Blake a collection of critical essays
Metadata
- Author: Frye, Northrop, ed
Highlights
It is natural, then, that the piper’s point of view is prevailingly happy; he is conscious of the child’s essential di- vinity and assured of his present protection. But into that joyous context the elements of experience constantly insinuate themselves so that the note of sorrow is never completely absent from the piper’s pipe. In experience, on the other hand, the Bard’s voice is solemn and more deeply reso- nant, for the high-pitched joy of innocence is now only a memory. Within this gloom, though, lies the ember which can leap into flame at any mo- ment to light the way to the higher innocence. Yet despite this difference in direction of their vision, both singers are imaginative, are what Blake called the poetic or prophetic character. — location: 218
white society feels that it can enslave and hence dehumanize the because of the blackness of his skin, which then becomes symbolic of his inferiority in the eyes of the whites, and also of his oppression. But a naturalistic fact about dark skin, its ability to withstand the sun’s heat, allows Blake to manipulate the symbol to show the Negro boy, from the perspective of humanity, as superior to his oppressors. Naturalistic fact allows no positive reversal of blackness in “The Chimney Sweeper.” The irony here is that the white victims of oppression are turned black and me, in the eyes of their oppressors, what they seem to be: creatures so different as to have no claims on humanity. — location: 405
Ovid gives a detailed account of the story of Clytie who pined away with desire for the sun-god and was transformed into the heliotrope which perpetuates her action of counting the steps of the sun. It will be as well to note at this point that the sunflower and the heliotrope are identified popularly but not, of course, botanically; the sunflower derives its name from its appearance, — location: 1216
The Lyca poems, “Lucy Gray,” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” all express the Romantic version—better, three Romantic versions—of the familiar paradox that in order to gain life it is necessary to lose it; in order to be “found” one must first be irretrievably “lost.” Attaching itself to the archetypal image of the lost and found maiden, the Romantic value is able to modify it, reduce or extend it, and even overturn its most firmly established traditional meanings. At the same time, the traditional meanings and accumulated associations of the image provide a test of the new value as it emerges, in an encounter from which both the value and the archetype gain. — location: 1646
The real or upright world is really the world of mental forms without material substance. — location: 1704
while to assume oneself the center of the material universe is to enclose oneself in the Urizenic cave of the ego. — location: 1706
The speaker, in other words, can proceed from the sexual to the human vision, where nature is no longer a sur- rounding physical existence but a city within the spirit. — location: 1707
Blake sees all these matters as interrelated. War grows out of acquisitiveness and jealousy and mischanneled sexual energy, all of which grow out of the intrusion of possessiveness into human relations. — location: 1839
Ore as the spirit of living that transcends the spirit of trad- ing is the divine seed-fire that exceeds the calculations of Urizen, god of commerce. The portrait of Urizen with golden compasses is made in the image of Newton, the mighty spirit of weighing and measuring who thought to reduce the prolific universe to an orrery of farthing balls. — location: 1848
Blake explained that any skin color is a cloud that cannot obscure the essential brotherhood of man in a fully enlightened society, such as Heaven. “These black bodies and this sunburnt face,” said the little black boy, are “but a cloud.” If the Negro is to be free of his black cloud, the little English boy must be likewise free from his “white cloud,” which is equally opaque. “When I from black and he from white cloud free,” I will “be like him and he will then love me.” — location: 2046
Beyond arguing her essential purity, she indicates by several analogies that there is something especially beautiful about dark skin and (she suggests both points at once) about pregnancy. Consider the dark skin of worm-ripened fruit, which is “sweetest”; or the darkness of “the soul prey’d on by woe”; — location: 2059
If war and subordination are the basis of Empire, peace and equality must be the ground of that condition in which “The Whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common,” as Blake would reiterate thirty years later in his Laocoon inscriptions. — location: 2085
The vision of Innocence is based upon ignorance, and the joy of right- eousness upon the prosperity of an untried Job. — location: 2269
The fear of lapsing into passivity has begun to dominate Urizen. But to cast out one’s desire is to become only the shadow of desire, and a Spectre must fall. — location: 2286
Tharmas can barely articulate his watery longings, nor can he separate his desire for Enion from his wish to punish her in revenge. The confusions of fallen instinct are matched by the violent fluctuations of Tharmas’ bellowing, as his voice thunders, sobs, and bursts over the ocean of space and time. — location: 2297
Los is now in much the same position that he held in The Book of Urizen, for he must hammer form out of chaos, and set both a Limit of Opacity (Satan) and a Limit of Contraction (Adam) beyond which man and the universe can- not fall. — location: 2308
that the bound babe of Urizen or “The Mental Traveller” is now understood to be a reborn Luvah, one of a series of such reincarnations which will culminate in the birth of Jesus. — location: 2319
The palaces are of a City of Art, a New Jerusalem that Blake calls Golgonooza (evidently an anagram for New Golgotha, to replace the scene of the Crucifixion). The Center cannot hold, but opens this world into the firmness of Eternity, rather than into the Vacuum of Ulro, where things fall apart to no definite end. The new creation that provides bodies for the impending Resurrection is intended as a comfort for Ore, the desire now at the end of its suffering endurance. — location: 2379
Thus it is one of Blake’s doctrines that we see the sky as a huge concave vault because we see it with eyes that are imprisoned in a concave vault of bone. — location: 2562
But the units of poetry are images rather than ideas, and a poem’s total meaning is therefore a total image, a single visualizable picture. — location: 2592
The propositional content of Blake’s Europe could be expressed somewhat as follows: the root of evil and suffering is the fallen nature of man; this fallen nature is a part of physical nature; hence the basis of superstition and tyranny is the deification of physical nature; this deification has polluted Western culture from the sky-gods of Greece and Rome to the gravitational universe of Newton. But its poetic meaning, its total image, is given us by Blake himself in his frontispiece to the poem, the famous picture of the Ancient of Days, the bearded god whose sharp cruel compasses etch the circumference of the human skull and of the spherical universe which is its objective shadow. — location: 2601
He gave his most moving expression to this recantation of his belief in revolutionary activity in “The Grey Monk,” written some years later: — location: 2814
For Blake did in fact regard the memory as a grave and the imagination as a teeming, creating womb, fromwhich spring the values that will save us all. Only the despicable “plagiary” works from the memory—the timid painter of paltry blots, the hire- ling of the establishment. The true artist possesses “that greatest of all blessings, a strong imagination”—the faculty that is religion, psychology, philosophy, ethics, and art all wrapped in one.13 — location: 3035
For inert psychology leads to inert personalities and lukewarm art. Locke had bound Englishmen to dead nature and imprisoned them in the cavern of their material bodies. — location: 3052
He is in part Blake’svision of Newtonian nature—cold, remote, mathematical, empty. — location: 3208
Both routes distracted him from himself and the field of his actual experience. Blake saw in Druidism the prototype of all sys- tematic theology which attempted to explain the paradoxes of spiritual life in the rational terms of fallen man and his world of nature. — location: 3393
Most important, however, was the constant interplay of life and death, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the one contrary living off the other, yet never completely absorbing it. As in Swedenborg, Blake found in Druidism a deep-rooted tendency to eliminate one contrary in favor of the other and to regard this process as the moral triumph of good over evil. — location: 3433
The moral judgment abhors a paradox, but it is only in paradox that the recurrent nature of life and its unique identity can both be understood. To fall short of this paradox is to become committed to the half-truths of formal logic and dogmatic theology where, to get a final answer, it is necessary to eliminate the contrary aspect of every problem. — location: 3443
In other words, “nature” to the Druid and the Deist was the basic reality containing a scale of being including man, but to Blake, “nature” was the lowest degree in a scale of visionary perception which man himself contained. — location: 3487
It was the state of nature as seen by the visionary imagination, just as Ulro was nature without vision. It was, in fact, human life seen as a living process within the circle of time—with its problems, contradictions, and constant change. — location: 3533
In opposition to the deification of life’s conditions, he chose to deify human life itself, or rather, human existence, since he did not worship what man usually was, but what it was in him to be. — location: 3565
In the prophetic books, man’s fallen state was attributed to the fact that his “Human Existence” was asleep, and his faculties and the conditions of his life had usurped control over him. To emphasize law at the expense of life would keep Albion asleep forever. — location: 3568
The sacrifice of the victim was a parody of self- sacrifice, just as the self-righteous virtue of the moralist was a parody of conscience. — location: 3581
The “Churches” and their respective “Heavens” were ways of ordering popular belief and so- cial practice, but the “Eyes” of God were the ways God was “seen” or understood by each succeeding epoch. — location: 3696
“Eden” was the point where the productions of time and the life of eternity met. Blake claimed to be “an inhabitant of that happy country,” and his professed aim was to unite the world of generation, through Eden, to its eternal source. — location: 3741