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Blake and the Natural World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Although most critics have stressed William Blake's “mystical” disdain for the phenomena of objective reality, his responses to nature are both frequent and varied. While not following any lineal order of development, these responses may be said to assume a hierarchical order once we examine them in their overall context. The hierarchy langes from mere description of nature in a manner reminiscent of the eighteenth-century physico-theological poets through a consideration of nature as an aspect of human perception and an aspect of human will. Finally, nature may be transmuted into art through the shaping power of the imagination, or in Blakean terms, through an inward confluence of Los and Christ.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974
References
Note 1 in page 131 For readings of Blake that stress his antinaturalism, see P. Berger, William Blake: Poet and Mystic, trans. Daniel H. Conner (London: Chapman and Hall, 1914); S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston and New York: Houghton. 1924); Milton O. Percival, William Blake's Circle of Destiny (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1938); Hazard Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963). An excellent qualification of the “mystical” approach can be found in Helen White, The Mysticism of William Blake (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1927).
Note 2 in page 131 Citations from Blake in my text are from The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Garden City, ?. Y.: Doubleday, 1968).
Note 3 in page 131 It may be argued that even mysticism does not necessarily repudiate objects outside the self, and that in a way it greatly enhances them, though at the price of their tangible or sensuous reality. Richard Sterba comments in this context: “the basic element of the mystic experience is the loss of the constrictive frame over our Selves and the fusion with objects of the outside world—be they human or parts of the Cosmos or the universe as a whole,” “Remarks on Mystic States,” American Imago, 25 (1968), 81.
Note 4 in page 131 My precedent for using the nonchronological or thematic organization comes from Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Adams justifies the method on grounds that the short lyrics are microcosms of Blake's larger myth, rather than simply parts of that myth (p. 28). In fairness, it should be noted that preference for the opposite, or chronological, method is expressed by Stanley Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1954), and E. D. Hirsch. Jr., Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), both of whom favor the chronological approach in the context of their particular interests: the shifts in Blake's imagery and attitudes toward innocence and experience, respectively, as these were manifested over a longer period of time. Another good example of the historical method is David Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954). 5The Neo-Platonism of William Blake (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 1961); William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963).
Note 6 in page 131 For a discussion of the relevance of the Persephone Kore myth to these poems, see Kathleen Raine, “Blake's Debt to Antiquity,” Sewanee Review, 71 (1963), 325–450.
Note 7 in page 131 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1947), pp. 356^403; Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (Garden City, ?. Y. : Doubleday, 1963), pp. 254, 337, 379–81.
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