17. A melodramatic piece called The Fall of Rosamond, for instance, is executed in a delicate stipple technique that was fashionable among society ladies, and colored in pastel shades; see Myrone, Blake Book, 30–31.
18. Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 877.
19. Blake Records, 71.
20. This suggestion is made by Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), 96.
21. Allan Cunningham, Blake Records, 638. John Mee comments on the differences between the watercolor and the engraving: “‘As Portentous as the Written Wall’: Blake’s Illustrations to Night Thoughts,” in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. Alexander S. Gourlay (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 2002), 178.
22. Blake Records, 632; Gilchrist, 117. Blake Records, 632. Henry Fuseli, a close friend of Blake’s, said that Catherine had been a maidservant: Blake Records, 71.
23. Blake Records, 672; Shakespeare, Othello 1.3.171–72; Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 306–7.
24. Gilchrist, 334–35.
25. Robert N. Essick, “A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Winter 2005–6), 126–39; Bentley, Stranger from Paradise, pl. 88 caption.
26. Blake Records, 392, 684.
27. Gilchrist, 333. See Anne K. Mellor, “Physiognomy, Phrenology, and Blake’s Visionary Heads,” in Blake in His Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 63–67.
28. See William M. Ivins Jr., How Prints Look: Photographs with Commentary, ed. Marjorie B. Cohn, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 46.
29. Public Address, E574; Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 32.
30. Blake Records, 690.
31. Marriage 14, 27, E39, 45.
32. See Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 92; Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy,” Print Quarterly 21 (2004), 18–38; and Phillips’s edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 28–30.
33. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1995), 165.
34. America 3.15, E52.
35. See Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 93, and Michael Phillips, “No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,” British Art Journal 5 (2004), 13–21.
36. On the printing process, see Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 25.
37. Blake Records, 690; Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 129. On Blake’s inks, see Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 98; and on the watercolor paints that were used at the time, see Townsend, Blake: The Painter at Work, 42.
38. Phillips, “Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy.”
39. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), 48, quoted by Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 146.
40. Ivins, How Prints Look, 158.
41. On total sales, see G. E. Bentley Jr., “What Is the Price of Experience? William Blake and the Economics of Illuminated Printing,” University of Toronto Quarterly 68 (1999), 617–41.
42. Descriptive Catalogue, E546–47; Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 29.
43. On romantic classicism, see Anne K. Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), ch. 4, “Romantic Classicism and Blake’s Art.” On Flaxman and Blake, see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183, 172.
44. Descriptive Catalogue, E550; on outline as moral, see Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art, 5. Cumberland is quoted by David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 103.
45. Ralph Wornum, Lectures on Painting (1848), quoted by Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 254; Descriptive Catalogue, E548; annotations to Reynolds, E655; Gombrich, Story of Art, 303.
46. Descriptive Catalogue, E538.
47. Jerusalem 38.23, E185 (the phrase “minute particulars” is repeated in eight other places in Jerusalem); Vision of the Last Judgment, E560. See Jenijoy La Belle, “Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo,” in Essick and Pearce, Blake in His Time, 13–22, and Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1.
48. Notebook puns, E510; Public Address, E580; annotations to Reynolds, E636, 641. See Eaves, Counter-Arts Conspiracy, 159–68.
49. Annotations to Reynolds, E641.
50. Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse 3,” in Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 44–45.
51. Annotations to Reynolds, E648, 656.
52. Annotations to Reynolds, E639. I discuss the problems in Reynolds’s position in “Generality and Particularity,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 381–93.
53. Descriptive Catalogue, E541; Gilchrist, 94; annotations to Reynolds, E655; John Flaxman to William Hayley, Blake Records, 208.
54. Gilchrist, 247; Kingsley Amis, The Alteration (New York: Viking, 1976), 1–2.
55. Examiner, Sept. 17, 1809; Blake Records, 282–83.
56. David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 19–20.
CHAPTER 2: HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND BLAKE’S SYMBOLS?
1. Descriptive Catalogue, E541; Vision of the Last Judgment, E565–66. In a translation of Plato that Blake knew, “It is more proper to consider the eyes and ears as things through which, rather than as things by which, we perceive”: Theaetetus 184c, in the 1804 translation of Thomas Taylor; see Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 2:120.
2. Blake to John Trusler, Aug. 23, 1799, E702; Trusler is quoted in a letter from Blake to George Cumberland, Aug. 26, 1799, E704. See also G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 181–82.
3. William Butler Yeats, “William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 119.
4. Thomas Gray, Ode on . . . Eton College, lines 21–30.
5. Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Gray,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 434–35; William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, lines 200–203.
6. Macbeth 1.8; Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), 29.
7. Christopher Heppner suggests possible alternative titles: “Reading Blake’s Designs: Pity and Hecate,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (1981), 339. See also David L. Clark, “How to Do Things with Shakespeare: Illustrative Theory and Practice in Blake’s Pity,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 106–33.
8. Gilchrist, “Supplement,” 407.
9. Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114. Heppner’s extended commentary on this picture is especially valuable.
10. John Milton, L’Allegro, lines 73–74, 91–98; Blake’s descriptions of his illustrations to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, E683.
11. See Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs, 268.
12. See John E. Grant, “Blake’s Designs for L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” in The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics, ed. Robert N. Essick (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1973), 430.
13. Four Zoas 70.12–17, E346; the “man of sorrow
s” in Isaiah 53:3 was taken to be an anticipation of Christ.
14. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 29.
15. Marriage 11, E38.
CHAPTER 3: INNOCENCE
1. Inscription in the Four Zoas manuscript, E697.
2. Cunningham, Blake Records, 637; John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 133.
3. Peter Berger, “The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence,” Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 213. On the tree of knowledge, see Andrew Lincoln in Blake Trust, 2:143.
4. Isaac Watts is quoted by John Holloway, Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 48–49, and John Wesley by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 375.
5. These and others are cited by Zachary Leader in a survey of progressive educational theory in Blake’s time: Reading Blake’s Songs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 149 and fig. 7.
6. Annotations to Reynolds, E650. The final word was accidentally cut away by a bookbinder, but “body” is the best guess (probably not “form,” since that would repeat “formed”).
7. Introduction, E7; Marriage, E36.
8. John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828); Alan Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830); both in Blake Records, 606, 633.
9. E16.
10. Quoted by Constantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 323–24.
11. William Cowper, The Poplar Field, in Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 362; The Ecchoing Green, lines 11–20, E8.
12. See Walter S. Minot, “Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’: An Explanation of Age,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Fall 1991), 78, and Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25–26, 131–32.
13. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, The Loves of the Plants (1789), 2, 26. On the anemone as the flower of Adonis, see Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 1:108.
14. Visions 6.4–5, E49; see Mary Lynn Johnson, “Feminist Approaches to Teaching Songs,” in Approaches to Teaching Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Robert F. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg (New York: MLA, 1989), 61; Helen P. Bruder, “Blake and Gender Studies,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicolas M. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 137–38; and Robert N. Essick’s commentary to his edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2008), 34–35.
15. Illuminated Blake, 69.
16. Illuminated Blake, 52; Dylan Thomas, The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.
17. The Blossom, E10; Marriage, E36.
18. The “clockwise” interpretation is David Wagenknecht’s: Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 58–59; Illuminated Blake, 52. The halo-sun can be seen in copy Y in the Blake Archive, and in the Kings College, Cambridge, copy reproduced in Blake Trust 2:pl. 11.
19. G. E. Bentley Jr., “Blake’s Pronunciation,” Studies in Philology 107 (2010), 114–29.
20. E8–9.
21. Four Zoas 18.1–3, E310.
22. E17.
23. Holy Thursday, E13 (and see The Little Black Boy, E9); Revelation 19:6; Hebrews 13:2.
24. Stephen C. Behrendt, Reading William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1992), 54.
25. E10.
26. See Martin K. Nurmi, “Fact and Symbol in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Blake’s Songs of Innocence,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 15–22.
27. See David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 132.
28. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 96–101, 363.
29. Zachary Leader, Reading Blake’s Songs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 47.
30. Edward Larrissy invokes ideology in this nonjudgmental sense: William Blake (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 19–20, 29.
31. Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:25–26, quoting Emanuel Swedenborg, Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System (1758).
32. Auguries of Innocence, E490.
33. Noted by Alexander Gourlay, “‘More on Blake’s Auguries,’” Notes and Queries (December 2011), 523.
CHAPTER 4: EXPERIENCE
1. Europe 5.7, E62; see Andrew Lincoln’s commentary on the Experience frontispiece, Blake Trust, 2:172.
2. Marriage 14, E39.
3. E28. See Angela Esterhammer, Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 144.
4. E29–30; Romans 7:7.
5. E26.
6. Ah! Sun-Flower, E25.
7. Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 135; The Sick Rose, E23; Stephen Cox, Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 109.
8. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 892 (letter 261).
9. Matthew Prior, A True Maid, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 1:455.
10. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), 260.
11. Marriage 14, E39.
12. The Clod and the Pebble, E19.
13. Marriage 7, E36; The Everlasting Gospel, E518. Paul is cited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant in their edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 31; on self-abnegation I follow the suggestion of David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 11.
14. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 133.
15. E24–25.
16. Alexander Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 8–9; Paradise Lost 1.25–26. B. H. Fairchild comments on Blake’s trochees: Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1980), 36–37.
17. Public Address, E576. The crossed-out lines were recovered by David V. Erdman and Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 109. The 1771 Britannica article is quoted by John E. Grant in a masterly article to which my comments are much indebted: “This Is Not Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’” Iowa Review 19 (1989), 112–15.
18. Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument, 82.
19. Paradise Lost 2.634–35. On the spears as beams of light, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 175–77.
20. Marriage 6, E35.
21. Illuminated Blake, 84; I am indebted also to Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Something in My Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 88.
22. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 137; Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 86. Tigers are pictured in Erdman and Moore, Notebook of William Blake, Notebook p. 2.
23. Night, lines 33–40, E14.
24. E22–23.
25. E12–13, 27; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, ch. 19. The mention of chimney sweeps forbidden to enter churches is from Jonas Hanway, A Sentimental History of Chimney Sweepers in London and Westminster (1785), quoted by Martin K. Nurmi, “Fact and Symbol in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Blake’s Songs of Innocence,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
, 1966), 18.
26. E26–27.
27. James Joyce, lecture on Blake (translated from an Italian original), in James Joyce: The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959), 215. Joyce did not realize that Blake was referring to Saint James’s Palace; Buckingham Palace was not yet the royal residence.
28. Ezekiel 9:4–6; there is a similar passage at Revelation 13:16.
29. George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 71; Michael Ferber, “‘London’ and Its Politics,” ELH 48 (1981), 310.
30. Jerusalem 84.11–12, 15–16, E243.
31. Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818) in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 33; P. B. Shelley, Julian and Mad-dalo: A Conversation, 182; Four Zoas 71.11, E348; Steve Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
32. Jerusalem 69.34–35, 57.8–10, E223, 207; T. S. Eliot, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 47.
33. John Holloway, Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 30; Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 142. On venereal disease and tears, see G. C. Roti and D. L. Kent, “The Last Stanza of Blake’s ‘London,’” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 11 (1977), 19–21.
34. Marriage 8, E36.
35. Auguries of Innocence, E492; David Punter, “Blake and the Shapes of London,” Criticism 23 (1981), 7. Gavin Edwards notes the range of Blake’s indictments: “Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A Contribution to the Discussion of Blake’s ‘London,’” Literature and History 5 (1979), 88.
36. Annotations to Reynolds, E636.
37. Blake Records, 396.
38. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 286; John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828), Blake Records, 619.
39. Blake Records, 438, 312–13, 337.
40. Charles Burney in the Monthly Review (June 1799), 202, quoted by Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2. On the ranking of poets in Blake’s time, see the comments by Nicolas M. Williams and Edward Larrissy in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1, 256.
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 26