Metaphysical Lyrics: Eliot

Source: http://www.uwyo.edu/numimage/eliot_metaphysical_poets.htm

T. S. Eliot, review of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press. London; Milford) in the Times Literary Supplement, October 1921.

[On the "dissociation of sensibility"]

By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly the reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Saintsbury's admirable edition of Caroline poets nor that of the Oxford Book of Englisb Verse. Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was right in including so many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many editions) accessible, as documents in the case of "metaphysical poetry." The phrase has long done duty as a term of abuse or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school (in our own time we should say a "movement"), and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current.

Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman. The "courtly" poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson); Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than the others, has a quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically "metaphysical"; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.

        On a round ball

A workman that hath copies by, can lay

An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,

And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,

        So doth each teare,

        Which thee doth weare,

A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,

Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow

This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,

where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of "bright hair" and of "bone." This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew; not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.

Johnson, who employed the term "metaphysical poets," apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that "the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together." The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry. We need not select for illustration such a line as:

Notre âme est un trois-mâts cherchant son Icarie;

we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The Vanity of Human Wishes):

His fate was destined to a barren strand, 

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; 

He left a name at which the world grew pale, 

To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in any other age), the Exequy of Bishop King, the extended comparison is used with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the figure of a journey:

Stay for me there; I will not faile 

To meet thee in that hollow Vale

And think not much of my delay; 

I am already on the way,

And follow thee with all the speed 

Desire can make, or sorrows breed. 

Each minute is a short degree,

And evry houre a step towards thee. 

At night when I betake to rest,

Next morn I rise nearer my West

Of life, almost by eight houres sail,

Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . . 

But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum 

Beats my approach, tells Thee I come; 

And slow howere my marches be, 

I shall at last sit down by Thee.

(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school:

So when from hence we shall be gone,

    And be no more, nor you, nor I,

    As one another's mystery,

Each shall be both, yet both but one.

This said, in her uplifted face,

    Her eyes, which did that beauty crown,

    Were like two starrs, that having faln down,

Look up again to find their place:

While such a moveless silent peace

    Did seize on their becalmed sense,

    One would have thought some influence

Their ravished spirits did possess.

There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word "becalmed"; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go--a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structureof the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray., And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's Coy Mistress and Crashaw's Saint Teresa; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones:

Love, thou art absolute sole lord

Of life and death.

If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age; and, without prejudicing their case by the adjective "metaphysical," consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes that "their attempts were always analytic"; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity.

It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne. Even if we except also Jonson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne:

    in this one thing, all the discipline

Of manners and of manhood is contained;

A man to join himself with th' Universe

In his main sway, and make in all things fit

One with that All, and go on, round as it;

Not plucking from the whole his wretched part,

And into straits, or into nought revert,

Wishing the complete Universe might be

Subject to such a rag of it as he;

But to consider great Necessity.

We compare this with some modern passage:

No, when the fight begins within himself,

A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,

Satan looks up between his feet--both tug--

He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes

And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!

It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following from Tennyson:

One walked between his wife and child,

With measured footfall firm and mild,

And now and then he gravely smiled.

The prudent partner of his blood

Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,

Wearing the rose of womanhood.

And in their double love secure,

The little maiden walked demure,

Pacing with downward eyelids pure.

These three made unity so sweet,

My frozen heart began to beat,

Remembering its ancient beat.

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress.

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.

After this brief exposition of a theory--too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction--we may ask, what would have been the fate of the "metaphysical" had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d' aujourd-hui.) Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit--we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the "metaphysical poets," similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing.

O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges,

Sacrilèges monomanes!

Emballages, devergondages, douches! O pressoirs 

Des vendanges des grands soirs! 

Layettes aux abois,

Thyrses am fond des bois! 

Transfusions, représailles!

Relevailles, compresses et l'éternal potion,

Angélus! n'en pouvoir plus

De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales! 

The same poet could write also simply:

Elle est bien loin, elle pleure,

Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . .

Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbiére in many of his poems, are nearer to the "school of Donne" than any modern English poet. But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.

Pour 1'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes,

L'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.

Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes!

Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit!  [Baudelaire]

In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century--Racine--and the great master of the nineteenth--Baudelaire--are in some ways more like each other than they are like any one else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the "artificiality" of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to "look into our hearts and write." But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.

May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are "metaphysical" or "witty," "quaint" or "obscure," though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets. On the other hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous person to disagree with) without having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we usually mean today; in his criticism of their versification we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; we must remember that Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cowley and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to break up the classification of Johnson (for there has been none since) and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend--whose Dialogue between a Pilgrim and Time is one of the few regrettable omissions from the excellent anthology of Professor Grierson.

TS Eliot's - Preludes

Source  http://iscenglishguide.blogspot.in/2013/01/analysis-of-ts-eliots-preludes.html

Analysis of TS Eliot's - Preludes

T.S Eliot’s Preludes, is one of his most prominent poems because it presents his view of society as a wasteland at that time. He does this by using concrete objects and images to metaphorically explore the nature of life and society. In this poem, we discover society as corrupt and desolate going through a cycle of meaningless routine where people bare a false hope of a divine source overlooking and protecting humanity.

The title itself holds significant meaning. A prelude in general and particularly in a musical sense characterizes an introduction to something. This is suggesting that the characteristics of society we are provided with in this poem are merely an introduction to what we should be viewing society like. The first stanza introduces the tone of the poem with a description of a typical street from an omniscient point of view. We are first given the impression of a desolate, corrupt and exhausted society through use of a variety of verbs like x is accumulation of verbs is heavily supported through a the use of alliteration of the “s” sound in words like x This technique evokes our sense of smell imagining the picture Eliot is describing. Throughout the first stanza, we are given the suggestion of the presence of people though it is not actually ever stated. This is evident in the mentioning of “smell of steaks…feet.” This effectively communicates to us that this is a fragmented world where nothing is whole. The darkness of the first stanza is concluded with a pause, creating anticipation followed by the line “then the lighting of the lamps…” This line gives us a feeling of hope as the darkness is contrasted with the mentioning of light.

However, the start of the second stanza marks the next morning yet the tone is still identical to that of the first. Eliot stresses out the fact that it is now morning, the possibility of a new start, through the use of personification. But we are soon to discover that nothing has changed. The lines that follow it give us the feeling of a “hangover.” This is depicted by the mentioning of “faint stale smells of beer from the sawdust-trampled streets…” Once again the alliteration of “s” reminds us of the sense of smell of the image we are given. The rest of the stanza continues the motif of emptiness created in the first stanza with the extensive use of “muddy feet…hands.” The last line introduces a change in perspective as we now focus on a more personal view, assuming the point of view of one particular person.

The shift to the second person immediately leads us to become more involved with the situation. The first three lines depict a haunted and restless night using the repetition of “you” and the accumulation x whole stanza constructs a shattered and desolate life, strengthening the picture painted from the earlier stanzas. This is portrayed by the “sordid images of which your soul was constituted…” The woman in this stanza even goes through an epiphany, in which we are shown that she herself makes a discovery of life to be meaningless. This opinion of society is reflected as an opinion shared by the whole society since this particular woman is representative of everyone because she is just one of “a thousand furnished rooms.”

The final part of the poem embraces the climax of the poem’s message and wraps up what is stated. After three stanzas of describing a failing society, this stanza suggests it is an ongoing cycle. The view is now switched to another particular person, a man this time. The alliteration of the “s” is reintroduced here in the first line “soul stretched tight across the skies…” Eliot points out the action of ‘stretching’ to suggest a sense of pain and agony created by restlessness. This idea could also be extended to almost make it seem like the man is vulnerable and fragile since his soul is personificated to be “stretching tight.” The accumulation of “four and five and six o’clock” infers a rhythm and a busy ongoing routine which society goes through, almost like in a mechanical way. This further outlines how society is so meaningless since we are forced to go through the same routine everyday. The “evening newspapers” is a reference to the people who travel in public transport everyday and reading the paper in the evening, a routine many people share.

The final three lines are very dramatic as Eliot reveals that people are constantly “assured of certain certainties” outlining the lack of uniqueness among society and yet again explaining how we are part of a meaningless routine. The sharpness of the following statement “conscience of a blackened world” is extremely heartbreaking. Eliot for the first time in the poem no longer uses a metaphor to bring across his message but instead makes a definite statement about the fate of society and ultimately, the world. This rather harsh statement gives us the total impression that there is no hope left in society and that we all live in a doomed world with nothing to save us, a truth we, as the reader, are forced to discover and accept. This forms a climax in the poem as we share the despair in the words that conclude his opinion.

However, the next stanza directly contrasts this lack of hope. The perspective changes to the first person with a very personal view. His mentioning of “the notion of some infinitely gentle infinitely suffering thing” is a reference to Jesus, a divine source, whom many people of society rely on for hope. Eliot is stating that he is succumbing himself to the hope of a god to save him and society. This denotes that this is exactly what people think of for hope, a divine intervention of some sort to save humanity. But Eliot quickly dismisses this source of hope in the final concluding stanza. Using an extremely harsh and savage tone, Eliot totally disregards the hope of a god saving the world. This yet again brings us back to the tone of a sense of hopelessness, as the world has no one to save it. The use of the world “revolves” tells us that society is still undergoing a continuous process, a reminder of the idea of a meaningless, mechanic routine which society goes through. The very last line “gathering fuel in vacant lots” is a very bleak and terror-filled tone, which the poem concludes on. The ‘vacant lots’ brings us back to the first stanza, a street where the society is corrupt, desolate and fragmented.

Eliot’s Preludes, is a poem that expresses his view of society as a hopeless world where the streets are lonely, shattered and exhausted and its people are mechanical, going through a constant, meaningless routine that lacks vividness and uniqueness. Discoveries are forced upon the reader as we are faced with the harsh reality of society. Divine sources are what people believe in for hope but he dismisses this idea as well, stating that it doesn’t exist and that no one will save this world from its doomed state. And so, with this in mind we truly discover what our world faces and how there is no god to save us.

Blake in the Academe

Source: http://www.criticalflame.org/verse/0712_novak.htm

Blake in the Academe

an essay by David X. Novak

In 1969, Northrop Frye introduced the new edition of his groundbreaking study of the works of the poet William Blake, with some offhand comments about its genesis: "The doctoral thesis is useful for encouraging intensive reading, but of very little use for gaining literary perspective, which takes years to develop and cannot be hurried. The present book never went through the thesis stage, and my interest in Blake had from the beginning been of the extensive kind." He does not go into specifics as to the nature of that involvement, but a later edition does the courtesy of reprinting a 1935 letter from Frye to his fiancée, in which he details something of that encounter — an immersion really, precipitated (to use Ian Singer's words) by a paper on Blake's epic Milton — as anything but casual:

I don't know what dimension I'm working in any more. Nothing has mattered, nothing has even existed, for the past six weeks, but Blake, Blake, Blake: I've spun the man around like a teetotum, I've torn him into tiny shreds and teased and atomized him with pincers, I've stretched my mind over passages as though it were on a rack, I've plunged into darkness and mist, out again into the clear light — where I started from in the first place — rushed up blind alleys of comparison and sources, broken down completely from sheer inertia, worked all night on a paragraph no better in the morning. . . But what I have done is a masterpiece. . . the best, clearest and most accurate exposition of Blake's thought yet written. If it's no good I'm no good. There isn't a sentence, and there won't be a sentence, in the whole work that hasn't gone through purgatory.

It is the kind of involvement one might expect Blake to elicit, and the eventual book,Fearful Symmetry (which was published in 1947), was instantly recognized as something of a classic in its field.

Frye's book represents the culmination of a style of writing about literature that, reaching its apex, would gradually be superseded by other modes: "Academic literary criticism has. . . become hung up on 'textuality': intertextuality, paratextuality, subtextuality, contextuality — count the ways", writes John Sutherland in Literary Review: "'Text' is a noumenon" which "does not exist materially, and as such "can be materialized in an infinite variety of ways." "The whole [academic] profession is following the pipes of Pan" in what might be considered its wholesale subscription to Jacques Derrida's motto: "Il n'ya pas de hors-texte ('there is nothing outside the text')."

This of course dovetails neatly with the academic need of teaching to students who, by virtue of their youth (in the main), have not had the time to gain the requisite "literary perspective". One easily stumbles upon sentences like, "In the transition from the era of Classicism into the era of Romanticism there was a time in English literature when there were artists who showed the first signs of incoming time in their writings marked with romantic attitude towards the world, respect for individualism and awakening of the idea of Rousseau's 'natural man'." This is taken from a work titled William Blake, Dichotomy of Existence in Songs of Experience vs [sic] Songs of Experience by Bojana Stretenovic, which was done "for the purpose of obtaining a Master's degree in English literature" according to the publisher's description at Amazon.com. I take it to be representative.

It is hard, when one is struggling to achieve a literary (or even a historical) perspective, to realize that the classifying names by which we, in hindsight, recognize our forbears, can only perhaps be loosely applied to them, and that the transition from one "era" to another usually does not occur so cleanly or abruptly, as though it were the changing from a Republican administration to a Democratic one. A poet like Blake, peripheral to the power bases of society, witnessed power relations shifting, such as that between wages and labor, and responded accordingly.

The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (From Blake to Byron) summarizes the transition from the weirdly named Augustan era to the Romantic period by noting new "conditions which created the demand for writers of a higher standard of performance than the Grub Street hack of Pope's day." This is Edgell Rickword, acknowledging an "increase in the literate and relatively well-to-do sections of the population" which transformed the economics of publishing entirely. Moreover, "none of [the new breed of] writers was intimately associated with those holding political power, none had moved so close to the control-room of the State as had Swift and Prior, Milton, Marvell, or Donne."

He is reporting a general trend, not easy to simplify, vaguely derived from the insertion of machines into industry, which disrupted "the social order [which] had been fixed most sharply in England in the subservience of the villager to the landed gentleman", to quote Joseph Bronowski from the introduction to his book on Blake, William Blake and the Age of Revolution. He titles that first chapter, "A Turbulent Age."

It is too much to try to encompass the whole period into a few glib sentences, but I cannot refrain from mentioning that I've never liked the appellation of "Romantic" to describe the broad spectrum of individuals it envelops. A swath of the English population — including Blake among other notables — greeted the coming of the French Revolution with romantic idealism, only to be crushed when it was betrayed. That is how I understand the term. Blake was not crushed — but that was perhaps owed to the strength of his vision: his wife said "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise", and Paradise for Blake meant the imagination.

He said, "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's". Keeping to the realm of "textuality," it might be suggested that Blake was deliberately raising a fist at the rationalism of John Locke, positing instead "his own system of values such as creative power, imagination, intuition, spiritual development all united in 'poetic genius'" (Stretenovic) or even a "Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision" to quote a recent popular title. However, Blake's next sentence is telling: "I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."

It would be apropos to say "Blake opposes the exploitative industrial system he sees around him in London." In Rickover's summary of the social milieu, he describes recently introduced "mechanical contrivances" such as James Watt's improved steam engine: "Although steam-power is the most spectacular of the innovations of the time, it was not the effective instrument of the great change, though these engines' clangour and belching of smoke and flame made them appropriate symbols of a baleful modernity." One such machine "operated the Albion Flour Mills in Southwark" (before it burned down) and "was certainly familiar to Blake. The snorting, ear-shattering monster must have been impressive in action, and may have helped to condition the [Romantic] poets' attitude to the new technology."

Sven Birkerts, in the wake of 9/11, suggested "[p]oetry does not. . . defeat trauma". Rather, it "is the reverse of the terrorist act, its antithesis" creating "something to hold against horror. . .that is equally persistent." In such a way poetry offers a means to "[help] restore the delicate inner balance we call sanity." The irony there is that it is hard to find a poet labeled "insane" by his peers more frequently than Blake, even when meant as a backhanded compliment from a discerning reader like Wordsworth: "the insanity of this man interests me more than the sanity of Byron and Moore." (I take my quote from E. de Selincourt, though I believe it to be more meaningful than precise: the Blake Records have it slightly different.)

The Industrial Revolution was beginning in Europe. "Only in England had there been, by 1873, any substantial progress towards the large-scale introduction of labour-saving machinery," wrote George Rudé in his history, Revolutionary Europe. "In England alone a distinct class of industrial entrepreneurs was arising in the wake of the technical innovations introduced by the Darbys, Hargreaves, Cort, Arkwright and Watt. . . . Its leaders, new men sprung from farming and commercial stock, were rapidly amassing fortunes and finding a place in society." This was the class Blake was born into.

Though his father, a hosier, would not have been as successful as some, his shop commanded prime Golden Square real estate (a corner with double frontage) at 28 Broad Sreet. The family lived upstairs, and it was here when he was age four Blake famously saw God peek through the window.

Thanks to biographical work found in books such as The Stranger in Paradise, by G.E. Bentley, Jr., compiler of the Blake Records, we know quite a lot about Blake's life. For example, the poverty and isolation for which Blake is renowned definitely did not obtain at least during the first half of his life. Not disposed toward the family trade, Blake, with the indulgence of his father (the word is Bentley's and is the right word), was able to attend Pars Drawing School, from the age of ten, for four years. It was his wish, and evidently the family could afford both the tuition and the sacrifice of a boy's labor for that duration. It was a blessing for the young and would-be artist, for it gained him entry to some of the best collections in private hands, usually only accessible with presentation of "a suitable douceur."

At age fifteen, he apprenticed to an engraver, which would become his life's profession. The contract agreement of his seven-year indenture deserves reprinting. "During that term", runs the standard legalistic jargon,

the said Apprentice his said Master faithfully shall serve, his Secrets keep, his lawful Commandments every where gladly do. . .. He shall not waste the Goods of his said Master, nor lend them unlawfully to any. He shall not commit Fornication, nor contract Matrimony within the said Term. He shall not play at Cards, Dice, Tables, or any other unlawful Games, whereby his said Master may have any loss. With his own Goods or others, during the Said Term, without License of his said Master he shall neither buy nor sell. He shall not haunt Taverns, or Play-Houses, nor absent himself from this said Master's Service Day nor Night unlawfully. . .. And the said Master. . . his said Apprentice in the same Art and Mystery which he useth, by the best Means that he can, shall teach and instruct, or cause to be taught and instructed, finding unto his said Apprentice, Meat, Drink, Apparel, Lodging, and all other Necessaries, according to the Custom of London, during the said Term.

A consideration of fifty guineas was paid by Blake's father (I have followed Bentley's ellipses throughout).

Upon successful completion of his indenture, Blake moved home, and then became a student at the Royal Academy, "the obvious step for any Londoner aspiring to be an artist." Blake was not without his admirers, but the requisite funds for a "finishing" trip to Rome ("the greatest ambition of every serious European artist") lay beyond his means, and so, after a time, he set up shop, and he married.

The origins of Blake's literary art remain a mystery. He would say that it was inspired. While we know so much about his life, the interior details of Blake's intellectual development are woefully lacking. Where did he get his books? Possibly at his Master's when he was an Apprentice. Perhaps his mother encouraged his early reading of poetry. We do not know, and speculation is fruitless. Blake became a highly educated man, and was probably self-taught, but more than that we cannot say. His antipathy toward formalized education is well known:

Thank God I never was sent to School

To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[.]

A Blake follower wrote after his death that "his theories wanted solidity". In Matthew Arnold's phrase, "The less a literature has felt the influence of a supposed centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste, the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality." T.S. Eliot takes it further: "We have the same respect for Blake's philosophy. . . that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house. . .. What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own". In other words, compelled to create his own system, the ad hoc resultant conurbation precluded Blake from reaching the consistency and cohesion of Dante's Commedia.

Yet, to return to Frye, the poems "make a vivid impact on the reader at once," indisputably. Blake has "the peculiar quality of a definitive poet [in] that he always seems to have a special relevance to the preoccupations of one's own age, whatever they may be." Especially in his lyrics, "Blake makes an immense appeal to a great variety of people outside the academic profession," as Frye puts it.

In his influential essay "An Introduction to William Blake", Alfred Kazin suggests some reasons as to why. "His theme is always the defense of the integral human personality," Kazin writes. "Blake's fight is against secrecy, unnatural restraint, the fear of life — the distortions of the personality that follow from deception and resignation to it." What themes could be more universal, or have more resonance — not just with the downtrodden public, but with "members of the elite" as we today would call such eminent personages as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Walter Savage Landor, Edward FitzGerald, to name a few of the better-known poetic voices who immediately recognized Blake's talent.

The assault against integrity — spurred on by the Industrial Revolution which was only just beginning to make itself felt — seems akin to ours today (brought on by the Information Revolution, I suppose) in its ferocity. Kazin writes:

Blake's need of certainty, whatever its personal roots, is also one of the great tragedies of modern capitalist society; particularly of that loss of personal status that was the immediate fate of millions in the industrial England of the "dark satanic mills." Blake was only one of many Englishmen who felt himself being slowly ground to death, in a world of such brutal exploitation amid such inhuman ugliness, that the fires of the new industrial furnaces and the cries of the child laborers are always in his work. His poems and designs are meant to afford us spiritual vision; a vision beyond the factory system, the hideous new cities, the degradation of children for the sake of profit, the petty crimes for which children could still be hanged.

Not just children, I might add. The economics surrounding Blake — and he was no Dickens waif — must have made an impression. An economic tract — something of a national survey but done in a Q&A format — was published in 1757, the year of Blake's birth, and offers a glimpse into that world. Its author, Josiah Tucker, was "[a]n acute observer", and my Pelican Guide quotes him from his Instructions for Travellers: "Few countries are equal, perhaps none excel, the English in the Numbers and Contrivances of their Machines to abridge Labour. . ." His argument runs deeper than that, however. After a passage in which he makes the case — convincingly, I might add — that this influx of labor-abridging machines will increase overall consumption (and thereby employment) by putting low-cost goods into the hands of many more consumers, Tucker embarks on a marvelous discourse to explain, ideally, how well the system might function. I quote at length, beyond what is strictly necessary, because of the delicious insight it affords into economic policy at the time of Blake's birth:

Q. Is that Labour, which is still to be performed by the human Kind, so judiciously divided, that Men, Women and Children have their respective Shares in Proportion to their Strength, Sex, and Abilities? And is every Branch so contrived, that there is no Waste of Time, or unnecessary Expence of Strength or Labour? Moreover, what good Consequences attend these Circumstances in such Parts of the Kingdom, where they are observed, and what bad ones in other Parts, where they are not?

A. In many Provinces of the Kingdom, particularly, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and certain Districts of Yorkshire, with the Town of Manchester, Norwich, and some others, the Labour, for the most Part, is very properly proportioned, and great Judgment appears in the Methods and Contrivances for bringing the several Parts of the Manufacture so within the Reach of each other, that no Time should be wasted in passing the Goods to be manufactured from Hand to Hand, and that no unnecessary Strength should be employed. For instance of both Kinds, take one among a Thousand at Birmingham, viz. When a Man stamps a metal Button by means of an Engine, a Child stands by him to place the Button in readiness to receive the Stamp, and to remove it when received, and then to place another. By these means the Operator can stamp at least double the Number, which he could otherwise have done, had he been obliged to have stopped each Time to have shifted the Buttons: And as his Gettings may be from 14d. to 18d. and the Child's from a Penny to 2d. per Day for doing the same Quantity of Work, which must have required double the Sum, had the Man alone been employed; this single Circumstance saves above 80, or near 100 per Cent. At the same Time that it trains up Children to an Habit of Industry, almost as soon as they can speak. And hence it is, that the Bijoux d' Angleterre, or the Birmingham Toys, are rendered so exceedingly cheap as to astonish all Europe; and that the Roman Catholic Countries are supplied with such vast Quantities of Crucifixes, Agnus Dei's, &c. from England. A Dozen of these Crucifixes, as I am informed, being to be sold, in the wholesale Way, for 7-1/2d. — But the good Effects of this proportioning of Labour to different Strengths and Sexes, is still more extensive than it at first appears. For in Birmingham the Numbers of poor Women on the Pay Bill, compared to those of poor Men, are hardly as three to two; whereas in Bristol, where no such good Politics obtain, the Numbers are upwards of four to one; and in many Parts of London, it is still much worse: So great is the Difference, and such the Expensiveness and heavy Burdens of a wrong Conduct even in this Respect: not to mention, that Prostitution and Debauchery seem to be an unavoidable Consequence in the female Sex of Poverty and Idleness, when they are young, and when they grow old, what Refuge can they have, if they do not soon rot with their Diseases, but the Parish Pay?

Further on he asks, "What Politics are established by the Constitution to prevent the monopolizing of landed Property into a few Hands?" When one "Master of the whole Manufacture from first to last. . . employs perhaps a thousand Persons under him. . ."

will they not also sometimes look upon him as their Tyrant? And as great Numbers of them work together in the same Shop, will they not have it the more in their Power to vitiate and corrupt each other, to cabal and associate against their Masters, and to break out into Mobs and Riots upon every little occasion?

After some rigamarole, the answer comes down to something like, "the Tenant who pays his Rent, has as little to fear from his Landlord, as from any other person", which sounds curiously like Blake's line from "The Chimney Sweeper": "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm."

Working conditions were no picnic. Yet Frye discounts "portrayal[s] of Blake as a mystical snail who retreated from the hard world of reality into the refuge of his own mind, and evolved his beautifully obscure visions there in contemplative loneliness". Circumscribed by circumstance, writes Kazin, "his ability to hit back ended in his notebook."

This is not entirely true. The historical record belies Kazin's assertion — just look up the incident when Blake ejected the dragoon from his garden. He more than capable of interfering actively when he witnessed an injustice. Frederick Tatham, an early biographer, reports "an anecdote showing his courage" in which Blake intervenes upon seeing a boy maltreated: "Blakes blood boiled & his indignation surpassed his forebearance, he sallied forth & demanded in no very quiescent terms that the Boy should be loosed. . ." and so forth; an anecdote which is matched by others.

What Blake was not, however, was foolhardy: "To defend the Bible in this year 1798 would cost a man his life" he scribbled, but did not publish. At question were "perversions of Christ's words & acts" by those in authority — but then Blake was raised "in the Dissenting tradition of private devotion and private Bible reading rather than public catechism and public worshippers" whose adherents "believed that all truth lies in the Bible and that the proper interpreter of that truth is the individual conscience, not the priest or the church" (Bentley). Regarding one such occasion, Bronowski points out: "Neither Wordsworth nor Blake printed their [privately written] attacks, and both remained free all their lives. Wakefield printed his, and was imprisoned for it from 1799 to 1801."

Though he later fell away from it — and how! — Blake and his wife signed a charter in 1789 affirming, "We whose names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, believing that the Doctrines contained therein are genuine Truths, revealed from Heaven, and that the New Jerusalem Church ought to be established, distinct and separate from the Old Church", which demonstrates, incidentally, that the lines "Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land" were more than a metaphor idiosyncratic to Blake.

In 1795 Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the work which provides most of us our introduction to his poetry. Songs of Innocence had been published five years earlier as a stand-alone work, but Songs of Experience (including a few poems shifted from Innocence) never existed independently. One of the better-known lyrics is "The Garden of Love":

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was build 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 tomb-stones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars, my joys and desires.

The theme is a common one in Blake. In "The Little Vagabond" he contrasted the "cold" church with the "Ale-house [which] is healthy & pleasant & warm". In "The School-Boy" he makes explicit, in contrast to the lovely "summer morn / When the birds sing on every tree", that "to go to school on a summer morn, / O! it drives all joy away."

Here we get into territory of Blake's philosophy. As Robert Gleckner writes (in "Point of View and Context in Blake's Songs"), "Blake created a system in which innocence and experience are vital parts" — though this "basic symbology" draws interpretation manifold in variety. "Innocence is belief and experience is doubt", Kazin tells us. Frye says, "The fallen world is the world of the Songs of Experience: the unfallen world is the world of the Songs of Innocence." For Bronowski, "the Songs of Experience are, at bottom, songs of indignation", whereas theSongs of Experience reflect "that happy child mood which the French Revolution seemed to fulfill" before the British government entered the fray in opposition. Gleckner distinguishes between the piper and the bard who host (or introduce) their respective sections: "for the piper the past can only be the primal unity, for the present is innocence and the immediate future is experience; for the Bard the past is innocence, the present experience, and the future a higher innocence."

This last strikes to the core of what Blake is attempting: reconciliation, if you will, of "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." He was not, as Keats, "ambitious of doing the world some good", so much as demarcating the good, as Frye indicates:

In reading about child labor and slavery in Blake's time (or their equivalents in our time) we hardly know which is more detestable: the cruelty involved or the complacency with which that cruelty was rationalized in pamphlets, Parliamentary debates, newspapers, and sermons. Blake was struck with this too, and never failed to see the rationalizing of evil as an essential part of the evil itself. . . .

The stultifying classroom may have been a crime against the childish spirit yearning to breathe free in the summertime; but how much more so the button factory, wherein one earned (if we believe Josiah Tucker) perhaps a tenth of the adult machinist for the privilege of having inculcated "the Habit of Industry". The economics of it must have seemed astounding; though never so staggering as the even wider disparities we know about today, in America — especially taking the perspective of global commerce. And yet, Blake's words ring no less true now: "Pity would be no more / If we did not make somebody Poor."

If expedience and high profit justified the employment of young boys (and sometimes girls) as low-wage factory drudges, necessity did the same for their use as chimney sweepers. Mark Edmundson explains: "the need for the sweeps was strong. Chimney fires could beget larger blazes that would destroy blocks and blocks of wooden houses." Blake biographer Peter Ackroyd likewise write, "The average size of these vents was something like seven inches square, and the small child was prodded or pushed into the even smaller spaces within; sometimes they were encouraged with poles, or pricked with pins, or scorched with fire to make them climb with more enthusiasm." Martin K. Nurmi writes, "Blake does not really describe the living and working conditions of the sweeps; he presupposes a knowledge of them." The poem succeeds because of meticulous understatement:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!' "

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

From the ritualistic head shearing to the "coffins of black", Blake details the conditions of degradation inherent to the profession. In our minds the lines might evoke imagery from Auschwitz — which in the individual "worst case scenario" would probably not be far from wrong. Yet the underpinning of the system depended on an aversion, or a looking away from, those basic conditions on the part of a public that knew, nevertheless, all too well what those were.

In Songs of Experience, Blake's corresponding poem (also titled "The Chimney Sweeper") takes a different tack: he notes the underpinning rationale, or malign rationalization, and rubs people's faces in it:

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying " 'weep! 'weep!" in notes of woe!

"Where are thy father and mother? say?" — 

"They are both gone up to the church to pray.

"Because I was happy upon the heath,

And smiled among the winter's snow,

They clothed me in the clothes of death,

And taught me to sing the notes of woe.

"And because I am happy and dance and sing,

They think they have done me no injury,

And are gone to praise God and his Priest and King,

Who make up a heaven of our misery."

The poem closes not with a pious platitude, but with an acute irony: the case against religious hypocrisy could not be plainer. "Both poems," writes Robert Pinsky, "dramatize the way religion, government, and custom collaborate in social arrangements that impose cruel treatment on some people while enhancing the lives of others."

Blake considered "the Eye of Imagination [to be] the Real Man." This being the case, Blake — a businessman himself, by force of circumstance predominantly — yet recognized, reportedly, "Were I to love money, I should lose all power of original thought". Moreover, he was not shy about intoning: "Christianity is Art & not Money. Money is its Curse." That may account for Blake's estrangement from both philosophical creeds and the New Church, or, as Frye puts it, "Blake's conception of art is not only central in his thinking, but distinctive of him as a thinker, and though he reminds us frequently of [George] Berkeley or Swedenborg, he was what neither Berkeley nor Swedenborg was, a practicing artist."

In a phrase which enraged T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold defined one aspect of the functionality of poetry: "Poetry is, at bottom, a criticism of life." Eliot rejoined, "At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom" in a rant that continued several more sentences over a seemingly innocuous figure of speech. Sometime Blake scholar Mark Edmundson, well-known for his attacks against college students (in the main) and the university system (overall), must accept enough of Arnold's definition to enable him to render them this stinging judgement: "What they will not generally do. . . is indict the current system. They won't talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery." This is strong stuff, if remarkably selective in his singling out "the unemployed."

Eliot also finds fault with Arnold's subsequent assertion — not original to Arnold but extrapolated directly from Epictetus — "that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life." To this, Eliot storms: "Not a happy way of putting it, as if ideas were a lotion for the inflamed skin of suffering humanity." Yet both by Arnold's measurement and by general consensus, I think there can be no doubt that Blake qualifies as a "great poet," one of the greatest in the English tradition — if only of the "second tier" as Eliot would have it ("Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius").

That time has not vitiated the trenchancy of Blake's moral vision is amply attested by references in contemporary media reports "exposing" labor practices at factories making goods for the American market, such as this last year from China Daily (August 19, 2011): "Workers toil in the heat and noise inside the grim workshop that conjures up images of Dickensian conditions and William Blake's 'dark, satanic mills'". Eliot's grousing aside, Blake conjures in the human conscience a righteous indignation against inhumane labor practices where they are found, much as Oscar Wilde said that fogs and sunsets exist "because poets and painters have taught [people to see] the mysterious loveliness of such effects." Frye finds an affinity in Blake's Vision of the Last Judgment with George Berkeley's phrase esse est percipi ("to be is to perceive"), citing this passage: "Mental Things alone are Real; what is call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture." This also forms the basis of Blake's Wordsworthian criticism: "Wordsworth must know that what he Writes Valuable is Not to be found in Nature."

The moral sense in Blake, almost a stridency, reaches out across the generations to shape our image of the past; however less certain its application to ourselves. David V. Erdman writes, "In an age when Luxury was still a sin and every fat man was a living comment on the inequitable distribution of a meager food supply, Blake shared the popular belief that the drone or waster was the wolf at the door." How popular this actually was then, it is hard to gauge. I suppose it is possible for our peers abroad to have a better sense of America's "luxury" and spendthrift profligacy than we have ourselves — though such a connection might not be drawn in some "self-enclosed" critical system.

Blake was not, however, a poet of social reform. While he may have signed petitions — he opposed slavery as well — his poems operated on another level. His work educated consciousness, in the Wildean sense. The real question to be asked is, why did so many of his peers not appear to take notice? The answers are already obvious from contemporary analogy: some are "being slowly ground to death, in a world of. . . brutal exploitation" and others occupy themselves climbing the flues of intellectual systems designed "to debunk wordviews" that they may find untenable. In this sense, as Eliot said, Blake was an artist of exceptional honesty.

All language is reducible to symbol. But to say that, and nothing more, is not saying much. The symbolism of Blake's poems may be extrapolated — stretched and teased and atomized (to echo Frye's letter to his fiancée) — for the betterment of understanding. Yet that is not all. "No symbol in Blake is single and fixed", writes Bronowski. Moreover, the chimney sweeper in Blake's poems, was not, and cannot ever be, merely a symbol, any more than a subsistence worker in Wenzhou, China's "Button City" wherein "almost two-thirds of all the buttons in the world are made", can be a symbol. The chimney sweeper was a real person.

In a sense, Blake had it wrong. There is no need for students in "School / To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool". When it comes to justifying the policies of empire, our students may be pinpricked, poled, or even scorched (by verbal admonition) to get them to climb. What holds true for university students increasingly applies to grammar school students as well. Tailored to become a cog in the machine, children are deprived of their opportunity to bask in the "summer morn/When the birds sing on every tree". They are even sold into an economic system of drudgery by their very parents (with the best of intentions). In a process which he cited as "the pathetic surrender of babes" (the phrase is from sociologist Jules Henry), psychiatrist R.D. Laing explained: "Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that." Psychology had not yet been invented in Blake's day; but it is hard to see that he would have disagreed with that.