Northrop Frye - Fearful Symmetry_ A Study of William Blake-Princeton University Press

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Author: Frye, Northrop

Highlights

A visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism. — location: 243

allied. Such a distinction cannot be absolute, of course, and one — location: 247

In the depths of his labyrinthine Jerusalem he promises us “the end of a golden string,”13 and that refers, as will be shown in due course, not to a technique of mystical illumination as is generally assumed, but to a lost art of reading poetry. — location: 308

The sources of art are enthusiasm and inspiration: if society mocks and derides these, it is society that is mad, not the artist, no matter what excesses the latter may commit: I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer’d, “the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.”19 — location: 338

The chief attack on Locke in the eighteenth century came from the idealist Berkeley, and as idealism is a doctrine congenial to poets, we should expect Blake’s attitude to have some points in common with Berkeley’s, particularly on the subject of the mental nature of reality, expressed by Berkeley in the phrase esse est percipi: “to be is to be perceived”: — location: 368

abstract the quality of his perception. — location: 485

40 An inactive thinker is a dreamer; an unthinking doer is an animal. No one can begin to think straight unless he has a passionate desire to think and an intense joy in thinking. — location: 496

The more a man puts all he has into everything he does the more alive he is. Consequently there is not only infinite variety of imaginations, but differences of degree as well. It is not only true that “every eye sees differently,” but that “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” and that “the clearer the organ the more distinct the object.”41 — location: 498

because more imagination has gone into perceiving it. — location: 508

Locke does not think of sight as the mind directing itself through the eye to the object. He thinks of it as an involuntary and haphazard image imprinted on the mind through the eye by the object. — location: 531

exuberantly active mind — location: 534

The imaginative mind, therefore, is the one which has realized its own freedom and understood that perception is self-development. — location: 535

The unimaginative is paralyzed by its own doubt, its desire to cut parts of the mind off from perception and parts of perception out of the mind, and by the dread of going beyond the least common denominator of the “normal.” — location: 535

This opposition of the freedom of the acting mind and the inertia of the response to an external impression — location: 537

We are not passively stimulated into maturity: we grow into it, and our environment does not alter our nature, though it may condition it. — location: 550

Sense experience in itself is a chaos, and must be employed either actively by the imagination or passively by the memory. The former is a deliberate and the latter a haphazard method of creating a mental form out of sense experience. The wise man will choose what he wants to do with his perceptions just as he will choose the books he wants to read, and his perceptions will thus be charged with an intelligible and coherent meaning. Meaning for him, that is, pointing to his own mind and not to, for instance, nature. It thus becomes obvious that the product of the imaginative life is most clearly seen in the work of art, which is a unified mental vision of experience. — location: 553

For the work of art is produced by the entire imagination. The dull mind is always thinking in terms of general antitheses, and it is instructive to see how foolish these antitheses look when they are applied to art. We cannot say that painting a picture is either an intellectual or an emotional act: it is obviously both at once. We cannot say that it is either a reflective or an active process: it is obviously both at once. We cannot say that it is “mental” or “bodily”: no distinction between brainwork and handwork is relevant to it. We cannot say that the picture is a product of internal choice or external compulsion, for what the painter wants to do is what he has to do. Art is based on sense experience, yet it is an imaginative ordering of sense experience: it therefore belongs neither to the “inside” nor the “outside” of the Lockian universe, but to both at once. — location: 558

idea; he paints only what he — location: 570

he paints only what he can visualize, and art owes its vividness and directness of impact, as compared with reasoning, to the fact that the concrete is more real than the general. — location: 570

It is, then, through art that we understand why perception is superior to abstraction, why perception is meaningless without an imaginative ordering of it, why the validity of such ordering depends on the normality of the perceiving mind, why that normality must be associated with genius rather than mediocrity, and why genius must be associated with the creative power of the artist. This last, which is what Blake means by “vision,” is the goal of all freedom, energy and wisdom. — location: 572

the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of sight is a potentially real world of subjects and objects; the world of vision is a world of creators and creatures. In the world of memory we see nothing; in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we see what we want to see. — location: 596

Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept. — location: 618

words in fact give a much clearer idea of what Blake means by “art.” The religious, philosophical and scientific presentations of reality are branches of art, and should be judged by their relationship to the principles and methods of the creative imagination of the artist. — location: 621

The religious, philosophical and scientific presentations of reality are branches of art, and should be judged by their relationship to the principles and methods of the creative imagination of the artist. — location: 622

The religious synthesis, therefore, in trying to fulfill the needs of a group, freezes the symbols both of its theology and ritual into invariable generalities. Religion is thus a social form of art, and as such both its origin in art and the fact that its principles of interpretation are those of art should be kept in mind: — location: 627

Poetic Genius, — location: 630

“All Religions are One” means that the material world provides a universal language of images and that each man’s imagination speaks that language with his own accent. Religions are grammars of this language. Seeing is believing, and belief is vision: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. — location: 632

To try to verify a philosophical or religious system in relation to an objective nonmental “truth” is to dissolve an imaginative form back into the chaos of the material world, and this kind of verification will destroy whatever truth it has. — location: 638

history is imaginative material to be synthesized into form, not memory to be reflected upon. — location: 646

Man in his creative acts and perceptions is God, and God is Man. God is the eternal Self, and the worship of God is self-development. — location: 673

Blake, by postulating a world of imagination higher than that of sense, indicates a way of closing the gap which is completed by identifying God with human imagination: — location: 668

The ego plays with shadows like the men in Plato’s cave; to perceive the particular and imagine the real is to perceive and imagine as part of a Divine Body. — location: 704

The universal perception of the particular is the “divine image” of the Songs of Innocence; the egocentric perception of the general is the “human abstract” of the Songs of Experience. — location: 707

One is that we perceive as God: we do not perceive God. — location: 710

There can be no “life force” apart from things possessing it: universal life is the totality of living things, and God has intelligence, judgment, purpose and desire because we are alive and possess these things. — location: 770

the training of a dog is an imaginative victory over nature. — location: 898

energy and form, existence and perception, are the same thing. Consequently every act of the imagination, every such union of existence and perception, is a time-space complex, not time plus space, but time times space, so to speak, in which time and space as we know them disappear, as hydrogen and oxygen disappear when they become water. — location: 991

When Blake says, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,”34 he means in part that every imaginative victory won on this earth, whether by the artist, the prophet, the martyr, or by those who achieve triumphs of self-sacrifice, kindliness and endurance, is a permanent reality, while the triumphs of the unimaginative are — location: 1018

where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of our affairs is the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the “eternal Now”35 of our personal experience. — location: 1028

The imaginative intensity which finds delight and beauty in considering the lilies may remain suffusing us with a vague and unlocalized joy, and with this we may well be content. But the impulse to make some kind of creation out of it is still there, and poetry and painting are the result of the perseverance of vision into conquest. — location: 1061

Eden in Blake’s symbolism is a fiery city of the spiritual sun; Beulah is the garden of Genesis in which the gods walk in the cool of the day. — location: 1066

As Ulro is a single and Generation a double world, so Beulah is triple, the world of lover, beloved and mutual creation; the father, the mother and the child. In Eden these three are contained in the unified imagination symbolized in the Bible by the four “Zoas” or living creatures around the throne or chariot of God, described by Ezekiel and John.39 This world therefore is fourfold, expanding to infinity like the four points of the compass which in this world point to the indefinite. — location: 1067

Eden in Blake’s symbolism is a fiery city of the spiritual sun; Beulah is the garden of Genesis in which the gods walk in the cool of the day. As Ulro is a single and Generation a double world, so Beulah is triple, the world of lover, beloved and mutual creation; the father, the mother and the child. In Eden these three are contained in the unified imagination symbolized in the Bible by the four “Zoas” or living creatures around the throne or chariot of God, described by Ezekiel and John.39 This world therefore is fourfold, expanding to infinity like the four points of the compass which in this world point to the indefinite. — location: 1066

Those for whom subject and object, existence and perception, activity and thought, are all parts of a gigantic antithesis, will naturally conceive of man as split between an egocentric will and a reason which establishes contact with the nonego. Believers in the cloven fiction tend to come to rest finally in either a will-philosophy or a reason-philosophy, trying in each case to minimize the importance of the one they reject, because they are seeking to unify their ideas by reducing the problem from the double world of Generation to the single world of — location: 1082

continues to speak by the artists who have prophetic imaginations. The “inspiration” which artists have is therefore the breath or spirit of God which dwells in the artist and is the artist. Such inspiration is the only proof we have of the existence of a spiritual power greater than ourselves. Art, then, is “the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.” — location: 1122

The “inspiration” which artists have is therefore the breath or spirit of God which dwells in the artist and is the artist. Such inspiration is the only proof we have of the existence of a spiritual power greater than ourselves. Art, then, is “the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.” — location: 1123

Man has within him the principle of life and the principle of death: one is the imagination, the other the natural man. In the natural world the natural principle will win out eventually and the man will die. As an individual ego reflecting on his sensations of an outer space-world while existing in time, the natural man is a dying man; and like most chronic invalids the ego is fretful, irascible, cruel, bothered by trifles, jealous and inordinately vain. Its only freedom is in domineering over or hindering others; its only happiness is in solitary possession; and in everything it does it seeks, like Cleopatra, for a painless form of suicide. — location: 1237

in that state of animal self-absorption which Blake calls the Selfhood. This word, a very important one in his thought, will be used henceforth to replace “memory” and “reflection.” Man has within him the principle of life and the principle of death: one is the imagination, the other the natural man. In the natural world the natural principle will win out eventually and the man will die. As an individual ego reflecting on his sensations of an outer space-world while existing in time, the natural man is a dying man; and like most chronic invalids the ego is fretful, irascible, cruel, bothered by trifles, jealous and inordinately vain. Its only freedom is in domineering over or hindering others; its only happiness is in solitary possession; and in everything it does it seeks, like Cleopatra, for a painless form of suicide. — location: 1235

The imagination in seeing a bird sees through it an “immense world of delight”; the imagination in looking at society not only sees its hypocrisies but sees through them, and sees an infinitely better world. — location: 1254

A “master race” would be more locked up in gloomy spiritual solitude than ever: the “will to power” never escapes from time, and therefore never loses the sense of the eternal and infinite as ironic, because forever elusive. When we see that all men are part of the larger body of a single Man we can also see that only the pleasure of creation is real, and that creation is the only outcome of conflict which satisfies the imagination. — location: 1506

Mastery over woman produces the same morbidity and imaginative idleness as mastery over man, and Blake uses the word “jealousy” to cover the Selfhood’s attitude to both. — location: 1520

Abstract ideas are called spectres by Blake, and Spectre with a capital letter is the Selfhood. The corresponding term is “Emanation,” which means the total form of all the things a man loves and creates. In the fallen states the Emanation is conceived as outside, and hence it becomes the source of a continuously tantalizing and elusive torment. In imaginative states it is united with and emanates from the man, hence its name. — location: 1522

Blake has put this into his terrible lyric on the sunflower in the Songs of Experience, the flower which wistfully follows the sun across the sky all day, a perfect symbol of the “vegetable” life rooted in this world and longing to be free. — location: 1549

getting away at cockcrow. We may notice that in all four areas of imaginative conflict the Selfhood sets up a parody of the imagination. The physical fight of the hero parodies the mental fight of the artist; the jealous wife and teasing mistress parody the emanation; money and morality parody the community of minds; the ghost or nightmare parodies the vision. — location: 1626

For all Jesus’ teaching centers on the imminent destruction of this world and the eternal permanence of heaven and hell, these latter being not places but states of mind. Jesus however did not discuss this in terms of good and evil, but in terms of life and death, the fruitful and the barren. The law of God that we must obey is the law of our own spiritual growth. Those who embezzle God’s talents are praised; those who are afraid to touch them are reviled. — location: 1663

Hell is the Selfhood “jealousy” defined by Blake as “the being shut up in the possession of corporeal desires which shortly weary the man,”49 and this is the only hell that Jesus spoke of. — location: 1670

But mountains in the world of experience are entirely motionless; what kind of faith can remove them? Well, a landscape painter can easily leave one out of his picture if it upsets his imaginative balance. And that kind of vision, which sees with perfect accuracy just what it wants to see, pierces the gates of heaven into the unfallen world. — location: 1677

A real miracle is an imaginative effort which meets with an imaginative response. Jesus could give sight to the blind and activity to the paralyzed only when they did not want to be blind or paralyzed; he stimulated and encouraged them to shatter their own physical prisons. Miracles reveal what the imagination can do. — location: 1686

Heaven is this world as it appears to the awakened imagination, and those who try to approach it by way of restraint, caution, good behavior, fear, self-satisfaction, assent to uncomprehended doctrines, or voluntary drabness, will find themselves traveling toward hell, as Ignorance did in Bunyan, hell being similarly this world as it appears to the repressed imagination: — location: 1719

Mental experience is a union of a perceiving subject and a perceived object; it is something in which the barrier between “inside” and “outside” dissolves. But the power to unite comes from the subject. The work of art is the product of this creative perception, hence it is not an escape from reality but a systematic training in comprehending it. — location: 1746

Art sees its images as permanent living forms outside time and space. This is the only way in which we can stabilize the world of experience and still retain all its reality: — location: 1750

And we say that examples and illustrations are “vivid,” which means alive. They are addressed to the body which is the form of the soul; they represent a communication from the whole mind and they demand total response. — location: 1765

Christ brought no new doctrines: he brought new stories. He did not save souls; he saved bodies, healing the blind and deaf that they might hear his parables and see his imagery. He stands outside the history of general thought; he stands in the center of individual wisdom. — location: 1770

Wisdom is the unhurried expanding organic health of the powerful and well-knit imagination, and it depends on a combination of practice and relaxation. It is difficult for the man who has knowledge without wisdom to relax his mind into receptivity in front of a picture or poem. To him it contains a communicable residue of general statements called the meaning, and to clutch this and carry it off is his sole desire. — location: 1773

The most obvious difference between them is that art is pure revelation and religion full of mystery. And the chief reason why people insist on substituting religion for art, and on maintaining a mystery in religion, is that only in abstractions can they find absolutes, and only in absolutes can they find an unchanging invariable support for their imaginations. — location: 1792

THE totality of imaginative power, of which the matrix is art, is what we ordinarily call culture or civilization. Everything worth doing and done well is an art, whether love, conversation, religion, education, sport, cookery or commerce. Because the world is fallen we think of art as ornament succeeding necessities; but all life moves upward to achieve ornament, for ornament is free and necessities are necessary: — location: 1827

Satan took away Ornament First. Next he took away Accomodations, & Then he became Lord & Master of Necessaries.7 — location: 1832

But one cannot pursue happiness: one must pursue something else that will give happiness; and the only happiness that exists is derived from the free creative life. — location: 1836

Inspiration is the artist’s empirical proof of the divinity of his imagination; and all inspiration is divine in origin, whether used, perverted, hidden or frittered away in reverie. All imaginative and creative acts, being eternal, go to build up a permanent structure, which Blake calls Golgonooza, above time, and, when this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding, will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the New Jerusalem which is the total form of all human culture and civilization. Nothing that the heroes, martyrs, prophets and poets of the past have done for it has been wasted; no anonymous and unrecognized contribution to it has been overlooked. In it is conserved all the good man has done, and in it is completed all that he hoped and intended to do. And the artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time.9 — location: 1850

We do not reflect first and write or paint afterwards: art is the activity of writing or painting. We do not experience an internal tornado and then see what we can salvage from the wreck: the conception takes on its own form and shape only in the execution. — location: 1885

Ideas cannot be Given but in their minutely Appropriate Words, nor Can a Design be made without its minutely Appropriate Execution…. Execution is only the result of Invention. — location: 1893

Drawing a line asserts the reality of the particular thing against the liquid generalizations which expand indefinitely over the surface of thought. A line, therefore, is both movement and purpose: whatever the medium of the art, the line exists neither in time nor space, but in their eternal and infinite union: — location: 1968

The visionary, we remember, has two sciences, the science of wrath and the science of pity: the former the explosion of energy, the latter its fruit and incorporation. The two words “prophet” and “artist” point to a contrast between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian, the singer of the dithyramb and the singer of the paean, running all through art. This contrast Blake calls Rintrah and Palamabron, both of whom are different aspects of himself: one may compare Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius. But this is the positive way of expressing what Burke expresses negatively. Art is produced in an imaginative state which absorbs the whole individual, and certain qualities and characteristics of such work, relative to it as abstractions always should be to real things, will appear. But an artist who starts out to create a quality of art will get nowhere. — location: 2002

he is the man who tries to assimilate art to science, wisdom to knowledge, the individual view of an eternal world for an anonymous improvement in time. — location: 2027

WHEN we perceive, or rather reflect on, the general, we perceive as an ego: when we perceive as a mental form, or rather create, we perceive as part of a universal Creator or Perceiver, who is ultimately Jesus. Jesus is the Logos or Word of God, the totality of creative power, the universal visionary in whose mind we perceive the particular. But the phrase “Word of God” is obviously appropriate also to all works of art which reveal the same perspective, these latter being recreations of the divine vision which is Jesus. The archetypal Word of God, so to speak, sees this world of time and space as a single creature in eternity and infinity, fallen and redeemed. — location: 2161

This feeling that the Bible does not exhaust the Word of God accounts for the phenomenon of what we may call contrapuntal symbolism, that is, the use of un-Christian mythology, usually Classical, to supplement and round out a Christian poem. — location: 2214

The true epic is a cyclic vision of life, and the true drama, including narrative and heroic poetry, is an episode of that cyclic vision, just as Greek tragedies were slices from the Homeric banquet. Great art, therefore, is more conventional than most people realize, and if Chaucer and Shakespeare are read in their “infernal or diabolic sense” we shall find in them the same imaginative conceptions that we find in the cyclic visions. As Blake points out, the witches in Macbeth are the same three goddesses of destiny we meet in the Norns and Fates. — location: 2230

Chaucer’s characters live age after age. Every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage; we all pass on, each sustaining one or other of these characters; nor can a child be born, who is not one of these characters of Chaucer…. Thus the reader will observe, that Chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind; every one is an Antique Statue; the image of a class, and not of an imperfect individual. — location: 2235

The artist may be conceited, irritable, foolish or dishonest, but it makes no difference what he is: all that matters is his imagination. We speak of So-and-So “the Man,” meaning So-and-So when he is not being a poet; but it is only when So-and-So is using the imagination which is the “Real Man” and writing poetry that he is a man: the rest of the time he is on the ordinary Generation plane. That is why some of the greatest poets, Homer and Shakespeare for instance, hardly seem to have had a personal existence at all. — location: 2241

existence at all. They are inspired; that is, incarnations of the ability to write. As Blake goes on he becomes more and more impressed by the contrast between a man’s imagination, his real life as expressed in the total form of his — location: 2245

As Blake goes on he becomes more and more impressed by the contrast between a man’s imagination, his real life as expressed in the total form of his creative acts, and his ordinary existence; and he devotes a good deal of the first part of Jerusalem to working out the conflict between them. — location: 2245

Wordsworth’s “Spectre” has obviously no right to open its mouth on the subject of Wordsworth’s poetry, of which it knows nothing whatever. — location: 2260

The inference is that all genuine poetry is something quite separate from the person who wrote it. A poem is like a child, an independently living being not fully born until the navel-string has been cut. — location: 2263

A thing’s name is its numen, its imaginative reality in the eternal world of the human mind. That is another reason why Jesus is called the Word of God. Reality is intelligibility, and a poet who has put things into words has lifted “things” from the barren chaos of nature into the created order of thought. — location: 2283

A word’s meaning depends partly on its context and partly on its relation to the mind of its hearer: all general meanings are only approximate. To the poet the word is a storm-center of meanings, sounds and associations, radiating out indefinitely like the ripples of a pool. It is precisely because of this indefiniteness that he writes poems. — location: 2291

As the original “organized men,” or “Giant forms,”17 dwindle into gods, the clarity of their relationship to the archetypal myth becomes blurred, and irrelevant stories and attributes cluster around them. They become increasingly vague and general until, in their final stages, they are mere personifications; and by the time that Phoebus and Philomela have become highbrow synonyms for the sun and the nightingale, they have disappeared. — location: 2378

religion is raw imaginative material clarified by art. — location: 2385

Some poets, including Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare, present a smooth readable surface for the lazy reader to slide over: others, including Dante, Spenser and Blake, make it impossible for any reader to overlook the fact that they contain deeper meanings. The wails of protest which the latter group arouses show only that the real profundity of the former group has not been touched. — location: 2391

And as no two poets can possibly mean the same thing by “Venus,” we should have to go through a long process of discarding misleading associations which the use of a new name prevents at once. — location: 2389

The central form of Christianity is its vision of the humanity of God and the divinity of risen Man, and this, in varying ways, is what all great Christian artists have attempted to recreate. — location: 2404

Shakespeare and Chaucer follow a sounder poetic policy. They avert their eyes from both gods and abstract nouns, and concentrate on living men and real things, on the particular rather than the general. Malbecco in Spenser “Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight,”19 but the characters of Shakespeare never dwindle into abstractions. — location: 2412

that is why Othello and the Wife of Bath are not individuals but “Giant forms,” exactly as Hercules and Juno originally were. They are, as we say, of universal significance, and that means precisely of the significance of the universe, the whole of life seen in the primary outlines of the human and divine mind—for Shakespeare and Chaucer, rightly understood, reveal these primary outlines just as the Bible does. If allegory means this universal significance in the artist’s creation of particular things, then all art worth looking at or listening to, including music, is allegorical. — location: 2418

Dante’s own Commedia is not affected by the fact that the geology of its hell, the geography of its purgatory, the astronomy of its paradise, are all impossible, and the theology of the whole poem rejected in part or in toto by many readers. Any fool knows that, but what he may not know is that the permanent form of the poem, which survives all the vacillations inseparable from “belief,” is allegory addressed to the intellectual powers. The same is true of all other works of art whatever. — location: 2427

Prisons exist because Selfhoods do: they are the real things the Selfhood produces, and symbols of it only in that sense. — location: 2436

We say that a snowflake has a symmetrical design, not because the snowflake has consciously produced it, but because we can see the design. We see that the snow-flake has achieved something of which we alone can see the form, and the form of the snowflake is therefore a human form. It is the function of art to illuminate the human form of nature, to present the ferocity of the weasel, the docility of the sheep, the drooping delicacy of the willow, the grim barrenness of the precipice, so that we can see the character of the weasel, the sheep, the willow and the precipice. This vision of character, or total form, is something of course much more inclusive than the words given, which express only aspects of that character, can suggest. — location: 2453

The painter’s task is not a hopelessly quixotic attempt to capture his model’s life, but to show its relationship to a universal human order, a Paradise in which lions owe their generation as well as their form to human minds. The most concentrated vision of the lion sees this archetypal human creature in the ferocious wildcat of nature, as Blake’s poem on the tiger does. — location: 2468

Those who do not love living things do not love God or Man, as the Ancient Mariner found to his cost. But because some Greek poet loved the nightingale, he created from her the human figure of Philomela, and by doing so passed from love into vision, from a sensitive reaction to nature into the intelligent form of civilized human life, or Paradise. The story of Philomela is not a fantasy suggested by the nightingale, but a vision of the fall of the original human nightingale into its present natural shape. — location: 2472

It revolves around the four antitheses that we have been tracing in the first four chapters, of imagination and memory in thought, innocence and experience in religion, liberty and tyranny in society, outline and imitation in art. These four antitheses are all aspects of one, the antithesis of life and death, and Blake assumes that we have this unity in our heads. — location: 2485

The Greeks have also kept a dim memory of a Golden Age before the Fall in their legend of a lost island of Atlantis and of a giant who contained the world in the figure of Atlas, the Titan who bears the world on his back, a perfect image of the fallen Albion with nature outside him and pressing upon him, and of the etymology of that curious word “understanding.” — location: 2507

This passivity takes the form of wonder or awe at the world he has created, which in eternity he sees as a woman. The Fall thus begins in Beulah, the divine garden identified with Eden in Genesis. Once he takes the fatal step of thinking the object-world independent of him, Albion sinks into a sleep symbolizing the passivity of his mind, and his creation separates and becomes the “female will” or Mother Nature, the remote and inaccessible universe of tantalizing mystery we now see. Love, or the transformation of the objective into the beloved, and art, or the transformation of the objective into the created, are the two activities pursued on this earth to repair the damage of the Fall, and they raise our state to Beulah and Eden respectively. — location: 2519

The word “emanation” in Blake means the object-world; creature in Eden, female in Beulah, object or nature in Generation, abstraction in Ulro. “Spectre” means the subjective counterpart to this in the two fallen states. — location: 2542

Yet gigantic energies still remain in men, imprisoned, but struggling to be free. The revolt of Prometheus nearly destroyed Olympus; and in the Eddas it is prophesied that some day the chained Loki will burst free and begin the destruction of the world.33 This imprisoned Titanic power in man, which spasmodically causes revolutions, Blake calls Orc. Orc is regarded as an evil being by conventional morality, but in Blake the coming of Jesus is one of his reappearances. — location: 2563

in every culture great imaginative work is done in the face of a consolidating tyranny. — location: 2639

Adam is the “Limit of Contraction,” and Satan is the “Limit of Opacity”; Adam and Satan, therefore, are the bounds put to the Fall in life and death respectively. — location: 2684

Hence Satan is described by Blake as a “Hermaphrodite,” a sterile fusion of subject and object into an indivisible abstract or spectral World. — location: 2686

The other tree symbolizes several different aspects of the Selfhood. It is a tree of morality, conveying the knowledge that one lives a good life in a bad world by using the minimum of imagination. It is a symbol of nature, of the separate objective body of Generation which Blake always associates with the vegetable world. — location: 2696

Orc, or human imagination trying to burst out of the body, is often described as a serpent bound on the tree of mystery, dependent upon it, yet struggling to get free. The erection of the brazen serpent in the wilderness therefore represents in disguised form the more clearly symbolic story of the earlier poem. The energy of Orc which broke away from Egypt was perverted into the Sinaitic moral code, and this is symbolized by the nailing of Orc in the form of a serpent to a tree. This was a prototype of the crucifixion of Jesus, and the crucifixion, the image of divine visionary power bound to a natural world symbolized by a tree of mystery, is the central symbol of the fallen world. Parallel to the image of the crucified Christ is the figure of Prometheus chained to a rock, imagination bound to Ulro. Both Titans were victims of Zeus-Jehovah or Urizen, and both are allotropic forms of Orc. Jesus redeems Adam in Generation; the Promethean fire will burn the “opaque” world to ashes in the final consummation. — location: 2719

It is this serpent, man’s Selfhood or desire to assert rather than create, that stands between man and Paradise: the cherub with the flaming sword who guards the tree of life therefore is that demonic “serpent.” — location: 2733

All monsters in heroic literature are, like Grendel, sprung of the race of Cain or the death-impulse, but much more hideous than this is the horror of something mysterious and undefined, the power of darkness. The creation of the fallen world is an “act of Mercy” because the stability and permanence of the dead inorganic world forms a barrier between our weak struggling lives and the total annihilation of all being in chaos. — location: 2750

A deluge in the Bible therefore signifies a defeat of the imagination; and the fall of Albion began with a deluge which drowned Atlantis and produced the ocean that bears its name. — location: 2759

The Great Whore of the Bible is the Medusa who turns men to stone, the femme fatale of the romantic poets whose kiss is death, whose love is annihilation, whose continual posing of the unanswerable riddle of life in this world is reflected in the mysterious female smiles of the Sphinx and Mona Lisa; and whose capacity for self-absorption has haunted art from ancient Crete to modern fashion magazines. The visionary sees nature as a veil (the sound-association with “Vala” should be noted) between himself and reality: the tearing of the veil of the mystery-temple by Jesus is therefore the first act in the apocalypse. — location: 2781

One looks in a poet for what is there, and what there is in Blake is a dialectic, an anatomy of poetry, a rigorously unified vision of the essential forms of the creative mind, piercing through its features to its articulate bones. — location: 2853

In the Italian development of Platonic thought which began with Ficino, this idea is combined with the Symposium and with Court of Love conventions in such a way as to produce a mythology rather like Blake’s theory of states. There are two great principles in life, Eros, which is energy and heat, and Venus, which is form and light. These two principles are subject and object in this world, male and female in a higher state, creator and creature in a still higher one. — location: 3028

On the other hand, heathens also believed their poets or prophets to be divinely inspired, and accepted them as their primary religious teachers. In both Hebrew and Classical cultures poets were the first lawgivers both in religion and in society. This is closely related to Blake’s point that myths were originally poetic and not theological. — location: 3054

In both Hebrew and Classical cultures poets were the first lawgivers both in religion and in society. This is closely related to Blake’s point that myths were originally poetic and not theological. — location: 3055

A poet is as much to say as a maker. And our English name well conformes with the Greeke word, for of , to make, they call a maker Poeta. — location: 3077

Milton’s “liberty” is practically the same thing as Blake’s imagination, and whenever Milton talks about reason he means it in the sense of the “bound or outward circumference of Energy” which liberty supplies. Liberty for Milton is the total release of the whole man, and his main effort in defining it is to break down the partitions in which the timid and cautious attempt to keep its various aspects separate. That is, the “Christian liberty” of the theologians is not a different thing from political liberty; and the “liberty to know and utter” inevitably expands into the liberty to love. — location: 3108

The release of creative genius is the only social problem that matters, for such a release is not the granting of extra privileges to a small class, but the unbinding of a Titan in man who will soon begin to tear down the sun and moon and enter Paradise. The creative impulse in man is God in man; the work of art, or the good book, is an image of God, and to kill it is to put out the perceiving eye of God. God has nothing to do with routine morality and invariable truth: he is a joyous God for whom too much is enough and exuberance beauty, a God who gave every Israelite in the desert three times as much manna as he could possibly eat. — location: 3128

There is an answer to this in Milton, that poetry is not “to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge.” — location: 3195

It is true that the poets of this age were reacting against the Augustans, but in view of the fact that they did not know that the Romantic movement was to succeed them, it seems better to look at them rather as attempting to get English poetry back on Renaissance rails. — location: 3285

The poets of gloom and graveyards were not mere victims of a passing fad: they knew that the proper study of mankind is fallen man, and that the man who does not see himself in this perspective does not see himself at all. — location: 3294

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Frye-Northrop Frye - Fearful Symmetry_ A Study of William Blake-Princeton University Press

Northrop Frye - Fearful Symmetry_ A Study of William Blake-Princeton University Press

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