Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

by Damrosch, Leo

  2. Four Zoas 4.6, E301.

  3. I adapt this formulation from Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 79. Freud’s analogy of the unruly mob is quoted from his “My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus” by Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Anchor, 1961), 63.

  4. Ezekiel 1:1, 4–6, 10–11, 16–18.

  5. See David Bindman, “Blake as a Painter,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98; the Raphael painting is in the Palatine Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

  6. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pl. 77 caption.

  7. Jerusalem 15.18–20, E159.

  8. Four Zoas 3.4–6, E300–301; John 17:21, 1:14.

  9. Milton 21.8–10, E115.

  10. Four Zoas 44.5–45.3, E329–30; Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 93.

  11. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 4:312. The fourteen versions of the fall are summarized by Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 255–60.

  12. Milton 24.71, E121.

  CHAPTER 10: THE PROPHETIC CALL

  1. Milton 2.25, E96 (“Mark well my words” is repeated at 3.5 and 4.20); Jerusalem 5.16–23, E147.

  2. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:177–78.

  3. Stephen C. Behrendt makes this suggestion: Reading William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1992), 156.

  4. Milton 2.16–22, E96; Paradise Lost 7.173.

  5. Harold Bloom first advanced his theory in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). A case for a more positive focus in Blake’s response to Milton is argued by Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).

  6. Paradise Lost 1.26.

  7. Milton 40.35–41.4, E142.

  8. Milton 16.47–50, E110, and 1, E95.

  9. Laura Quinney suggests this interpretation in William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 134.

  10. See, e.g., Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 311, and Illuminated Blake, 248.

  11. On astral bodies, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 203.

  12. Blake to William Hayley, May 6, 1800, E705.

  13. Genesis 1:3; Jerusalem 16.12–15, E160.

  14. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (1821); Marriage 14, E39.

  15. Ben Jonson, To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, lines 58–62; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), 275–76. The Joseph Wright painting described here was executed in 1771 and is in the Derby Museum.

  16. Jerusalem 98.24, E257.

  17. Book of Los 4.27–36, E92.

  18. Urizen 10.15–18, E75; Milton 24.72–73, E121.

  19. Book of Los 4.19–26, E92; 5.33–34, 41–47, E94.

  20. The similarity of vocabulary is noted by Paul Miner, “‘The Tyger’: Genesis and Evolution in the Poetry of William Blake,” Criticism 3 (1961), 67–68. More largely, see my chapter “Los, Mulciber, and the Tyger” in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 373–81.

  21. Urizen 10.35–39, E75, and 13.20–21, E77; Illuminated Blake, 193; David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 92.

  22. Urizen 18.1–5, E78. On the medical theory, see Hilton, Literal Imagination, 83. My comments are indebted as well to W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 156.

  23. Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 129; Book of Los 5.47, E94. Copy E is in the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.

  24. Jerusalem 45.3, E194; James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 37. Mitchell suggests the printer’s smock: Blake’s Composite Art, 51.

  25. Jerusalem 1.9, E144.

  26. Isaiah 21.11–12; John 10:9, as suggested by Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, 244. Erdman mentions also the wicket gate through which Bunyan’s Christian begins his journey to salvation in Pilgrim’s Progress: Illuminated Blake, 281.

  27. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E721 (he says the poem was written “above a twelve-month ago”).

  28. Milton 22.4–14, E116–17. Udan-Adan is a formless chaos outside the humanized world.

  29. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Style and Iconography in the Illustrations of Blake’s Milton,” Blake Studies 6 (1973): 67; Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 220–21; Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 135.

  30. Julia Ward Howe, The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Vision of the Last Judgment, E562.

  CHAPTER 11: BREAKTHROUGH TO APOCALYPSE

  1. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 359, 351; Jerusalem 75.10–17, E230–31, and 72.17–20, E226.

  2. Jerusalem 6.2–7.8, E148–49.

  3. Jerusalem 52, E200; on the figure of the double, see Edward J. Rose, “Blake and the Double: The Spectre as Doppelgänger,” Colby Library Quarterly 2 (1977), 127–39.

  4. Jerusalem 10.51–55, E153–54.

  5. Jerusalem 8.21–22, 39–40, E151, and 10.17–24, E153.

  6. My Spectre around me night and day, E475.

  7. Four Zoas 117.7–13, E386.

  8. Four Zoas 119.4–13, 21–23, E388, and 136.21–22, E404.

  9. Milton 42.36–43.1, E144; Robert N. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251.

  10. Ronald Britton, “The Preacher, the Poet, and the Psychoanalyst,” in Acquainted with the Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Imagination, ed. Hamish Canham and Carole Satyamurti (London: Karnac, 2003), 125–26.

  11. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 27; Britton, “Preacher,” 130. Peter Otto assembles a remarkable mini-anthology of quotations from a long series of critics who echo Frye: Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 9–11.

  12. Jerusalem 53.15–19, E203, and 72, E227.

  13. Jerusalem 98.28–29, E257, and 36.58–60, E183.

  14. John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977): 138. Harvey refers to this image as “Stonehenge,” which it is not.

  15. Descriptive Catalogue, E542; Jerusalem 27, E171, and 47.7–11, E196. See Peter F. Fisher, “Blake and the Druids,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 569–612.

  16. Jerusalem 66.2–9, E218; see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 71–72.

  17. My comments are indebted to Illuminated Blake, 379, and to Morton Paley, Blake Trust, 1:297.

  18. William Stukeley, Abury: A Temple of the British Druids, with Some Others, Described (1743), 54; Europe 10.23, E63.

  19. W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 181.

  20. Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction, 217.

  CHAPTER 12: “THE TORMENTS OF LOVE AND JEALOUSY”

  1. Four Zoas 90.36, E370; Blake Records, 137, 140.

  2. Blake Records, xxvi–xxvii; Aileen Ward, “William Blake and t
he Hagiographers,” in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl (New York: AMS, 1994), 16–17. “Intense! naked!” is quoted from America 4.8, E53.

  3. Gilchrist, 60.

  4. Notebook, E473–75.

  5. E469, E516; Blake Records, 290.

  6. Visions 8.13, E51.

  7. E470.

  8. Visions iii, E45. Recent feminist critics have suspected more explicit allusions to the clitoris, to multiple orgasm, and to lesbian sex: Anne K. Mellor, “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995): 366; Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997): 75; Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, eds., Queer Blake (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Introduction, 12.

  9. Visions 1.1–13, E45–46; see David Worrall, “William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1975), 402.

  10. Visions 1.16–25, E46; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1975), 167.

  11. Visions 5.3–6, 3.16–19, 7.16, E45–50.

  12. Visions 7.23–29, E50; Jerusalem 69.15–17, E223; Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, 82.

  13. Visions 2.11–20, E46.

  14. Christopher Frayling, “Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous,” in Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Martin Myrone (London: Tate, 2006), 13.

  15. Darwin is quoted by Nelson Hilton, “An Original Story,” in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 74. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, 70, quotes Fuseli’s aphorism.

  16. Visions 2.35–36, E47; Europe 10.28–29, E64.

  17. Gilchrist, 334; Blake Records, 447.

  18. Four Zoas 34.63–65, E324.

  19. Paradise Lost 4.698–711.

  20. Paradise Lost 4.505–11; Rossetti, supplement to Gilchrist, 426.

  21. My comments are indebted to David Wagenknecht, Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 310; Pamela Dunbar, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 56–60; and Bette Charlene Werner, Blake’s Vision of the Poetry of Milton (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1986), 71–72. I also repeat some thoughts from my Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 223–25.

  22. Urizen 20.2–25, E80; François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, no. 324, trans. Leonard Tan-cock (London: Penguin, 1959), 79.

  23. Four Zoas 60.6–12, 19–22, E340–41; Paradise Lost 6.328–30.

  24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Modern Library, 1954), aphorism 168, p. 470; Europe iii.1, 5–6, E60; Proverbs 9:17. There are fourteen surviving copies of Europe; no one knows why the Prologue was omitted from twelve of them.

  25. E467; Jerusalem 96.5–6, E361.

  26. See Jacques Lacarrière, Les Gnostiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 99–100.

  27. Jerusalem 44.33–37, E193–94.

  28. Jerusalem 69.43–44, E223. Here is one attempt to explain the “cominglings”: “The senses as we conceive them drop out to be replaced by faculties, which, as separate entities, themselves drop out to be replaced by a fourfold organ of imagination, the body of Albion.” Thomas Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 29.

  29. Sigmund Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in the Erotic Life,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 68.

  CHAPTER 13: THE FEMALE WILL

  1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, book 12, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Raymond et al., vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959), 644; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.6.

  2. See Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ch. 4, “The Emblem.”

  3. For the Sexes, E268; Tiriel 8.11, E285; also Europe 5.6, E62; Jerusalem 30.57, E177. The complete series of emblems is reproduced in E259–67.

  4. E268.

  5. Jerusalem 93.8, E253; Genesis 30:14–16; John Donne, “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” line 2.

  6. E269.

  7. To Tirzah, E30; Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, line 207; John 2:4. David Erdman thinks To Tirzah was added to the Songs in 1803 (E800), and Andrew Lincoln agrees, Blake Trust, 2:18n. Joseph Viscomi argues that it may have been as early as 1795: Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 238–39.

  8. Jerusalem 96.23–28, E256.

  9. Jerusalem 30.23–26, E176; Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997), 182, 36, 3. Elsewhere Bruder surveys recent studies and shows that the ambiguity of Blake’s imagery has permitted critics to detect every possible attitude, pro and con, toward sex and gender: “Blake and Gender Studies,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicolas M. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 132–66.

  10. Alicia Ostriker, “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Winter 1982–83), 156–65; annotations to Lavater, E596; Milton 36.31, E137. See Susan Fox, “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry,” in Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970–1984, ed. Nelson Hilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), 15–32, and Leo Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 75–90.

  11. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 73; Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), x.

  12. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:157.

  13. Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), xii.

  14. My Spectre around me night and day, E475–77. The sequence of stanzas in this poem is far from certain; I follow Erdman’s version.

  15. Four Zoas 35.11–12, E325.

  16. Jerusalem 64.12–17, E215; I follow W. H. Stevenson’s explanation of Arthur: Blake: The Complete Poems (London: Pearson Longman, 2007), 804. Enion’s song of experience is quoted at the end of chapter 4, page 95, above.

  17. Jerusalem 68.10–15, 63–68, E221–22; David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 205.

  18. Four Zoas 26.5–13, E317; Brenda Webster, Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 213–14.

  19. Gilchrist, 348; Blake Records, 57.

  20. E689. The tradition of detecting negative implications in Blake’s Dante illustrations was inaugurated by Albert Roe in Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).

  21. Dante, Purgatorio, 29:91–96, 100–102, 106–14, 121–26 in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Courtney Langdon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 345–47.

  22. Dante, Purgatorio, 30:31–33, in Langdon, Divine Comedy, 353. Nelson Hilton gives an illuminating interpretation of various meanings of the vortex: Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), ch. 10.

  23. Four Zoas 122.15–20, E391; Jerusalem 99.1–5, E258–59.

  24. Robert N. Essick, “Blake and the Production of Meaning,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 13. On Blake’s use of gold and silver, see Blake Trust, 1:15–16.

  25. I follow Illuminated Blake, 282–83, and Blake Trust, 1:131–32.

  26. Jerusalem 86.1–10, E244.

  27. Illuminated Blake, 325;
Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 43. My comments are indebted also to Illuminated Blake, 325, and Blake Trust, 1:181.

  28. Tintern Abbey, lines 123–24; annotations to Wordsworth, E665–67; Blake Records, 430. M. H. Abrams’s study is Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).

  29. Four Zoas 136.35–36, E404–5.

  30. Milton 32.50–63, E131.

  31. Milton 31.28–38, E130–31. On “nature” as a construct, see Kevin Hutchins, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

  32. Shakespeare, sonnet 29; Wordsworth, The Prelude 10.725–27 (1805 version).

  33. Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1955), 194.

  CHAPTER 14: WRESTLING WITH GOD

  1. All Religions Are One, E1–2.

  2. Marriage 11, E38; Everlasting Gospel, E520; Four Zoas 100.10, E372.

  3. Laocoön, E274; David V. Erdman, “‘Terrible Blake in His Pride’: An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 336; Everlasting Gospel, E524.

  4. Marriage, E37; annotations to Watson, E614.

  5. Daniel 7:9; J. T. Smith, Blake Records, 620.

  6. Proverbs 8:27; Paradise Lost 7.224–31.

  7. Urizen 20.33–41, E80–81.

  8. E516.

  9. Voltaire, Candide ch. 25.

  10. Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 242.

  11. Isaiah 33:6.

  12. “Let the brothels of Paris be opened,” E499; Morris Eaves, “The Title-Page of The Book of Urizen,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 225–30. Erdman makes the suggestion about the book of nature: Illuminated Blake, 183.

  13. Genesis 1:10–31; Urizen 4.10–11, 23, E71–72.

  14. Gilchrist, 130–31; G. E. Bentley, Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings in Illuminated Printing, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 176. The “eternal Now” is in the Lavater annotations, E592.