The Early years of the Progressives

Source: http://www.dawn.com/news/1051994

The Early Years of the Progressives

By Kamran Asdar Ali

Published Oct 27, 2013 07:06am

From February 28 to March 6 of 1948, 632 delegates assembled in Calcutta for the second congress of the Communist Party of India (CPI). The most important task performed during the meetings was the shift toward a more radical political line by the party that followed a critique of the reformist politics of its leadership during most of the 1940s.

The delegates also took some time to divide the party into two constitutive parts: the CPI would confine its working to the boundaries of the Indian Union while the post-August 1947 separated territories of Pakistan would be free to form a different communist party.

The CPI’s radical position followed the Soviet post-Second-World-War political line that was articulated forcefully by Andrei Zhdanov, one of the three secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in his speech at the inaugural Cominform Conference in Poland in September of 1947. As the earlier alliance of the three superpowers — the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union — on the basis of defeating fascism was no longer viable in the changed political climate, the Soviet Union argued for a mass resistance against the Anglo-American line of imperialist expansion. In India, this was translated by B.T. Ranadive (the new CPI secretary general) and his group as a call for more radical confrontational politics of struggle and political strikes, a general uprising which had little to do with the level of preparedness of the public as well as the rank and file of the party itself. Some of this confrontational politics was accepted by the newly formed Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) as well.

It is evident to most who know the history of the period that culture and intellectual creativity was of immense importance to the CPP and to its new secretary general, Sajjad Zaheer. Zaheer, an accomplished short-story writer and literary critic, did not produce much literary work during these early years in Pakistan, yet he was constantly writing for the party newspapers and sending long letters to different party committees. He also found time to read what was being written in various literary journals and newspapers and would send individual comments and criticism to foes and friends alike. The militancy in his letters to party comrades was represented often in dictatorial language, giving much importance to the dissemination of party literature, opposition to Muslim League leaders and the building of an open political front linked to other progressive forces in the country. One of these fronts was the re-establishment and the re-organisation of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA). The PWA was one of the most influential literary movements in the decade preceding the partition of British India. It was initially formed by a group of Indian students like Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali who were living in England during the 1930s. With annual gatherings, regional meetings and affiliated literary journals, the movement attracted writers and intellectuals from almost all Indian languages. However its strength lay among the Urdu-Hindi writers of the era.

From its very inception, the PWA was influenced by socialist and Marxist tendencies and soon after his return from Britain in 1935-36, Sajjad Zaheer joined the CPI. Hence, although the PWA was open to all those who broadly agreed with its manifesto — that called for a new literature that addressed progressive ideals and focused on the issue of poverty, deprivation and servitude of the Indian masses — it soon became closely aligned with the CPI.

Carlo Coppola, who has written a history of the PWA, argues that young Zaheer and others were influenced by Marxist writings while studying at Oxford and the person who encouraged them to establish a formal organisation was the leftist writer Ralph Fox (Fox later died in the Spanish Civil War). However, what is missing in Coppola’s account (and also from Roshnai, the biographical account of the PWA that Sajjad Zaheer wrote later) is any discussion of how the manifesto borrowed heavily from the reports and speeches of the first Soviet Writers Congress in 1934, especially if we see the speeches by Zhdanov and Maxim Gorky. There is much thematic similarity between Zhdanov’s position and that of the emerging manifesto of the young Indian students in Britain. This influence remains a story still untold.

The All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association (APPWA) was a continuation of the All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) and similarly closely affiliated with the newly formed CPP. For example, in 1948, the various CPP district organising committees supervised the formation of local APPWA chapters. Zaheer himself, as a founding member and past president, was keen on pushing the role of intelligentsia in society. In his communiqués he asserted the need for writers to have a thorough mastery of Marxist ideology and insisted on study circles so that intellectuals and creative people, especially those linked to the CPP, could study the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, as well as literature coming from the Soviet Union and progressive literature from Europe and Britain. Writers were also encouraged to write essays, articles and literary criticism for popular consumption to counter bourgeois and “reactionary” ideologies that were being propagated by, according to him, state and class enemies. Within this context, by the late 1940s the CPP, in control of APPWA and influenced by the CPI’s radical line, had started to purge from its ranks those that did not completely toe the new party line. This became more evident after the introduction of the new manifesto which targeted “non-progressive” writers during the first APPWA conference held in Lahore in November 1949.

During this conference, “non-progressive” intellectuals were severely criticised for their perceived political failings, alliances with state machinery, sexual perversions and lack of social consciousness. The manifesto for this meeting clearly divided the Pakistani cultural scene into many factions and spoke positively of those intellectuals who raised their voices against the ruling class and who struggled against oppression and for independence, peace and socialism (the new manifesto was published in the literary magazine Savera in 1950). Their writings, the manifesto proclaimed, were full of optimism, progressive ideals and a willingness to move the working class toward action.

In opposition to these intellectuals were the groups that were undemocratic, supported the status quo and through their writings, created confusion in peoples’ minds. The manifesto, in strong and uncompromising language, established three groups of reactionary intellectuals. The first were the writers who proclaimed the ideology of art for art’s sake. The text criticised these writers as denying class struggle and hence colluding with the ruling classes. The second group was designated as those that claimed to write Pakistani literature. They too were condemned as people who favour the capitalist and feudal classes of the new country and who, in their communalist hatred toward India, could not differentiate between Nehru’s fascist government and the Indian working classes. The third group was labelled as Islamic writers who seeked to establish Islamic law in the country. The manifesto lumped all of these writers — the Islamists, nationalists and liberals (art for art’s sake) — together and painted them as reactionaries.

The manifesto then turned toward those writers who used bourgeois psychology and Freudian parameters to understand society. These authors were labelled obscene, perverse, pornographic and decadent for their depiction of life through the lens of sexuality. They not only distorted peoples’ experience, the manifesto asserted, but also disrespected love as a pure form of desire. Hence the manifesto portrayed these writers as anti-humanists who could only make fun of the peoples’ creative faculty and were insensitive to the struggle for human existence. The protagonists of their works were killers, thieves, prostitutes, and those elements of society that do not contribute in the productive process; they wrote pessimistic stories that sang of darkness and of death (this is a clear reference to Saadat Hasan Manto’s work).

During the late 1940s, the progressives were dominant on the literary scene and their insistence on creative activity that focused on a clear ideological position was the legacy of their anti-colonial and class-based politics. They argued that reactionary authors did not understand or write about the social and political aspect of Partition violence and merely presented psychological and sexual renditions of the events. In an essay, the progressive poet Ali Sardar Jafri (Taraqi Pasand Adab, 1957) asserted that the progressives deeply analysed the situation from social and political angles and found the light of humanity even in this darkest hour of the nation’s history. Echoing progressive stalwarts like Ali Sardar Jafri, even Sajjad Zaheer argued that free thinkers and liberal artists possessed a sick mentality that made them avoid peoples’ problems. Hence in Pakistan’s early years there was much anxiety among progressive writers to create a distance from those who were perceived by them as the standard bearers of middle-class values and perverted literature. For example, Jafri attacked poets like N. M. Rashid by arguing that he and others like him were perpetrators of the death wish, escapists, obsessed with sexual themes and condemned him and Manto for raising such topics to the level of religious belief.

Writing during the late 1940s, Aziz Ahmed, another progressive intellectual, in his book on the subject, said that people like Manto were so obsessed with sexuality that he wondered whether they were mentally stable. He goes on to say that this perversion had entered Urdu literature due to the influence of D.H. Lawrence who, according to Ahmed, did not hold the respect of British literary circles any more. Within this context, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi (who was then the secretary general of the APPWA), in an important defence of progressive literature, proclaimed that the progressives had learnt from their mistakes and cleansed their house of impure infections brought in by perverted artists whose pornographic work and psychological analysis was influenced by the decadent intellectual Sigmund Freud (‘Kuch to Kahiye’ Nuqush 9, 1949). Ironic as it may seem, calling works of literature obscene meant taking them out of public circulation, a framing that seemed akin to the censorship that the progressives themselves at times suffered from under the moral surveillance by the community and the state (colonial or post-colonial).

What I have recounted about the new manifesto is fairly common knowledge among the literary circles in Pakistan. What is not so well known is that the language of the manifesto may have been influenced by, as did the first manifesto in 1935, the Congress of Soviet Writers, the renewed Soviet criticism of writers and intellectuals who were not following the state sponsored ideological line. One example of this form of attack was by the same Andrei Zhdanov in 1946 on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad for publishing the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958) and Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966). This became the basis for what was later to be called the Zhdanov Doctrine in cultural debates within global socialist circles. The journals were reprimanded for giving space to Zoshchenko’s short stories. They were deemed commonplace, rubbish, devoid of ideas and apolitical literature that aimed at disorienting the youth and poisoning their minds. He is called a vulgar lampoonist for the satirical short stories he published during the war.

Similarly, the poet Akhamotova, who has now become the icon of modern Russian poetry, was condemned for ideologically empty poetry of pessimism reflective of a spirit of decline. She was accused of bourgeois aristocratic aestheticism, of “art for art’s sake,” which does not follow in the footsteps of the people. She is portrayed as a poet of the elite that mixes fornication and prayer, of a kind of religious eroticism (we see the echo in how N.M. Rashid, Manto, Meeraji and others were condemned during the period of the new manifesto). As was the case with the APPWA manifesto of 1949, so was the ideas put forward in Zhdanov’s argument that literature should become party-oriented in order to counteract the bourgeois individualistic moral code and literary forms (Zhdanov’s speech was published in Pravda, September 21, 1946).

It is obvious to a lay reader that there are connections between the Soviet positions on culture and literature and the PWA during the late colonial and the early post-colonial period in South Asia. These literary linkages need to be elaborated and discussed for us to understand the literary debates in Pakistan’s early years.

This said, there was of course opposition from various quarters to the understanding of culture and literary undertaking by the progressives. But other groups were not as organised and consisted of a range of free thinkers, modernist poets and independent-minded intellectuals along with those who sought to link the question of Pakistan with Islamic morals and values. The latter group was intellectually eclectic and divided (Hasan Askari wrote a scathing critique of M.D. Taseer during the late 1940s in his discussions of Pakistani culture) and many had also previously been close to the progressives. However, it is also clear that intellectuals like Mohammad Hasan Askari and others continued to question and accuse the progressives for negating the completeness of the independence project and denying Partition as the logical end-point of the struggle, which for them was the emancipation of the masses through a proletarian revolution (a clear attack on Faiz’ poem ‘Subh e Azadi’). To take an example, Mohammad Din Taseer, an eminent man of letters who was also one of the founders of the PWA in the 1930s, had by the late 1940s become one of its major opponents. In a trenchant piece published in 1949, Taseer clearly states that although all progressives are not socialists, and all progressives are not traitors, all socialists are traitors to the cause of Pakistan. This is so, Taseer explains, because their loyalties are with Soviet Union or with India and they seek the destruction of the new nation. Such proclamations aided the ruling elite in the first years of Pakistan’s existence in becoming suspicious of any communist challenge to its authority.

Hence, in Pakistan’s early years, groups of intellectuals debated the future course of the country after the catastrophe of Partition. Whether the answer was in class solidarity (as the communists believed) or in the moral community of South Asian Muslims (as the Pakistani state desired) was a continuing discussion. Further, irrespective of the CPP’s desire to open up a discursive space to convince people of its political agenda, the government of the time was adamant to put important members of the CPP’s central committee and its workers periodically in jail and ban or confiscate communist publications. Further, the state also started using Islam as a political weapon to counteract various the communists and other democratic forces. Islamic doctrine was employed in the media to persuade people against the anti-religious (meaning anti-Islam) and, linked to it, the perceived “anti-Pakistan” political stance of the communists. The party was under perpetual government surveillance and attack. During the early 1950s, Zaheer spent several years in jail and soon after his release in 1955 he went back to India. The CPP was officially banned as a political organisation a year earlier in 1954.

Postscript: Under Sajjad Zaheer’s leadership, the progressives in Pakistan, at least in this era (perhaps as a reaction to their own suppression), sought to tame the conditions of the debates according to their own vision of a more egalitarian future. They used the trope of sexual deviancy, ideological purity and social commitment to curb the chaos that they thought would ensue from “non-progressive” literature. In this world of order and truth they sought no contingency and no ambivalence. In later years however, Syed Sajjad Zaheer went through a transformation of sorts. In a recent key note address at the Jamia Milia University in Delhi on Zaheer’s 100th birthday, writer and critic Intizar Husain related the following: Zoe Ansari, a critic and literary figure in India had written a critique of the great Persian poet Hafiz and called him an escapist poet whose work was perverse. In responding to him, Zaheer admonished Ansari for throwing the priceless gem of Muslim cultural history in the proverbial dustbin of history. He argued that we cannot read Hafiz in terms of some mechanical relationship between social practice and artistic expression. Husain suggests that this was a provocative response, but a bit late. Zaheer should have proclaimed such ideas in the 1940s, in the early days of the progressive movement. But perhaps he could not as the “tides were riding high with revolutionary fervor and some young radical would have announced that now even Banne Bhai (meaning Sajjad Zaheer) has also become reactionary” (Dunyazad #17, 2006).

Edmund Burke

Source: http://literarycriticismjohn.blogspot.in/2013/04/edmaund-burke.html

Edmund Burke

On a superficial view we may seem to differ very widely from each other in our reasonings, and no less in our pleasures; but, notwithstanding this difference, which I think to be rather apparent than real, it is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures.

[A Philosophical Inquiry In to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke]

With Edmund Burke there is a shift from an ontological, mimetic and objective approach to literature to an epistemological, pragmatic and subjective approach.  Ontology means in Greek ‘the study of being’.  Ontology concerns itself with determining the essence of things whether that essence being natural or supernatural.  Mimetic theories are those that are concerned with the relationship between the poem and the universe.  Mimetic theories are ontological in their approach because they are interested in what the poem is.  For them poem is an imitation.  Aristotle’s goal to define precisely the proper nature and essence of a well constructed plot makes it an ontological concern. 

The Platonic-Aristotelian debate over mimesis is really a debate over the ontological status of a work of art. They both are asking ‘what’s a poem’.  According to Aristotle a poem possesses its own substance and integrity’.  For, Plato poem is just a shadow.  The debate is again over the ontological status of a poem.  Although the neo-classical theory is partly pragmatic because it is concerned with the response of the audience, it still works within a philosophical framework that is essentially ontological; the theorists are still trying to figure out what a poem is.

The rules of decorum laid down by Horace, Dryden and Pope are less concerned with audience’ response than with what a poem should.  Even Longinus who does define the sublime partly in terms of its effect, is actually concerned with the actual, physical, metaphorical and linguistic qualities of a sublime poem.  Neo-classical theorists are interested in audience response but the audience’s response functions as only one criterion of what makes a work of art great.  They are still more interested in thethingness of a poem.  When contrast ontology with epistemology (study of knowing). Epistemology is concerned not with the thingness of things but with how we know and proceed with that thingness.

Pragmatic theories in their purest form are epistemological because we are interested in how the audience knows, receives and perceives what they are looking at. Epistemological theorists seek to explore not just whether or not a poem pleases.  They want more than that.  They want to study the mental processes by which that pleasure is perceived and known. 

For the true epistemological pragmatist beauty does not so much define a quality that inheres in a given poem or painting.  As it describes a certain kind of mental response that are created within the mind of the person who experiences that poem otr painting. Being only interested in the painting is ontological, whereas the interest in the mental response to that painting is epistemological.  For an epistemologist beauty does not reside in the painting but beauty is in the very way one percieves that painting.  Beauty resides in the mind.

At the core of all epistemology and any theory that is epistemological we have got to make a distinction between subject and object.  In Burke and German philosophy a subject is a conscious self that percieves.  An object is an unconscious thing that doesnot percieve but is rather percieved.  When epistemologists define their response to art as purely subjective what they mean is that the experience of art has nothing to do with the poetic object but exists wholly in the mind of the subject.  This philososophicsl use ofb the word ‘subjective’ shouldn’t be confused with its modern use to signify a person’s relativistic belief.  Philosophically speaking if we speak of an aesthetic response we mean an epistemological, pragmatic and subjective response.   Aestheticians want to set up standards for these subjective responses. 

Burke’s Enquiry

In his work, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke lays the groud work for understanding how we percieve both art and greater world around us.  For Burke the ground work and means of all perception is the senses.  Burke can be called an empiricist- knowledge comes through senses or experience.  He believes that all of us have equal access to sense perception.  The senses are the great originals of all our ideas.  Therefore it is possible to arrive at a universal principle of judgement, -eventhough judgement is subjective- because it all happens via the senses and we all have access to the senses.  Therefore we can set down universal standards of judgement.  Universal-subjective seems to be a paradox but Burke believes that fixed laws are possible in aesthetics, literary criticism and the like.    

From universal sense experience to universal principle of taste

According to Burke all people percieves external objects in the same way.  We all recognise that sugar issweet and tobacco is bitter.  We find more natural pleasure in sweet that in the bitter.  Habits can make you prefer tobacco to sugar.  But habits can never abolish our knowledge that tobacco is not sweet and sugar is not bitter.  The senses are the base.  The power of imagination and judgement are based on senses. Senses are at the botttom, radiating out of senses are imagination and judgement. Imagination is also called sensibility.

According to Burke imagination or sensibility takes the raw material offered it by sense perception and then recombines that material in a new way.  Although the imagination can be quite inventive it cannot produce anything new.  It can only vary what is given it by the senses.  So whatever affects our imagination powerfully, whatever brings us pleasure or pain must have similar effect on all men.  Though it is a huge assumption it is central to Bruke and the epistemological aesthetic project.  If so we all should take pleasure and pain in the same things.  Therefore though we perceive things separately somehow we all perceive them the same. 

Both imagination and judgment are based on senses.  Imagination is linked primarily to immediate perceptions and has about it an almost child like quality.  Imagination is direct, intuitive and child like.  Judgment is a higher critical faculty that is closely linked to reason.  Judgment is gained through an increasing understanding brought about by a long close study of the object of sensation.  Still the judgment rest in the senses and therefore judgment also share common nature.  Based on judgment and imagination there is ‘taste’ or ‘aesthetic taste’.  Since taste is based on imagination and judgment which are based on the senses taste too must be common to all men.  But there are exceptions according to Burke.  If our imagination or judgment is bad or deficient it will affect our taste.  For Burke there are some people whose natures are blunt and cold.  These people are deficient in imagination or sensibility.  Sometimes these people have weakened their imaginative facilities through hedonism or avarice.   If our imagination is blunted we will end up suffering from a lack of taste.  That is to be distinguished from people that are deficient in judgment.  If one is deficient in judgment one will have bad taste.  Lack of taste or no taste is the result of deficiency in imagination.

Taste according to Burke differs from person to person not in kind but in degree.  The principles of taste operate the same in all men, but the end result may not be the same. Some men due to a keener sensibility (imagination) or greater knowledge and discernment have a fuller or more refined sense of taste.  Burke is at the same time democratic and highly elitist.

Imagination tends toward synthesis whereas judgment tends toward analysis. Imagination brings things together; it discovers and even creates unity in the midst of differences. Judgment is more analytical.  It discerns subtle distinction in what appears to be uniform.  Although burke asserts that sensibility is essential to taste Burke finally gives preferences to judgment as the true foundation of taste. 

The sublime and the beautiful

  Burke defines the sublime and the beautiful in totally epistemological terms.  For Burke beautiful and sublimity are not qualities of the object rather they are faculties of perception that can be categorised.  The sublime and the beautiful is something that happens in the observer, not in the painting or the poem.  Burke defines sublime as that which inspires in us feeling of terror (1992, p340).  Sublimity is defined by the impact that has on us by the way we percieve it subjectively and epistemologically. Dark, gloomy and massive objects invoking us an overwhelming feeling of power and infinity.  Terror produces within us a mental, emotional response that Burke calls astonishment.  The sublime has this effect on us.  In that moment everything is suspended and our mind is totally filled by an object or thought.  For Burke, the sublime  is not only experienced through our eye and our ear it is also experienced through the senses of taste, smell and touch.  There are such things as sublime sounds or sublime taste.  We can percieve the sublime through all the fiv of our senses.

Indeed such sublimity is a mental experience, it manifests itself in our body by causing our hands to clench and our musceles to construct.  To be sublime there cannot be actual terror; if we were really in danger that is not the sublime but that is just terror. On the other hand the beautiful is that which inspires in us sentiments of tenderness and affection.  So whereas the sublime is more masculine and is closely allied to pain the beautiful is more feminineand is linked to pleasure and love.  Beauty like sublimity can be percieved by all the senses.

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding; (in whatever the strength of that faculty may consist), or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of a proper and well-directed exercise, which a:lone can make it strong and ready. Besides, that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province. These causes produce different opinions upon everything which is an object of the understanding, without inducing us to suppose that there are no settled principles of reason.

[A Philosophical Inquiry In to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke]

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.