex.
If you want to get a better sense of Blake’s amazing scope, check out the essay.
