My take on Blake, as epitomized for Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism follows. You can read it in 90 seconds, but it will take the ten weeks to see for yourself. Fortunately there's the additional week-long break over Thanksgiving to work on projects. An electronic discussion group will be created for this class, and every student will be expected to participate actively (so an efficient personal computer and high-speed modem are desiderata). My current projects with Blake are the digitizing of his complete writing and a multi-media hypertext of Songs of Innocence and of Experience , and I hope these might play a part in the course.
An engraver by trade, Blake's saturation in the practice and history of painting and print- making grounds a preoccupation with style, vision, and reproduction. Confronting the alienating imperatives toward standardization and specialization in London's late-eighteenth-century publishing industry, Blake (1757-1827) counters that culture by authoring, calligraphing, illustrating, singing, etching, printing, binding, and publishing his own work. Such strength of commitment compounds with the haunting psycho-cultural "myth-mash" drama of his "giant forms" in a composite art form which has been the subject of early work by a number of theoretically inclined critics (e.g., Hazard Adams, Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, E. D. Hirsch).
Blake's scattered critical formulations reflect largely his training in the visual arts; they are difficult to reconcile with each other and, especially, with his literary practice and its many strategies for dissemination (unusual punctuation, puns, varient "copies" of a given title). His recurrent emphasis on "line" may be contrasted with the then dominant "finished" style of engraving whose pretension to mime in monochrome tone, color, and shadow required decomposing the image into a tedious system of tiny cross-hatchings or dots and lozenges--the polished style of Augustan poetry with its code of diction and allusion made for Blake a kind a literary analog. In the labored mediation such style demands, Blake sees the illusion underlying any attempt to represent external nature (or historical acts); drawing directly on the copperplate, he argues, offers an unmediated line from beholder to the artist's insight into the artificial nature of reality ("Mental Things are alone Real" [Erdman, Poetry (E hereafter) 565]). Only a firm and determinate line establishes the individual identities or minute particulars in which "the Infinite alone resides" (E 205). On the other hand, the "bounding line" entails the loss of other possibility inherent in realized form, so that only by the institution of "contrary" identities--like text and design--can Blake ensure "progression" (E 34).
In the 1790s Blake urges "energy" and "an improvement of sensual enjoyment" (E 39; e.g.: greater pleasure in reading); after 1800 he favors "mental fight" and a vision of redemptive imagination which taps a heritage of Christian radicalism. From the perspective of energy he inaugurates the Romantic revaluation of Milton as "a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it" (E 35), and then, in Milton, a Poem he develops his re-reading into a new type of epic. Blake's complex psychological model gives large play to sexual drive and to repression as it unfolds in the ongoing strife of old Urizen (horizon/your-eyes-in/your reason etc.) and inspiring Los (loss/Sol [Apollos]), of male Zoas and female Emanations. "The stubborn structure of the language" is Los's building (E 183). Blake's emphasis on individual identity is engaged on one side by a concern with prideful "selfhood" and on the other by the conclusion that "We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals" (E 131). The "true" or "Real Man" appears in or as "Poetic Genius" (E 1-2) or "Imagination / (Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever)" (E 148).
Blake confronts literary theory with a semiotics which stresses how significance can be found in every particular--"Revelation in the Litteral Expression" (E 143), not least--a psychology which highlights the role of the perceiver, a deconstructive dialectic which vibrates with awareness of how form and frame are at once indispensable and intolerably limiting, and the moving instance of a half century's daily care about making a difference: "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans" (E 153).
Descend the cone to enter the Vortext.
The New Child: British Art and the Origin of Childhood, 1730-1830