A Blake Dictionary The Ideas and Symb…
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- Author: Damon, S. Foster, Eaves, Morris
Highlights
Blake was not content only to record: he wanted to force his reader to think along with him. No great work of art has its meaning on the surface, not Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, or Milton’s. The public has taken these great writers merely as a storyteller, a playwright, an epic-maker, and has been content to enjoy their writings on that level only. For example, Paradise Lost has been treated as an epic (but is it really Aristotelean?), as a theological treatise (but is it quite orthodox?), and as Biblical history, though it is no more history than The Divine Comedy is a travelogue; but never had it been understood as a study of damnation. Blake was the very first person to know what Milton was writing about. He was determined not to have his own message sidetracked by surface meanings. So he removed the surface meanings. — location: 436
But Blake’s reader cannot accept passively what Blake writes, as he cannot understand it. He must dig, participate actively; thus Blake’s thought is kept living and his ideas fresh. “[Symbolism] address’d to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry” (To Butts, 6 July 1803). Therefore, to rouse the Intellectual Powers while baffling the Corporeal Understanding, Blake deliberately confused his prophetic books. He introduced flat contradictions, which can be resolved only when the meaning is understood; then they turn out to be clues. He furnished some definitions. Jerusalem is Liberty, he tells us twice (J 26:3; 54:5), but to understand her, you find you have to think out exactly what Liberty really is. Other definitions turn out to be only extended applications. System there is, but it must be discovered. Narrative there is, but it is a dream narrative which does not obey the conventional rules for story-plotting. None of it makes sense until we apply it to the workings of the human mind. — location: 448
Every sect is self-limited, whereas Truth is universal. Instead of any religion, Blake wanted the truth—the whole truth including all errors, life including death, the soul including the body, the world of mind including the world of matter, the profound discoveries of the mystics reconciled with the scoffings of the skeptics, heaven and hell married and working together, and in the ultimate heart, Man eternally in the arms of God. — location: 471