Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  41. Four Zoas 35:11–15, E325.

  CHAPTER 5: REVOLUTION

  1. Acts 17:6; Revelation 14:6.

  2. E. P. Thompson wrote the classic Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963); his Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) was published shortly after his death. Jon Mee gives a valuable review of what we know and don’t know about Blake and the radical underground: Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).

  3. Annotations to Bishop Watson, E617; Vision of the Last Judgment, E560, quoting Numbers 11:19. Richard Brothers’s bizarre career is described by Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 260–93.

  4. Robert N. Essick gives an authoritative account of the several states of this print: William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 70–74.

  5. Gilchrist, 33; Albion Rose inscription, E671; There Is No Natural Religion [b], E2.

  6. Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 41; Areopagitica in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 557–58.

  7. On “invenit” and “sculpsit,” see Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 70, and Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 110.

  8. The historical context is reviewed by David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 7–11; Burke is quoted from the 1796 Letter to a Noble Lord.

  9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 153; the second comment is in Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 55. Tatham, Blake Records, 673.

  10. See Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 182–83, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 56–60.

  11. See Joseph Viscomi, “The Lessons of Swedenborg; or, The Origin of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 182–84.

  12. Marriage 3, E34.

  13. Gilchrist, 90.

  14. Michael Phillips reproduces an enlargement of these two figures in his edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 88.

  15. My comments are indebted to Blake Trust, 3:131.

  16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1969), 194–95; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Nelson F. Adkins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 77, 80; Marriage 7, E35.

  17. Jerusalem 45:9–12, E194.

  18. Marriage 7–10, E35–38. The difference between Blake’s proverbs and traditional ones is explored by John Villalobos, “William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell and the Tradition of Wisdom Literature,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990), 246–59, and by Mike Goode, “Blakespotting,” PMLA 121 (2006), 769–86.

  19. See Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy,” Print Quarterly 21 (2004), 29.

  20. For helpful interpretations, see Illuminated Blake, 139; Blake Trust, 4:50–52; and Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 135. I explore affinities between Prometheus and the crucified Christ in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 107–11.

  21. Europe 5.6, E62; Jerusalem 30.57, E177; Tiriel 8.11, E285.

  22. America 2.1–7, E52; Song of Solomon 3:4.

  23. America 8.13–14, E54; on sales of America, see Andrew Lincoln, “From America to The Four Zoas,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210, and David Worrall, “Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 195.

  24. America 14.10–19; see Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 57n. An important theme in Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) is Blake’s emphasis on revolutionary goals far more radical than the American leaders envisioned.

  25. Marriage 10, E37; Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 45.

  26. America 6.1–15; Matthew 24:41, 27:66; John 20:17; Ezekiel 37:7–10.

  27. Makdisi, Blake and the Impossible History, 182–83, makes the point about activity and stasis. Some possible references for the small creatures are given in Illuminated Blake, 144, and in Blake Trust, 4:58.

  28. W. M. Rossetti, appendix to Gilchrist, 423; The French Revolution 10.189, E294; Song of Los 6.6, E68; King Lear 3.2.4; Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 59.

  29. America 8.1–6, E54.

  30. Essick makes this point: Blake, Printmaker, 144.

  31. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 207–35; Milton O. Percival, William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 31. Frye’s “Orc cycle” is trenchantly critiqued by Christopher Z. Hobson, The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 48 ff.

  32. I originally proposed this distinction between iconic and dynamic symbols in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, 79 ff.

  33. Illuminated Blake, 157; Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 79.

  34. Europe 10.16–23, E63.

  35. The Herculaneum image is mentioned by Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), 51.

  36. America 7.3–5, E53, and 6.15, E53.

  37. James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), xvi.

  38. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 29; Europe 9.8, E63. W. J. T. Mitchell suggests the visual pun on “blasts”: “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 154.

  39. America 2.18–21, E52; the “vales of Kent” refers to the Old Kent Road in London, not to the county of that name. When Blake printed America again in 1807 he masked these lines so they did not appear, but they show up once more in the final copy of 1821. A Welsh bard refusing to play his harp for the conqueror is the subject of a then-famous poem by Thomas Gray, The Bard, which Blake would later illustrate.

  40. Royal proclamation and Stationers’ Company resolution quoted by Michael Phillips, “Blake and the Terror, 1792–93,” Library, 6th ser., no. 16 (December 1994), 266, 272; see also Stephen C. Behrendt, “History When Time Stops: Blake’s America, Europe, and The Song of Los,” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992), 379–97.

  41. Notebook entry, E694; annotations to Watson, E611.

  42. Public Address, E580.

  43. Jacob Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York: Harper, 1965), 3.

  44. Marriage 3, E34.

  CHAPTER 6: ATOMS AND VISIONARY INSIGHT

  1. E477–78.

  2. Blake Records, 703.

  3. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London: Routledge, 1950), 236–37.

  4. Annotations to Lavater, E595.

  5. Alexander Pope, Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey; William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), 3.61–63.

  6.
Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, 1952), 400; the quotation about “sands on the shore” comes from Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 132.

  7. Auguries of Innocence, E490; Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum; or, An Exposition of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, in the 1654 translation of John Sparrow, vol. 1 (London, 1965), 4; Blake Records, 404, 343; Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking, line 9.

  8. Annotations to Lavater, E592; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 147; Marriage 7, E36; Milton 24.72–73, E121.

  9. On a source in Michelangelo, see Jenijoy La Belle, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Frescoes and Blake’s 1795 Color-Printed Drawings,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Summer 1980), 81.

  10. Blake Records, 500.

  11. Blake Records (Frederick Tatham), 48; on Blake’s printing technique, see Martin Myrone, The Blake Book (London: Tate, 2007), 81.

  12. Mark Crosby, “‘The Sculptor Silent Stands before His Forming Image’: Blake and Contemporary Sculpture,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127.

  CHAPTER 7: “THE GATE IS OPEN”

  1. Blake to George Cumberland, Sept. 1, 1800, Blake Records, 97; printed with a facsimile by Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, “‘Dear Generous Cumberland’: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Summer 1998), 4–13.

  2. Blake to William Hayley, Dec. 18, 1804, E759; see Robert W. Rix, “Healing the Spirit: William Blake and Magnetic Religion,” Romanticism on the Net 25 (February 2002), http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/006011ar.

  3. Blake to Thomas Butts, Sept. 23, 1800, E711; Butts to Blake, undated, Blake Records, 101.

  4. Blake to Butts, Oct. 2, 1800, E712–13; W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), 61. See also Arnold M. Ludwig, “Altered States of Consciousness,” General Psychiatry 15 (1966), 25–34.

  5. Vision of the Last Judgment, E565–66; Isaiah 6:3; Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy, 2.1.

  6. Gilchrist, 159, 196.

  7. E504, 506; Henry IV, Part I 3.2.25.

  8. Milton 41.8, E142; Paul Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 19.

  9. Blake to Cumberland, July 2, 1800, E706–7.

  10. Milton 4.26, E98.

  11. Blake to Butts, Aug. 16, 1803, E733; Matthew 25:29–30.

  12. To H——, E506; Fair Elenor, line 68, in Poetical Sketches, E412. I have argued for the schizoid interpretation in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 311–13; Robert N. Essick likewise suggests “a mild form of schizophrenia” in “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 257.

  13. Hayley to Lady Hesketh, Aug. 3, 1805, Blake Records, 205–6.

  14. Annotations to Spurzheim, E663; R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Vintage, 1976), 67.

  15. Blake to Butts, Jan. 10, 1803, E724.

  16. Blake to Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804, E756; see Morton D. Paley, “The Truchsessian Gallery Revisited,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 265–77.

  17. Michelangelo quoted by James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 108.

  CHAPTER 8: UNDERSTANDING BLAKE’S MYTH

  1. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” and “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 7:109, 17:143; Jerusalem 39.41–42, E187.

  2. Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 196; William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), 3.114, 5.268–70, quoted by Joseph A. Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 235–36.

  3. Jerusalem 10.20–21, 11.5, E153–54. Nelson Hilton makes the point about “striving with” in “Blakean Zen,” Studies in Romanticism 24 (1985), 183.

  4. Jerusalem 5.16–22, E147.

  5. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E722; Milton 30.1–3, 8–14, E129.

  6. Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1. Morris Eaves has said, “It takes the massive intellectual pressure of a Northrop Frye to bind Blake’s formidable difficulties into an illusion of total coherence, which inevitably falls into contradictions, fragments, and dead ends as soon as the pressure lets up”: “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995), 415–17.

  7. Jerusalem 77, E231; Morris Eaves, quoted by Kari Kraus, “‘Once Only Imagined’: An Interview with Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002), 161; Andrew Lincoln, “From America to The Four Zoas,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210.

  8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to H. F. Cary, Feb. 6, 1818, and to Charles Augustus Tulk; both in Blake Records, 336. Some commentators assume that “anacalyptic” is simply a synonym for “apocalyptic,” but that seems wrong. I proposed my interpretation of this word in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 74, and Nicholas M. Williams has recently concurred in the introduction to his collection Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1.

  9. Vincent A. De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 61; B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1980), 85–86; Nelson Hilton, “Literal / Tiriel / Material,” in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 99.

  10. Alcuin, Commentariorum in Apocalypsim, quoted by Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 7.

  11. Jerusalem 3, E145–46; Four Zoas 34.77, E324; Arthur Golding, Metamorphoses 15.984–95; Four Zoas 3.1–3, E300.

  12. Four Zoas 61.24–31, E341–42; David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 92. (I have altered his patterning slightly.)

  13. Milton 1, E95–96; Numbers 11:29.

  14. Isaiah 52:7.

  15. 2 Kings 2:11; Vision of the Last Judgment, E560. On active response, see Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Something in My Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 85. My comments are indebted as well to Nancy M. Goslee, “‘In Englands Green & Pleasant Land’: The Building of Vision in Blake’s Stanzas from ‘Milton,’” Studies in Romanticism 13 (1974), 105–25.

  16. Song of the New Model Army, quoted by A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958), 59; Jerusalem 34.14–15, E180.

  17. Jerusalem 65.12–24, E216; the French visitor to the Carron ironworks in Scotland in 1784 is quoted by Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 136–37.

  18. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 226.

  19. See Michael Ferber, “Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as a Hymn,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001), 82–94. Ferber offers a detailed analysis of how Parry’s score brings out the force of Blake’s words. David Cameron is quoted by Susan Matthews, “‘And Did Those Fee
t’? Blake and the Role of the Artist in Post-War Britain,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 161.

  20. Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009), 78.

  21. Blake Records, 310; Four Zoas 122.16–20, E391.

  22. Jerusalem 27.1–36, E171–72; Gilchrist, 7; details from David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 288–90, 472–75, and Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 75. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 32–33, traces a typical route that Blake might have followed.

  23. Details from S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (reprint ed., Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979; orig. publ. Brown University Press, 1965), 246, and Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 165. On executions, see Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975).

  24. Milton 25.48–55, E122.

  25. Michael Phillips, “No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,” British Art Journal 5 (2004), 13–21.

  26. Four Zoas 95.26–28, E360–61; details from David V. Erdman, “Lambeth and Bethlehem in Blake’s Jerusalem,” Modern Philology 48 (1951), 184–92.

  27. Jerusalem 24.25, 29–35, E169; Zechariah 11:13; Jerusalem 52, E201; Four Zoas 109.5–6, E378.

  CHAPTER 9: THE ZOAS AND OURSELVES

  1. Revelation 4:6.