Here is the opening from William Blake’s “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” the most inviting and shortest of his prophetic poems:

“Art thou a flower! Art thou not a nymph! I see thee now a flower,

Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!”

The Golden nymph replied: “Pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild.

Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight

Can never pass away.” She ceas’d & closd her golden shrine.

Then Oothion pluck’d the flower saying, “I pluck thee from thy bed,

Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts,

And thus I turn by face to where my whole soul seeks.”

Over the waves she went in wing’d exulting swift delight;

And over Theotormon’s reign took her impetuous course.

Bromion rent her with his thunders. On his stormy bed

Lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appalld his thunders hoarse.

Bromion spoke: “Behold this harlot here on Bromion’s bed,

And let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid;

Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south:

Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun:

They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge:

Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent.

Now thou maist marry Bromion’s harlot, and protect the child

Of Bromion’s rage, that Oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.

Then storms rent Theotormon’s limbs; he rolld his waves around,

And folded his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair;

Bound back to back in Bromion’s caves terrors & meekness dwell.

At entrance Theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard

With secret tears; beneath him sound like wavecs on a desart shore

The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money,

That shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires

Of lust, that belch incessant from the summits of the earth.

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Blake writes long lines, “fourteeners,” with some slight variation; sustaining the momentum across them, he recasts a high style in a voice that asks more from the breath, an exhalation of sounds commensurate to the inspiration of a prophet. The vision he presents is fairly simple: Oothoon is Theotormon’s beloved; she has been raped by Bromion, and Theotormon now believes her to be a defiled whore, and he holds Oothoon and Bromion captive. Bromion is not just a rapist; he voices the views of a conventional, orthodox (small O) Christian morality (represented in this poem, and elsewhere, by “Urizen”—“your reason”). His response to Theotormon’s grieved outcry celebrates that religion’s threat of damnation and absolute law: “And is there not one law for both the lion and the ox? | And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains? | To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life.” Hearing Oothoon’s sighs, the Daughters of Albion raise their voices in one of the most glorious moments of Blake’s poetry, in which they celebrate the variety of the “natural,” the variety of nature’s stations, roles, purpose, pleasures, and ends, and denounce the deformation of what is natural in humankind:

“O Urizen! Creator of men! Mistaken Demon of heaven:

Thy joys are tears! Thy labour vain, to form men in thine image.

How can one joy absorb another? are not different joys

Holy, eternal, infinite! and each joy is a Love”

“Does not the great mouth laugh at a gift? & the narrow eyelids mock

At the labour that is above payment? And wilt thou take the apoe

For thy councellor? Or the dog for a schoolmaster to thy children?

Does he who contemns poverty, and he who turns with abhorrence

From usury, feel the same passion, or are they moved alike?

How can the giver of gifts experience the delights of the merchant?

How the industrious citizen the pains of the husbandmen?

Who buys whole corn fields into wastes, and sings upon the heath:

How different their eye and ear! How different the world to them!

With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer?

What are his nets & gins & traps? & how does he surround him

With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude,

To build him castles and high spires, where kings & priests may dwell?

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound

In spells of law to one she loaths; and must she drag the chain

Of life, in weary lust?  must chilling murderous thoughts obscure

The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage

Of a harsh terror, driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod

Over her shrinking shoulders all the day, & all the night

To turn the wheel of false desire, and longings that wake her womb

To then abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form

That live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more”

Till the child dwell with one he hates, & do the deed he loaths,

And the impure scourge force his seed into its unripe birth

E’er yet his eyelids can behold the arrows of the day.”                           (ll. 114-143)

This is of a piece with the Old Testament prophets, but an imitation of none of them. The lines show Blake’s characteristic—when he is at his greatest—ability to write at a level of immense generalization without leaving behind the sensuality of passionate language. When he writes of “cold floods of abstraction” and “forests of solitude,” he admits into his poetry the chill of such abstraction. We might compare “forests of solitude” to the famous “forests of the night” from “The Tyger” (“Tyger Tyger burning bright | In the forests of the night”) to ascertain something essential to Blake’s capacity to make symbols that retain a concrete immediacy. “Forests of solitude” is slightly absurd, since forests are inherently gatherings of trees, but even if we imagine that the phrase envisions the solitude provided by a forest, we would expect the opposite, “solitude of forests,” which gives priority to the material reality. Instead “Forests of solitude” gives pride of place to the abstraction of solitude, and “of” establishes no clear relationship to forests, except to suggest an allegorical landscape of Solitude, like something out of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. But this allegorizing of the abstract is exactly what Blake would deny. The whole thrust of these lines, and of Blake’s imagination, is to discern general truths in the specific natures and materials of things. If he inherits a gnostic tradition, wherein Urizen is the mistaken demon of the heaven, he rejects religion’s condemnation of the physical and sensual in favor of reason; it is not that he would eschew reason but would place reason on the same ground as what he elsewhere calls “concrete particulars.” This is what Blake achieves in “forests of the night”: “night” carries within itself the symbolic breadth of allegory, but it does not depart from the scene; the night has its forests, its shadows clustered about figures, and perhaps Blake knew to hunt nocturnally; in that poem, it also hearkens to the stars that throw down their spears, to the heavenly darkness in which the poem’s god labors at the forge. It does not feel as if Blake is inverting the order of things, since to write “the night of forests” suggests that the night of forests is somehow distinct from night elsewhere; even if night is differently experienced in a forest, it is not its own entity. When reading Blake’s long lines, it is easy to become insensitive to their subtle variations of force that are continuous with Blake’s deepest judgments.

Among the more interesting of words in Blake’s poetry is “energy.” In “America: A Prophecy” we find the phrase “performers of the energies of nature,”  in “Milton,” “& every one remains in his own energy,” and in “Jerusalem,” “No individual can keep these Laws, for they are death | To every energy of man, and forbid the springs of life” and “Become a net & a trap & every energy renderd cruel.” It’s a key word for Blake, and he uses it just before it becomes admitted into the lexicon of scientific terms (in 1807, with Thomas Young)—it suggested a vigor of style and moral force, applied to aesthetics and morals (by Samuel Johnson) and to religion (by Wesley). Interestingly, Blake retains this range but moves it towards the material and scientific: it denotes something akin to a biological life-force as well as a moral and spiritual vigor in his deities, and it even encompasses the powers of biological generation and metallurgical transformations that occupy those deities. In other words, in Blake, there is a recognition that energy, life, and imagination are profoundly interrelated, just as the focused physical exertion of engraving his books was coterminous with their visionary expanse. In this he anticipates the approaching extension of the word into the natural sciences, but he—as he would have hoped—reconciles that sense of the word to its spiritual inheritance.

I make this detour into Blake’s language because in this passage, even without using the word, he shows what it means to write “energetic” poetry: Blake’s long lines are expressions of that energy, and they also are capable of registering all that would oppose it, namely the sclerotic morality that would subsume the erotic into a category of sin (as Bob Dylan sings, “Her sin is her lifelessness,” and Blake would have agreed that this is true sin):

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound

In spells of law to one she loaths; and must she drag the chain

Of life, in weary lust?  must chilling murderous thoughts obscure

The clear heaven of her eternal spring? to bear the wintry rage

Of a harsh terror, driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod

Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night         (ll. 132-137)

The enjambment of “fourteeners” might entail any number of effects, including speed or acceleration, but neither sense nor sound nor sight have necessary priority in a poem, and here they conspire to make the enjambment register the enormous weight, the gravity, against which Oothoon labors, and against which all women labor, as they are made subservient to male desire, and to what Blake will suggest, a few lines later, is the repeated rape of those marriage beds that women have been compelled to occupy. Here, observe how “she must drag the chain” around the line-ending, so that “of life” is diminished, a burdening rather than a quickening, with “weary lust” making sense of how this might be: if sex is the source of life, then the weary toil of undesired sex undoes life itself. In the same line “must chilling murderous thoughts obscure” leaves obscure that “obscure” is a verb, a (Shakespearean) condensation of adjectives that sublimates into clarity and light in the next line, “the clear heaven of her eternal spring.” This, it should be noted, is in the heroic meter: not “iambic pentameter” inflexibly measured out (Blake would have recoiled, I imagine, from the pretentions of prosodic analysis of verse), but the ten-syllable approximation that characterizes the blank verse of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. It sounds out, in other words, as a fulfillment of her desire, a sudden empowered realization of what might be; but in the longer line that Blake employs, this is immediately frustrated by the rapid shift: “to bear the wintry rage.” As a matter of syntax, we are invited to read through the question mark (at the time, it did not necessarily indicate a break in the sequence of clauses), and to hear “to” as purposive: the chilly murderous thoughts obscure the clear heaven of her eternal spring in order to bear the wintry rage. It is as if all of that hope was purposed for enduring greater suffering still. The tripartite syllabic division of the next line registers the excesses of measure, ration, and law: five syllables apiece, and nothing more nor less. When “bound to hold a rod” turns into the final line, the fatigue of enjambment sets it; “bound to hold a rod” could have ended in a full stop. But this fatigue is choreographed, and the line that follows registers its exhaustion, first in the “shrinking” of “shrinking shoulders,” which, in an adjective both accurate and suggestive, reveals the flinching, fearful terror of women in the subtle motion of a shoulder’s shift, and then in the monotonous, inevitable, lifeless progression of “all the day, & all the night” we are returned, with her, to the hopeless, inescapable routine of suffering. In these varied ways, Blake’s poetry rediscovers, against the inheritance of Miltonic blank verse, and standing apart from any poetic exemplar of the eighteenth century (even Christopher Smart), the energy of verse that he felt to have been smothered, and nearly lost, in the rise of reason and the state-sanctioned, state-sanctioning church.

The failure of his England is a denial of sexual energy; the denial of sexual energy is a denial of imaginative energy; the denial of this is a denial of political energy by which the spirit of Albion might be restored or created greater than before. 

Blake is acknowledged to be a visionary and radical poet, but his political radicalism lies not so much in his sense of injustice (it is radical, but so were many British devotees of Paine’s and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man). Instead, his radicalism is implicit in his refusal to accept the common myths and symbols of his days, which extends to his expanded awareness of energy as something that binds together moral, physical, and political life, and which is possessed equally by men and women in their capacity for pleasure, both bodily and spiritual. Blake’s sexual politics depends on this deeper relationship of sexual generation and sexual pleasure to energy itself. Blake shifted the very essence of what it meant to respect the energy of a person. That shift could not, given the extraordinarily small output of Blake’s workshop, reach many people; its interest does not depend on its (necessarily negligible) influence, but on its enduring force. However much social mores evolve, or even “progress,” the anthropologist Maurice Godelier reminds us that society itself operates through mechanisms of repression that cut off channels of desire; the risks of this happening unjustly, violently, or benightedly are inherent to social life. Godelier writes:

In the simplest and therefore the roughest terms, I would say that in every society, an individual becomes a subject responsible for his or her own acts when he or she has made a significant break with the world in which he or she was first socialized without experiencing the sort of trauma that leads to social paralysis and isolation or down the path of forbidden or marginal practices. The world from which this break occurs is that of the family and kinship relations, but it is also a place in which the individual discovers the body and learns about the differences between the sexes and the generations, where the incest taboo, among many other prohibitions both sexual and nonsexual, holds sway. (129)

And even more strongly:

But as Freud has taught us, what is repressed never disappears, but continues to exist in different and unconscious forms that resurface in the conscious mind cloaked in ways that make it partially undetectable. This phenomenon, which cuts across historical periods and cultures and acts on the conditions of an individual’s emergence as a social subject, is evident in each society’s need to control the exercise of sexuality, beginning with the earliest kin relationships into which an individual is born and socialized. To control means both to allow and to forbid; to forbid does not mean to eliminate, however, but to suppress and therefore to repress from the conscious mind, from the place where intent is met by the decision to do or not to do so.

To state this ontological fact in another way, I would assert that no society—and therefore no social subject, no actor, no individual capable of producing and reproducing it—is possible without a social sacrifice of one kind or another, without metaphorically giving up, individually and collectively, a part of human sexuality. (131) 

Blake’s poetry returns us to the elemental experiences of desire, pleasure, and yearning that we repress for the sake of peace; his hope that we might inhabit a world where no such repression is possible is Utopian, but the hope that we might repress less, or more justly and with less hypocrisy is not:

And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty!

This knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling hypocrite?

Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! and all the virgin joys

Of life are harlots; and Theotormon is a sick man’s drem

And Oothoon is the crafty slave of selfish holiness.

‘But Oothoon is not so; a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies

Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears;

If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d

In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work,

Sit on a bank and draw the pleasure of this free born joy.

‘The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin

That pines for man shall awaken her womb to enormous joys

In the secret shadows of her chapter; the youth shut up from

The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image

In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.

Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence?

The self enjoyings of self denial? Why does thou seek religion?

Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou sleekest solitude,

Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire?

‘Father of Jealousy, be thou accursed from the earth!

Why hast thou taught my Theotormon this accursed thing?

Till beauty fades from off my shoulders darken’d and cast out, 

A solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity.

‘I cry, Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!

Can that be Love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?

That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day:

To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary! Dark!

Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?

Such is self-love that envies all! a creeping skeleton

With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.      (ll. 167-197)

“Hypocrite modesty” makes of modesty itself, the very word and idea, a hypocrite, not in its essence of meaning, but in its social function: Blake is calling out what Byron would call “cant,” but whereas “cant” is empty self-deluding talk, “hypocrite modesty” is both word and deed. It is the whole habitus of modesty that Blake strikes at. It is both Theotormon and modesty itself which are “knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling,” the former because he has ensnared Bromion and Ooothoon and made them captive, and the latter because modesty performs its part to deceive as it pursues artful, secret, and fearful ends. The sequence of those adjectives is not arbitrary: “knowing” and “artful” speak to its innermost workings, “secret” to its determination to keep them so, “fearful” to its motivation in doing so, and “cautious” and “trembling” both to its worry over being found out and the outward (false) appearance that constitutes “modest” behavior.  Against this, he sets Oothoon’s true state of being:

Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears;

If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d

In happy copulation; if in evening mild, wearied with work,

Sit on a bank and draw the pleasure of this free born joy.

These lines apprehend the full breadth of what energy, light, and life mean to Blake. The beauty of the light of the morning sun fixes his eyes “in happy copulation.” This is as audacious a moment as any in the poem: the eyes themselves, in their perceiving not just by means of light, but the source of light, are “fix’d” in “happy copulation,” where copulation is the generative power of seeing the world, where the principles of optics that developed from Newton and passed into the philosophy of Berkeley are made subordinate to desire, a more fundamental energy than light itself. “Fix’d” is almost as startling, itself fixed on the end of a line, it denies of copulation the bodily vigor we would expect, and situates copulation the activity of seeing. “Draw” contains a mild pun: draw as in water, but also draw as in completing a preparatory sketch before, say, engraving a piece. Blake’s own activity of an artist is relevant to what he describes, and these very lines are a part of his drawing of this free born joy. “Born” is similarly animated: it matters that joy is “born” because this is a poem about procreation, creation, and giving life (compare to the earlier “force its seed into its unripe birth”). 

Against this vision of procreation in and from beauty, love, and joy, there is the imagination that goes wrong:

The lustful joy shall forget to generate & create an amorous image

In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.

Blake acknowledges the limitations of his language: “forget to generate and create” for a moment seems as if both are forgotten, but “create” here is active and not negated by “forget.” Instead, this is the image of a stifled, desperate erotic fantasy, the silent pillow stifling any sound. But the distinction between “generate” and “create” is apt, since this is a description of masturbation; Blake condemns onanistic futility. And on top of that, “create…an image” nods slightly to the creation of man by the God of the religion that Blake would reject in its institutionalized forms; the subsequent question “Are these not places of religion?” bolsters the suggestion. When Blake writes “the horrible darkness is impressed with images of desire,” he might have in mind the “impressions” of bookmakers, against which “draw” and his own engravings are to be contrasted. Whether or not that is the case, the superb touch of the word “impressed” makes darkness a tangible substance, but one without depth, a screen that bears flat images, rather than light that reveals their depth, and that itself possesses the fullness of form that permits copulation. 

Reduced to a “shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity,” Oothoon has lost substance, form, and being; but “non-entity” also suggests, more specifically, that she has lost her identity as a particular sort of being: entity is not just being, but it is an entity that exists as a species of being. And this leads us to the heart of Blake’s vision, which, despite all of the mythological trappings, is fundamentally a radical naturalism: radical because it seems to return to the roots of nature, which have been covered, and because it finds there the eros and imagination and energy that he celebrates. “Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hang before his sight” is a perfect example of Blake’s mastery of the “fourteener” line. It is hard to see any advantage that Blake might have gained had he sliced this at the ten-syllable mark and written “Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hang | before his sight.” Had he done this, the word “hang” would have hung onto the end of the line, suspending the eye along with the fruit. But that suspense would have been entirely misplaced, stirring anticipation, and suggesting temptation, resolved by what would be a turn into the phrase “before his sight.” As Blake has it, stretched along the single fourteener, the eyes linger on the fruit in disgust, the vision wearied by what it sees. What’s more “before his sight” is almost redundant, to great effect. We already know he is looking at the fruit, so it’s nothing new, in terms of information, to be told that the fruit hangs “before his sight.” But the return of “before his sight” suggests that he cannot remove his sight from the fruit, that he sickens but remains “fix’d” to it—and it “fix’d to him”: he can neither eat nor leave. This sort of “fix’d” seeing is grotesquely different from what Blake had earlier celebrated in the “fix’d copulation” in the light of the morning sun. “Fruit” here sickens because it reminds this corrupt false Love of the generation that it does not seek, but that it cannot entirely escape. The “lamplike eyes” watch “around” the “frozen marriage bed” both because they are jealous (and must watch for any who would approach) but also because they avert their gaze from what they cannot entirely abandon. In a poem titled “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” it is too easy to assume “visions” is a shorthand for prophetic speech, forgetting that the act of seeing is of central importance: seeing truly and freely is loving truly and freely, and loving truly and freely is seeing truly and freely. This is human nature restored to its true and free self; this is Blake’s radical naturalism. That naturalism is capacious, admitting to various creatures and entities the capacity to value what others cannot:

Does the whale worship at thy footsteps as the hungry dog?

Or does he scent the mountain prey, because his nostrils wide

Draw in the ocean? does his eye discern the flying cloud

As the raven’s eye? or does he measure the expanse like the vulture?

Does the still spider view the cliffs where eagles hide their young?

Or does the fly rejoice, because the harvest is brought in?

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath?    (ll. 144-150)

For humankind, though, light itself and love itself play special roles:

Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy! nestling for delight

In laps of pleasure; Innocence! Honest, open, seeking

The vigorous joys of morning light; open to virgin bliss.       (ll. 156-159)

.

I don’t want to indulge in speculative metaphysics—Blake would have abhorred such an attempt. But it is worth remarking on the similarity of light and love. Both are, of course, attributes of divinity, but that is not to say what they have in common in themselves: and that is that they encompass and reveal any object. It is not just that love and light are essential to true human nature, but they are in themselves how the nature of others, humans but not only humans, can be disclosed: to love is to see others, to see others rightly is to love them. They disclose the world, and they disclose what it is for humankind to disclose that world. 

In this, they are similar to a third element that is not stated but that does the stating: language itself. And it is by means of Blake’s language in another, longer visionary epic (Milton) that he achieves what is a perfect expression of his radical naturalism, embodying in his wording the energies inherent in both love and light:

Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring:

The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn

Appears: listens silent: then springing from the waving Cornfield! loud

He leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill, trill,

Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse,

Reechoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell:

His little throat labours with inspiration: every feather

On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine.

All Nature listens silent to him & the awful Sun

Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird

With eyes of soft humility, & wonder, love & awe.                     (Book the Second, ll. 27-37)

To what end, Blake might ask, should political action and ambition aspire if not to such sight and sense?

A Note on Blake’s Mythology:

I’ve written that Blake is concerned with humankind, but the figures of Ooothoon, Theotormon, and Bromion are hardly humans as we know them. They are figures instead in the complex mythology that Blake devised for his longer epic poems. Although they are not humans, however, they work somewhat like caricature, albeit in the direction of myth and epic instead of comedy and satire. It is not preposterous to wonder if Blake, writing in the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, the greatest of British caricature artists, might have conceived of his works along similar lines of focused exaggeration. For these mythical figures draw out and magnify the essential elements of human experience that preoccupied Blake; he makes them in our image so that they can help us imagine what we might be and where we might be going wrong.

Nonetheless, they are strange figures, with odd names, and there has been a debate on them that I want to comment on since it has bearings on the sort of political designs Blake might have had in the long-lined visions and epics.

The primary debate over Blake’s poetry has been misguided in supposing that we ought to fret over the identities of the various mythological figures he invents and inherits. It is especially unfortunate that this debate has assumed political contours, along a right-left axis. 

Of William Blake’s religious inheritance and inventiveness, T.S. Eliot and E.P. Thompson represent two extremes. On the one hand, Eliot, asserting that what William Blake’s “genius required, and what is sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet” (Eliot, 322). On the other hand, Thompson, arguing that “it might be more helpful to consider, not individual doctrines but the degree to which different traditions were capable of sustaining, in the vocabulary of their doctrines, a disciplined and consistent pursuit of knowledge and an enquiry into value, even where subsequent ages have come to view that much of his vocabulary was erroneous,” and finding Blake’s language capable of deep inquiry into “social and political assumptions or enquiries into value” (Thompson, 108). 

I have sympathy for both lines of thought: it is at times exasperating, at times tedious, to read through any of Blake’s longer poems, what the scholar Nicholas Shrimpton calls “diffuse epics,” but in them Blake finds opportunities for profound criticisms of reigning assumptions of his day. More interesting, the views of both Eliot and Thompson are inadequate in similar ways. In wishing upon Blake an inherited system of thought, Eliot denies the validity of the traditions of the Anglican establishment, including the scientific traditions of the Royal Society, in favor of an idealized Latin, Catholic inheritance that he was seeking to claim for himself; more perversely, he refuses to recognize that the active rejection of the enduring structures of the Anglican faith was Blake’s most “honest” (Eliot’s word in praise of Blake) decision as a poet, feeling that all established churches, whatever the tradition, risked ossifying into catacombs of true human nature. Thompson wants to validate Blake by providing possible subterranean dissenting traditions upon which he might have drawn: “Blake can’t have dreamed up a whole vocabulary of symbolism, which touches at so many points the traditions which I have discussed, for himself ab novo. Nor can he have put it together like a mosaic from his reading. Things don’t happen like that” (Thompson, 106).

For Thompson, as for Eliot, some inheritance is essential, not as a condition of Blake’s being a poet, but as a stock of ideas and images upon which he could directly draw. The trouble is not the thought that any poet must have something behind him, something to chew on and digest, but the notion that Blake must have accepted the constraints of some existing, fixed structure of vocabulary and symbols. But it is Blake who writes “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s” (Jerusalem, 1.21). His having written that cannot, of course, establish that he does not borrow even that very notion from elsewhere—but what does make Thompson’s position untenable is that the so called “vocabulary of symbolism” varies so much from poem to poem across time that it suggests Blake was actively rearranging the tiles of the mosaic, if not actively renewing the meanings of the figures and symbols he employed. The very course of Blake’s career suggests an idiosyncratic creative process not merely absorbing but transforming whatever it has gathered. To borrow a term from philosopher Hans Blumenbeg, Blake might be said to “reoccupy” a set of symbols with new meanings, and then to reoccupy his own reoccupations. Most perversely, in my mind, is that Thompson puts his claims to work not on the prophetic epics where they would be most clearly vindicated, but upon the songs of innocence and experience, which do least to challenge them, being the poems that would likewise be least susceptible to Eliot’s criticisms. 

As might be anticipated, the Thompson v. Eliot (and Davie) debate is over the political imagination, with Thomspon approaching from the left corner and Eliot and Davie from the right. But what Thompson and Eliot share, and what Blake’s verse challenges, is the desire for the inheritance of some sort of system that could do the work of explaining Blake. Both want to situate Blake’s vision of historical change within history. This, I think, gets something exactly wrong about Blake, which is central to his political importance. Blake did not invent the language or even all of the coordinates of his poems (“Jerusalem” and “Albion” are not his trademarked terms), but the poetry unceasingly announces that the political inadequacies of his era are inseparable from imaginative inadequacies; the poems need to disorient if they are to reorient us towards a better politics, founded in turn on a better cosmology. This comes close to saying that Blake’s visionary powers were performative; this is a fine way of putting things if the performative is not mistaken for a mere performance. The excesses of Blake’s imagination, the refusal to offer a key to a system, or even a consistent portal for entering its landscapes, cannot be either dismissed as failures or residues of systems of thought. They remain strange because we are estranged from what they offer; this is a point that Blake would need to make, as he refuses both the dominant symbols of state-sanctioned and even state-tolerated Christianity and the rage for order and consistency associated with an age of reason. The visionary poems are demonstrations of the energy that does not cool to solid form; we can recognize in their symbolic figures echoes and reflections of any number of other symbols and archetypes, but these play glancingly on their surfaces, tempting us to define what must be in perpetual flux. Even if Blake is construed as somewhere in a Gnostic tradition, refusing the orthodox Christian answers to the world’s oppression and suffering, and refusing a Christian morality of oppression and repression that feeds that suffering and oppression—even if he is thus construed, he does not simply implicate a usurping deity in the fallenness of the world.

Instead, the constant energy of his poems rejects the grounds of a solid tradition, even if he draws upon radical dissent. Whatever he borrows and adapts, there is no thought that the enduring identity of the figures and struggles of the poems are their true topics; it is the change itself that he celebrates. Where Thompson and Eliot alike go astray is in centering their arguments on the fact of a system, rather than the conditions of its emergence. This latter requires force, momentum, pressure, energy, and this latter is what Blake would ask we honor. Such energy is as unpredictable and roving as the desire that many wrongfully would confine to an unnatural corridor.

And even if there were other structures and techniques available to Blake, for a poet as committed to rejecting some of the deepest ideological assumptions of his age, and saving the imagination from the unnatural forms of thought he saw his society setting upon it, it is hard to see what better solution was available than this: he needed to ceaselessly reinvent systems that would themselves be thought of as perverse and unnatural. In doing so, he could clear a space in which his radical naturalism could be expressed.

Works Cited:

Maurice Godelier, In and Out of the West: Reconstructing Anthropology (Verso, 2009)

T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (Faber and Faber, 1934)

E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast (Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Editions of Blake:

Selected Poems, ed. G.E. Bentley, Jr (Penguin Classics, 2005)

Selected Poems, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton (Oxford Classics, 2019)