CHAPTER TSWIENN Thy. 6 Ne The Romantic Poets I: Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge pore of ie abies sth century was (as earlier chapters ve indicated) a period of transitio: mn am heepetiment in poetic styles and subjects, ena is ieee to see how the view ir es the refined and pleasing communication to educated ears-of an as- pect of civilized and generalized humanity| seems to be abandoned in practice long before it is officially discarded by the critics. It would be a mistake, however, to diagnose all poets who show a stronger personal feeling or a passionate interest in the old and the odd and the unique as “pre-ramantics” who point forward to a liberation of poetry whieh takes place in a violent poetic revolution at the end of the century. Shifts in the view of the nature and fune- tion of poetry proceed gradually and continuously, and the move- ment from the view that poetry is essentially “imitation” of human nature, in a general or ideal or deliberately Synthesized or central- ized or universalizéed sense, for the dual purpose of pleasing and edifving, and that the test of a work of literature is the degree to which it communicates its “imitation,” with pleasure and edification, to its audience, to the view that poetry has for its major function the expression of the poet’s emotion and that the relation of the poem to the poet is more significant than its relation to its audience—such 4 movement proceeds in a variety of ways throughout the century, and indeed one can sometimes see a mimetic and an expressive view of poetry held simultaneously, as in Dr. Johnson, rho most stren- i mi id also re- proves Milton because “Lycidas” does not seem to be the overflow of genuine passion. The attitude of the self-styled Augustan age of scarcely established as an attitude (and one which contained contradictory elements) before it began to be modifiedBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 857 under the impact of a great variety of forces. The stability which English ehougit and society regained at the end ofthe seventeenth century could not in the nature of things be long maintained, and the unstable equilibrium of Queen Anne's period gave way to more complex and more obviously contradictory attitudes. Melancholy, in- terest in the uncivilized and the odd, a sense of change and of the im- possibility of keeping static—some or all of these states of mind are seen quite early in the century; and by the time we arrive at Gray and Goldsmith and Cowper, the first and third of them are almost standard. The enclosing of village ground in the interest of big land- owners and relatively large-scale farmers produced a change and unrest in the countryside (as Goldsmith’s Deserted Village records), and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution toward the end of the century produced a very different view of the value of life in urban society from that found in the Queen Anne writers, Blake's “London” is written in another world altogether. Further, the strain of thought most clearly represented by Rousseau encouraged the no- tion that the conventions of civilization, far from being all that made a decent life possible, far from representing the refinement of a crude humanity into a gracious pattern of worthwhile living, rep- resented intolerable restrictions on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption and evil. This is in some de; the theme of Blake’s Songs of Experience and the tenor of much of his thought, and Blake thus represents as complete an antithesis to the Augustan position of Lord Chesterfield as can be found. In this respect the poets of the full-fledged “Romantic Movement”—Words- worth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron—represented no advance on Blake, who had gone as far in that direction as it was possible to go. In many respects Blake is much further away from Dr. Johnson than Coleridge was, and Gray is in many senses of the word more “romantic” than Wordsworth. It does not help to label poets like Gray (still less, Blake) “pre-romantic,” for that suggests that there was a single movement developing in a straight line and those who came later were more thoroughly in the movement than those who pace them. In his view that poetry should use the real Janguage men, Wordsworth was closer to Dryden and Pope or to Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” hi rissa cali an to Gray— 3 flower of meditative beBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE ifleation in the light of poetic theory and Practice, rv (however far back we m ‘ i andl that this shitt is reflected pitatires tte pt ak oversimplification to say that people of the earlier eighteenth cen- tury, in their gratitude for what civilization had achieved by way not only of making life agreeable but also of making men more amenable to regular observation, tended to think of the arts as a product of conventional urban society and of the function of liter- ature as the representation of roe aspects of human nature ex- pressed in the language of that society and with all the resources of that society's traditional culture. One of the shifts in attitude that produced the new movement was the questioning of that very point. A generation that had survived the religious and civil disputes of the seventeenth century might well have accepted with relief and grati- tude a norm of urbane moderation operating within strictly defined conventional limits, but a later generation, which had no memory of those disputes and no feeling of relief at having escaped trom the perpetual conflicts between single-minded religious or political en- thusiasts, came to feel a sense of constraint rather than a sense of freedom in the demands of urban gentility. They lifted their eyes from the gentlemanly limitations imposed on their horizon to con- template with a certain fascination the world of Gothic superstition or heroic violence or primitive behavior of one sort or another. (It is worth noting that the Jacobite movement became a fertile source of literary inspiration in Scotland only after it had become a safely lost cause.) And of course the great paradox was that at the very core of eighteenth-century genteel culture lay two venerated works dealing with life in a very ungenteel society—the Bible and Homer. Sooner or later neoclassic culture would have had to come to terms with primitivism. Actually, it turned to investigate the “primitive’ background of the Bible and Homer rather earlier than might have been expected—in Robert Lowth’s De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (1753) and Robert Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius and Writ- s of Homer (1769). 2 pe of the horizon was social as well as chronological. Primitive and heroic societies became more and more objects of in terest, and at the s 5 men living outside the pale of urban g -Tegarded as legitimate, ov the i e it often hap- h are: used in ce P ¥ E F sBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 859 ordinary conversation, become too familiar to the ear and contract a kind of meanness by passing through the mouths of the vulgar, a poet should take particular care to guard himself against idiomatic ways of speaking.” So wrote Addison in 1712. By 1800, Wordsworth was writing: “Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, [as the subject of his poems] because, in that condition, the essential sions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more aopoatte language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, can be more accurately contemplated, and more’ oreibly. communi: cate . .” Dryden and Pope had insisted that the language of etry should be based on the conversation of gentlemen; Words worth held that it should be based on the conversation of peasants. Between the two views lay generations of gradual exaltation of the primitive (as opposed to the polished and highly civilized) as a state peculiarly favorable to poetry. To look beyond the polished life of educated men in cities to wilder and cruder ways of living, to investigate ballads and folk poetry as representing something more genuinely poetic than mod- ern literature (and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Po- etry, 1765, was only one of many eighteenth-century signposts in this direction, and not the clearest), to include as proper subject matter for serious poetry aspects of life which neoclassic critics would have considered “low” or “mean” (“men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply,” said Wordsworth—a proposition Dr. Johnson would not have denied, but which he would have considered irrelevant to the production of poetry), and in general to hold that the con- ventions of contemporary civilization did not represent the only guarantee of valuable human behavior—we can at least say that these were attitudes which became increasingly common as the eighteenth century advanced. One might add-to this list the desire to explore kinds of emotion and sensibility which someone like Lord Chesterfield would have carefully shunned as simply inviting trouble. The result of the application of these attitudes was that poetry which has come to be called “romantic” can exhibit either a calculated simplicity or an equally calculated exoticism. Cole- dee, looking back many years later on the pro- by Wordsworth and himself in 1798, i endeavor had been “directed to persons erRs 860 BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE cure for these shadows of imagination that willi belief for the moment, Rvitieh, constitutes postion te worth’s task, Coleridge added, had been “to propose to himself his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, ad to excite a feeling analagous to the supernatural, by awakentag the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directin it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; . . .” Here we see the poet's glance directed away from the world of social polite, ness in two different directions—to the imaginative world of the su- pernatural, and to the everyday world of ordinary people outside society.” Both poets were seeking a deeper reality than they con- sidered any account of the urbane, conventional world of men and manners could yield. (Not, of course, that the neoclassic writer necessarily made the contemporary world of polite society his sub- ject matter; but he addressed it as his audience.) _Thus the term “Romantic movement” has been used to cover such different literary phenomena as the studied rustic realism of Words- worth’s Michael—whose most often quoted line is the impressive matter-of-fact ‘And never lifted up a single stone, and the deliberate indulgence of an exotic imagination that we find on occasion in Coleridge and Keats and which reaches its sometimes fantastic culmination in such a poet as Beddoes, New political and social ideas helped to complicate the picture. The French Revolution, the developing Industrial Revolution in England which changed the physical appearance and the social structure of the country, and new notions in psychology and meta- physics, all played their part. Wordsworth, enthusiastic about the French Revolution when it first broke out, suspicious of “the in- creasing accumulation of men in cities,” and eager to find the funda- mental truths about man and the universe through a contemplation of external nature, interested in the way in which “we associate ideas ina state of excitement,” showed the effect of these new ideas no less than Shelley, who moved from the atheistic rationalism of William Godwin to a passionate Platonic idealism. Byron, who combined an antisocial irony with an equally antisocial self-pity, and Keats, who " understood what the individual life of the imagination could do for a poet more clearly, perhaps, than any other English pene writer, developed their own characteristic poetic themes, te techniques—but they, too, like the early ‘ordsworth a like Shel- ley, were in some | alienated from polite society; they ath the earlier 5 aoe made the it onlyne — BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 861 made man capable of civilized achievements, and explored areas of the imagination and the sensibility to which their readers had access only by reading and surrendering to their poems. Keats Agnes” distills the purest essence of passionate living in a society that is symbolically violent and magical, and his “La Belle Dame sans Merci” broods with ste beauty over the fact that we can love to despair what is nevertheless horrible: society as Pope or Prior saw it is wholly ignored in these poems. The poet is on his own, drawing nourishment from his solitary reading and imaginings. This means that each poem must create its own world and present it persua- sively to the reader, In Keats’ odes, as in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Ab- bey,” the mood and ideas of the poet are generated from a sensitive brooding over natural objects, and the poem becomes an organic unity wholly different in meaning and effect from any paraphrase or summary of its content. It is thus to be expected that poets begin to consider a poem as an organic whole to be explained in terms of analogies from biology rather than as a craftsmanlike rendering of a previously discerned content to be discussed in mechanistic terms. Coleridge (drawing on recent German philosophy and criticism) was the first important English critic to emphasize and bring home the organic nature of form in art. Poetry which does not rest on a basis of social agree- ment, and one might almost add of social exclusiveness, becomes more and more concerned with the unique universe created by the individual poem, and discussions of “propriety” and “rules” become wholly irrelevant. The poem is referred back to the poet out of whose experience it is generated rather than forward to the audience whom it is designed to please or back to the nature it “imitates.” What is “proper” is determined by the life generated by the spe- cific , not by the attitudes of any social group to which it may be addressed. This view could not, of course, long survive, for after a period of unrest and poetic individualism, new norms arise and a new relation between the poet and his public develops: Tennyson was as much concerned with propriety as Pope, but it was a very different sort of propriety. Whether the romantic poet moves out intS the country with Wordsworth, or into a symbolic Middle Ages, as Keats sometimes sa or Wogan to ae a passionate Platonic love affair with the iverse as we find in Shelley, he is illustrating in one way or another his isolation, his inability to draw nourishment from the conventional ai n , ‘society, his862 BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Im referring the poem back to the poet, we alsa associate it in q new way with the external world, which the poct's mind intuits and to which the poet's mind corresponds in a special way: ‘No outcast he, bewildered and depressed: Along his infant veins are interfused, ‘The gravitation and the filial bond ‘Of nature that connect him with the world. The poet escapes from his fellows to find man through nature (“For T have learned /To look on nature, not as in the hour /Of thought. Jess youth; but hearing often-times /The still, sad music of humans ity”), and this is often the same thing as finding himself: There is a pleasure in the pathless woods) There is a rapture on the lanely share, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and musie in its roar, Tove not raan the less but nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all Imay be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel 1 What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal, The voice of Byron here, for all its individuality, is also the voice of the romantic poet in his alienation from society, : William Blake (1757-1827) broke away deliberately and violently from the cultural pattern of his age and turned to the occult tra- dition (or traditions) in European thought—Jewish cabalistic ideas which had been floating about in certain Christian circles since the late fifteenth century, ideas from the Swedish visionary and religious {unkeer. Emmanuel Swerlenborg, from the German mystic Jakob me, from the esoteric doctrine of Rosicrucianism, which had ‘had-adherents in England since Robert Fludd was initiated into the cult early in the seventeenth century, and from other mystical and magical ideas which, while far from the surface of eighteenth- century life and thought, nevertheless aroused increasing interest among some scholars and unorthodox thinkers as the century pro- gressed. Blake himself was a visionary whose ideas often came to him in the form of clearly visualized encounters with angels, proph- ets, or other symbolic characters. Except for his first volume of poems, Poetical Sketches, Blake's poems and ‘prophetic books were himself on copper } with decorative designs. He was Fear oe aisBLAKE, WoRDSwonTH, AND CO! BRIDGE 863 Blake's Iyrics of and other on, of Thomas Chatterton ‘The Bible, tributed to his style. Poetical Sketches (1783) has an Elizabethan freshness as well as some obvious signs of imitativeness. It is the lyric touch that impresses most in this volume How sweet I roam'd from field to field, Anc tasted all the summer's pride, “Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide! This is the first stanza of a poem entitled simply “Song,” as ate the following lines: My silles and fine array, My smiles and languish’d air, By love are driy'n aways And mournful lean Despaie Brings me yew to deck my prave: Such end true lovers have. Sometimes the influence of specific Shakespearean lyrics is almost too obvious—“Memory, hither come, /And tune your merry notes,” or “When silver snow decks Susan's clothes, /And jewel hangs at th’ shepherd's nosc’—and there are ballad imitations, Elizabethan dra- matic fragments, an imitation of Spenser, meditations in a rhetorical prose which shows Ossianic influence, and invocations to each of the four seasons which show a rich pictorial sense and at times sug- gest Keats. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, etched between [1789 and 1784, showing the two contrary states of the human soul” are Characteristic and more original, The freshness and purity of the lyries of the former group, which deal with childhood as the symbol of an untarnished innocence which ought to be, but which in modern civilization cannot be, part of the adult response to the world, show a poetic imagination at once more direct and more visionary than that of the Elizabethan lyrists who influenced his earliest poetry. The introductory poem, “Piping down the valleys wild,” “Nurse’s Song,” “Holy Thursday,” the well-known “Little Lamb, who made thee?” have a childlike directness and a sense of controlled joy in the human and natural world that show none of the signs of a SON, writing for children or playing at being a child that so much deliberately simple , TherBLAKE, WORDS WOSTH, AND COLERIDGE “And now beside thee, bleating lamb, I can lie down and sleep; Or think on him who bore thy name, Graze after thee and weep. For, wash’d in life's river, My bright mane for ever Shall shine like the gold As I guard o'er the fold.” ‘The benedictory tone here is strengthened by the slow movement of the first four lines of each stanza and the rocking rhythm of the Jast four. The sense of everything in its proper plaze, of peace and content, of order and poeta ruling etre 9 rises from many of these poems: When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still. “Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down ‘And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away \ Till the morning appears in the skies.” “No, no, let us play, for it is yet day y And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly And the hills are all cover'd with sheep.” “Well, well, go and play till the light fades away And then go home to bed.” The little ones leaped and shouted and laugh’d And all the hills echoed. : (Nurse’s Song) In Songs of Innocence all human desires are innocent; even disci- pline is innocent and makes for joy, as “Holy Thursday” shows: "Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, ‘The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green, Crey-headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow, Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames’ waters low. O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town! Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own. ‘The hum of multitudes was there, but t of | Thousands of little boys and girlsBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of n ice of song, Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among, Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. Here the conclusion makes explicit the moral, as happens more than once in these poems: For Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face, And love, the human form divine, ‘And Peace, the human dress. . . « And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jews rhere Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell There God is dwelling too. - These are not versified moral platitudes, but profoundly held moral ideas springing directly from Blake's personal vision of the universe and rendered with lilting simplicity which reflects the primal nature of the subject. =~ “Without contraries is no progression,” wrote Blake in The Mar- riage of Heaven and Hell, ae Songs of Experience do not simply represent the corruption of innocence by the immoral forces of /Society, but show the inevitable distortion and sadness which \ Jsystematized empirical philosophy imposes on life, and_through ‘which the road to the ultimate wisdom lies. The true vision cannot | vome to the innocent, for innocence by its very nature is easily led astray, nor can it come to those who acquiesce in the distortions of experience; those distortions must be known and transcended. There is, that is to say, no road back to innocence, only a road forward through experience to a comprehensive vision. Nevertheless, Songs of Experience are clearly the product of disillusion, however tempo- rary, and present an overwhelmingly sad picture of what man has made of man. “The Clod and the Pebble” sums up much of the collection: ; “Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, ods But for another gives its ease, - © | And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair, The that oe indictme guage ar The “BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 867 “Lave seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in anather’s loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.” The picture now given of “Holy Thursday” is in striking contrast to that given in the poem of the same title in Songs of Innocence. The indictment is the stronger for the elemental simplicity of the lan-/ guage and the simple stanza form: rm Is this a holy thing to see Ina rich and fruitful land, Babes redue'd to misary, Fed with cold and usurous hand? Js that trembling ory a song? Can it be a song of jay? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! The “Nurse’s Song” of Songs of Experience is an even more direct counterpart to the poem of the same title in Songs of Innocence: When the volees of children are heard on the green And whisp'rings are in the dale, The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale, Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Your spring and your day are wasted in play, And your winter and night in disguise. Blake's own ideas appear more strikingly in Songs of Experience than in the earlier poems; symbolic and visiona more frequent, iat the formas still simple and the Stilsimple and familiar (as in “The Little Vagabond” and “The ae Sweeper”). The notion that spontaneity of the imagination and of the emotions has been killed by legalism and cold selfishness is expressed in many ways throughout these poems. In “The Human Abstract” Blake writes of Mercy and Pity in tones that savagely parody the kind of defense of things as they are which was so com- mon in the eighteenth century (and which Dr. Johnson in a very different way also fiercely attacked): Pity would be no more If we did not make somebody poor; And Mercy no more could be Tf all were as happy as we,868 BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE And mutual fear brings peace, Till the selfish loves increase: Then Cruelty knits a snare, And spreads his baits with care, The fruit of deceit grows on a tree that springs from the analytig intellect: The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro’ Nature to find this Trees But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain. Cruelty, hypocrisy, poverty, misuse of the intellect, distrust of the imagination, political and ecclesiastical institutions, frustration of desire, are associated evils which combine to corrupt and destroy: How the chimney-sweeper's ery Every black’ning Church appalls, ‘And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace walls. But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born infant's tear, And blights with plagues the marriage hearse. And even more clearly: 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 turn’d to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore; And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be; And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys and desires. ‘The change in rhythms in these last two lines provides a note both haunting and sinister. ven vs ee we ABLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE 869 Ab, sun-flowerl weary of time, Who couttest the ste Secking after th: Where the trave ‘Where the youth pined away with desire, And the pale virgin shrouded in snow Arise from their graves, and aspire Where my sun-llower wishes ta go, The impact of this poem is powerful and immediate, and the theme (the search for redemption from frustrated desire, which destroys) clear enough even to the reader who has not worked out the sym- bolic pattern in any detail. The same can be said of “The Sick Rose”: © Hose, thou art sick The invisible worn That flies in the night, In the howling starm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark seeret love Does thy life destroy. The most impressive—and by far the most well-known—of these poems is “The Tyger” (Blake's spelling is worth retaining, for it seems to emphasize the’symbolic quality of the animal). The power and intensity of this short poem, achieved both by the imagery and by the way the beat of the line is handled at each point, are over- whelming, and again there is an immediate poctic meaning com- municated even to those who cannot refer each image to its symbolic context, There is both beauty and terror in the elemental forces of nature. In that section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell entitled “Proverbs of Hell” (and Hell for Blake was a deliberately perverse symbol of liberty and the spontaneous activity of genius), Blake wrate: The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the geat is the bounty of God. ‘The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God, The nakedness of woman is the work of God, . . . The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, teo great for the eye of man, This provides a clue, if one were needed, to be eens of the ambivalent symbol of the tiger, ch a72 BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bri In the forests 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? . When the stars threw down their spears, ‘And water'd 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? Later works of Blake can be used to explain the symbolism of the stars throwing down their spears, but, as in Yeats’ “Byzantium” which can be explained with reference to Yeats’ book A Vision but which contains its own powerful meaning in immediate poetic terms, the images have sufficient significance in their context to work ef- fectively in the poem without reference to anything outside. Some cosmic disaster associated with the creation, some divine miScat- riage associated with divine creativity, is suggested here. Blake's tiger is akin to the “rough beast” of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” in its combined suggestion of terror and wonder. The ultimate vision of the universe is neither simple nor easy; and “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” The innocence of the lamb is impossible in the world of experience, and the way to regeneration lies past the tiger. With Tiriel (written about 1789: it is impossible to give a date of publication for these works of Blake for they were not published in the regular way, and Tiriel was left in manuscript), Blake began his series of works written in rhetorical free_verse and using myths and symbols of his own creation to embody his vision of the universe and his doctrine of man. Though this kind of verse can achieve remarkable force and eloquence, its great defect is monotony, and few readers can read them at length without some degree of weari- ness: And Har and Heva, like two children, sat beneath the oak: Mnetha, now aged, waiting on them and brought them food and clothing; But they were as the shadow of Har and as the years forgotten. ee ‘And The : 1789) The res} is sMf. BLAKE, WORDSWonTH, AND GOLENIDGE 871 Playing with fawers and romming after birds they spent the day, ‘And fn the night like infants slept, delighted with infant drome, i ae movement can be seen in The Book of Thel (etched in 789): The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar: Thel enter'd in and saw the secrets of the land unknown, She saw the couches of the dead, and where the fibrous roots ‘Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists; Aland of sorrows and of tears where never smile was secon. The French Recolution (1791) shows Blake's peculiar imaginative response to the events of his time, and the swinging rhetorical line is sometimes used here with great power: Troubled, leaning on Necker, descends the King to his chamber of comet]; shady mountains Tn fear utter voices of thunder; the woods of France embosom the sound; Clonds of wisdom prophetic reply, and all over the palace roof heavy, Forty men, each conversing with woes in the infinite : shadows of his soul, Like our ancient fathers in regions of twilight, walk, gathering round the King; Again the loud voice of France cries to the morning; the morning prophecies to its clouds. In Visions of the Duughters of Albion (etched 1793), America (etched \ 1793), Europe (etched 1794), Urizen (etched 1784), The Book of | Ahania and The Song and Book af Los (1795), The Four Zoas (frst written 1795-97 and revised 1797-1804), Milton (1804-1808), and Jerusalem (1804-20), Blake presented his fully developed Erncrey in order to give his view of man and his destiny. ‘Though the mythal- ogy is Blake's own and can be Bewildeting to the casual reader, it ag resents a clearly formulated system based on elements in long estab: lished mystical and symbolic tradition. Full appreciation of Blake's Prophetic Books is possible only to those who have worked. out in detail his intricate system of myth and symbol; the less devoted reader can however respond to Blake’s intense _mythopoeic imayi- nation, his unusual combination of the exotic and the everyday, and ‘the beat and surge of his prophetic eloquence: But Loz and Enitharmon delighted in the moony spaces of Eno, ‘Nine times they liv’d among the forests, feeding on sweet fruits, And nine bright spaces wander'd, weaving mazes of delight, Snaring the wild goats for their milk, they eat the flesh of lambs: fe, av 1872 BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE A male and female, naked and ruddy as the pride of summer. Boe (The Four Zou sane The apse tone ee rings out in the midst of thetorical prophe i oe ne fONB at the anvil of the dancing males, caught “ows desire /\ cruelties of the moral law,” in Milton: the fied desi “Ah weak and wide astray! Ab shut in narrow doleful form; ti oe Creeping in reptile lesh upon the bosom of the ground! Sit Josh The Eye of Man is a narrow orb, clos'd up and dark, to the Scarcely beholding the great light, conversing with the Void; ized id The Ear a little shell, in small volutioas shutting out. > t lan All melodies and comprehending only Discord and Harmony; ae The Tongue a little moistrre fills, alittle food it cloys, pain, A little sound it utters and its cries are faintly heard, tan ‘Then brings forth Moral Virtue the cruel Virgin Babylon, . . .” a Biblical and Ossianic prose helped to mold the cadences of Blake's mh thetorical speech, but the tone is always unmistakably Blake's: a Ibehold London, a human awful wonder of God! Reya He says: “Return, Albion, return! I give myself for thee, Revs My streets are my Ideas of Imagination. i: Awake, Albion, awake! and let us awake up together, com My houses are thoughts; my inhabitants, affections, alone The children of my thoughts walking within my blood-vessels, that Shut from my nervous form which sleeps upon the verge of Beulah of th In dreams of darkness, while my vegetating blood in veiny pipes fron Rolls dreadful thro’ the furnaces of Los and the mills of Satan. thir For Albion's sake and for Jerusalem thy Emanation intr I give myself, and these my brethren give themselves for Albion.” I 0 nc Though an understanding of the Prophetic Books depends ona | not knowledge of Blake’s complicated mythological system, we c: _in his prose aphorisms (a form of which he was a master), in various ; “occasional writings, and in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, sudden a y flashes that take us directly to the heart of his doctrine. “If it were_ is not for the poetic or prophetic character, the philosophic and experi- a mental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable th to-do-other than repeat the same dull round-over again.” “He who aa sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, . sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.” “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak : di of enough to be restraine “and governs the unwilling. je reason Milton wrote in fetters ‘when he wrote of A app EaGos, and at liberty when of Devils and Testrainer or reason usurps its placeBLAKE, WORDSWOuTH, ANY COLERIDGE 873, Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of evil’: wil y Knowing Forever tate ate a Dea eaay mithou | idesieg Whaat in whores is always found— /The lineaments of grati- ' , Blake was completely at odds with all the official doctrines of his KT time, theological, moral, political, and esthetic. His annotations to Sir Herth Reynolds's Discourses show how bitterly opposed he was to the view that the function of the artist was to represent a general- ized ideal based on seleccion, combination and idealization of par- | { ticulars. When Reynolds writes that it would be absurd to understand poetic metaphors literally, or “to conclude that because painters sometimes represent poets writing from the dictates of a little winged boy or genius, that this same genjus did really inform him what he was to write,” Blake notes: “The ancients did not mean to impose when they affirmed their belief in vision and revelation. Plato was in earnest, Milton was in carnest. They believed that God did visit man really and truly, and not as Reynolds pretends. How yery anxious Reynolds is to disprove and contemn spiritual perceptions.” When Reynolds remarks that the “disposition to abstractions, to general- izing ana classification, is the great glory of the human mind,” Blake comments; “To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.” And when Reynolds argues that “in the midst of the highest flights of fancy or imagination, reason ought to preside from first to last,” Blake notes: “If this is true, it is a devilish foolish thing to be an artist.” Blake’s view of Reynolds is summed up in his introductory remark: “This man was hired to depress art.” Blake was not only a rebel; he was. also a visionary for whom all knowledge came through the exercise of the imagination. As he noted on a descriptive catalogue of exhibitions of his paintings: £ The Last Judgment is not fable or allegory, but vision, Fable ot allegory are a totally distinet and inferior kind of poetry. Vision or imagination is a repre- sentation of what eternally exists, really and unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration, who in the aggregate are called Jerusalem, Fable is allegory, but what critics call the fable is vision itself. The Hebrew Bible and the Gospel of Jesus are not allegory, but eternal vision or imagination of all that exists. The notes on this topic conclude with a passage which sums up his position vividly: “What,” it will be questioned, “When the sun rises, do you not see a round dise of fire somewhat like a ?” Ono, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’874 BLAKE, WORDSWOKTH, AND COLERIDGE The message of Blake's Prophetic Books is not, however, simpy, that empirical reason and empirical science are enemies ‘of CY visionary understanding. Blake was no simpleton, and his fullt developed system does not ignore the complexities and parade’, of existence. In his myth res represented by Urizen, wie created man, but in creating ily limited creature out of thy erfection and infinitude of God (who before the creation compre, ended all) there must be a withdrawal or retraction of himself ty God, and this can be achieved only by the limiting power of reaso) which produces the restricting dimensions of time and space and traps the spirit in the five senses. Urizen, who is associated with reason, law, all the restricting and limiting forces of society and the moral order, is necessary for the creation, but nevertheless must be fought against. At the other extreme is Los (imagination) and Luvah (passion). The Fall, which Urizen’s act of creation made inevitable, can be undone by the-reconciliation of Urizen with Los and Luvah, in order that complete and undivided man (Albion), who was divided into many at the Fall, may arise again. This resur- rected and regenerated whole man is sometimes identified by Blake with Jesus Christ. Blake's use of Christian and Jewish imagery is not to be taken as a sign of his fundamental agreement with the ortho- doxies of either religion; his association of Los with Satan is proof enough of that. Blake follows through his myths with massive particularization: he is not content with simy of contraries, but complicates his story in hitter to follow the com- plexities of experience. Rebel though he was in so many ways, ane. in flat opposition to so much in the official thinking of his age, Blake also spoke for his age, rendering with his eccentric brilliance both its currents of political and social rebellion and the underground tradition of mystical and visionary ideas which had had a long history in European thought. His rhetorical utterance is sometimes wearisome and sometimes too dependent on a private mythopoeia to be readily intelligible, but his imaginative energy and his clear poetic eye are truly remarkable qualities, not easily paralleled in English poetry. However odd or willful he may sometimes appear, Blake remains one of the great—and fruitfully disturbing—figures of our literature. Though Blake was a visionary influenced by Boehme, Sweden- borg, William Law, and other prophetic and mystical thinkers as well as by some of the main underground currents of European mystical thought, he was also a man of his time who responded characteristically and sometimes violently to the main political and social events of his age, notably the French Revolution and the re- le opposition of pairs lai ical pressive pol revolutionai British soc bringing in against tys both soci to be fou Romantic at least 1 ated with on the Blake ne Willi proach stylized incider known ary ac certail in the famor Wor Poet vital exte and The yiel nes the th: of of he o v eeBLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND GOLHAIDCE 875 pressive palic: revolutionary British social life whi bringing in its wake. T ent adopted in its fear of and the far-reaching changes in teadily developing industrialization was ins through his work a strain of provest any and on of all kinds and of for freedom . political, ¢ esiastical, and intellectual. This strain is to be found, though in differing forms, in all the first generation of Romantic poets, at least in their youth, The nch Revolution—or at least the idea of the French Revolution, and the mystique associ- ated with it—was for ef period one of the great stimulating Fores on the English literary imagination, Without its impact neither Blake nor Wordsworth would have been the pacts they were, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) brought a completely new ap- proach to the writing of English poetry. His objections to an over- stylized poetic diction, his attitude to Nature, his choice of simple incidents and humble people as subjects for his poetry-these well- known characteristics of his are but minor aspects of his revolution- ary achievement. Poetry for him was primarily the record of a certain kind of state of mind, and the value of poetry for him lay in the value of the state of mind which the poem recorded. In his famous preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth proceeded to define poetry by first asking “What is a Poet?” A poet for Wordsworth was a man of unusual emotional vitality whose perceptions of his fellow men and of the world of external nature yielded intuitions of the relation of one to the other and of the psychological and moral truths underlying all existence. The process was not instantaneous; the high moments of perception yielded an emotion which on later recollection produced an aware- ness of its human and universal significance, The starting point was the poet's special kind of perception, which differed in degree rather than in kind from that of ordinary men, but of course this difference of degree was of prime importance; the end pare was a record of the implications of the perception. No earlier English poet had held such a view, nor, in spite of Wordsworth’s undoubted influence on later poetry, has any 4 es English poet held it in its purity. Wordsworth is thus unique in the history of English poetry. But if Wordsworth was unique in his view of what constituted poetry, this is not ic say that he was uninfluenced by the philo- sophical, social and political forces of his time. His views were in fact hammered out with reference to the impact on him of the contemporary situation. The French Revolution and the social and political thought which preceded and followed from it; the eight- eenth-century development’ of the psychological views implicit in 0;