Best Writing on William Blake

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
I'm not sure whether this thread belongs here or in the "Thought" forum. That in itself is almost worthy of discussion.

So what have you read on Blake that you've liked? Bonus points for stuff written in the past thirty years, also bonus points for anything inflected with structuralism or Marxism. I seem to remember someone mentioning him on Dissensus (or thereabouts) in the past.
 

owen

Well-known member
marxism (but no structuralism...his book on althusser is apparently awful, whatever) and plenty of millenarianism, messianism, apocalypticism and general fun in this one-
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luka

Well-known member
that raine woman talks a lot of sense. i would liek to read yeats on blake but i haven't yet.
 

jenks

thread death
back in my undergrad days Northrop Frye was the guy.

the very first biog of blake has recently been republished and, despite some quibbles, there is ackroyd's blake which gives some very sharp readings of soem of teh poems.

yeats on blake seems an interesting proposition - must check it out
 

dogger

Sweet Virginia
a few basics, some slightly more up to date than frye.... ;)

John Beer - Blake’s Humanism. Manchester: 1968.
David Erdman - Blake: Prophet Against Empire. 1977.
Nelson Hilton - Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words. Berkeley 1983.
John Meen - Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s.1992
 

fldsfslmn

excremental futurism
Thanks for the wonderful recommendations, everyone. I've got a few of these waiting for me at my library!
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I have to say that I've never really "got" Blake, but then I've never had much of an inner ear for poetry. I love Philip Larkin and I'm trying to train myself to like other poets as much. Part of it is obviously reading things out loud. I remember reading Blake and finding it very simple, as his poetry is hailed for being - but deceptively so. But I couldn't see much more than the simplicity. Perhaps I read the wrong poems, or misread them.

I love his drawings, though. I would like a good book on him, too, if only to help me understand what all the fuss is about.
 

luka

Well-known member
The prophetic books are not simple. I dont understand them. They are too hArd. I've been trying to read them for almost 20 years, and failing. Why not try the marriage of heaven and hell. That's neither simple nor incomprehensible
 

luka

Well-known member
The prophetic books are not simple. I dont understand them. They are too hArd. I've been trying to read them for almost 20 years, and failing. Why not try the marriage of heaven and hell. That's neither simple nor incomprehensible

ive nailed these now. do that all day reading of Jerusalem for Blakes birthday really opened everything up for me.
 

luka

Well-known member
As Frye explains in an interview, Blake arrives for him in a revelation while he was a graduate student:

Frye: ...I was assigned a paper on Blake’s Milton, one of his most difficult and complex poems, and started working on it the night before I was to read it. It was around three in the morning when suddenly the universe just broke open, and I’ve never been, as they say, the same since.

Cayley: What was it? I know you can’t describe the experience, but what was it in Blake that provoked this experience?

Frye: Just the feeling of an enormous number of things making sense that had been scattered and unrelated before. In other words, it was a mytholog*ical frame taking hold.


This in itself ramps up the weirdness level. Frye was not not the only author or Blake scholar whose insights into the prophet-poet were gained in a flash of vision. Allen Ginsberg, writing about the origins of the sixties counterculture, explains that S. Foster Damon, author of A Blake Dictionary and also a pioneer of Blake criticism, had his own Blakean revelation while tripping on peyote and stumbling wide-eyed across the Harvard green:

One scholar who transmitted Blake's kabbalah, S. Foster Damon, can remember his sudden vision of tiny flowers carpeting Harvard Yard violet before World War One, an image that lingers over 60 years in mind since his fellow student Virgil Thomson gave him the cactus Peyote to eat. Damon concludes that rare beings like Blake are born with physiologic gift of such vision, continuous or intermittent.


Added to all this is that Ginsberg also was inspired to continue his poetic explorations because of an auditory epiphany involving the voice of Blake. The master poet, seer of numerous visions, apparently also has the power to bestow visions from the beyond to those that deeply contemplate his work. Frye's Fearful Symmetry occasionally also takes on the tone of a channeled text.

*
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
He had learned from Jacob Boehme and from old alchemist writers that imagination was the first emanation of divinity, ‘the body of God,’ ‘the Divine members,’ and he drew the deduction, which they did not draw, that the imaginative arts were therefore the greatest of Divine revelations, and that the sympathy with all living things, sinful and righteous alike, which the imaginative arts awaken, is that forgiveness of sins commanded by Christ. The reason, and by the reason he meant deductions from the observations of the senses, binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses, and divides us from each other by showing us our clashing interests; but imagination divides us from mortality by the immortality of beauty, and binds us to each other by opening the secret doors of all hearts. He cried again and again that every thing that lives is holy, and that nothing is unholy except things that do not live—lethargies, and cruelties, and timidities, and that denial of imagination which is the root they grew from in old times. Passions, because most living, are most holy—and this was a scandalous paradox[134] in his time—and man shall enter eternity borne upon their wings.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/49613/49613-h/49613-h.htm#Page_131
 
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