READING WILLIAM BLAKE Also by Stephen C. Behrendt HISTORY AND MYTH: ESSAYS ON ENGLISH ROMANTIC LITERATURE (editor) THE MOMENT OF EXPLOSION: BLAKE AND THE ILLUSTRATION OF MILTON SHELLEY AND HIS AUDIENCES P.B. SHELLEY, ZASTROZZI AND ST. IRVYNE (editor) APPROACHES TO TE AC HING SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (editor) Reading William Blake STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT Professor of English University of Nebraska, Lincolrz M MACMILLAN © Stephen C. Behrendt 1992 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1992978-0-333-52484-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or und er the terrns of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1 P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and dvil claims for damages. First published 1992 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Edited and typeset by Grahame & Grahame Editorial Brighton British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Behrendt, Stephen Reading William Blake I. Title 821 ISBN 978-1-349-38959-9 ISBN 978-0-230-38016-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230380165 for Joseph Wittreich This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii List of Plates x Key to Abbreviations xi A Note on Copies xii 1 Introduction: Reading Blake's Texts 1 The Illuminated Page 12 An Example: Five Plates from America 25 2 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 36 The Songs in Context 42 The Songs and the Reader 51 3 Three Early IIIuminated Works 73 The Book of Thel 74 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 84 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 93 4 Lambeth Prophecies I: History of the World 101 Reconstituting History 105 Metamorphosis and Encyclopedic AIIusion 113 5 Lambeth Prophecies II: History of the Universe 125 Inversion, Reversal, and the Ways of Seeing 126 Myth, Metamorphosis and the Nature of Reality 143 6 Epic Art: Milton and Jerusalem 152 Milton and Epic Art 153 Jerusalem and the Eternal Community 165 Notes 174 Index 191 VB Preface This book explores the dynamics of the reading process involved in reading William Blake's illuminated poems. Those poems include on the same pages verbal texts and visual texts that often seem to be at odds with one another or even, at times, to be entirely unrelated. Because reading verbal texts and visual texts involves different aesthtic assumptions and operations, the texts of Blake's iIluminated pages simultaneously make different demands on their readers, which further complicates the reading activity. I have not attempted here to offer a comprehensive reading of Blake's poetry. Rather, I have explored some of the demands that Blake's illuminated texts place upon us as part of the process of reading and comprehension. I have tried to outline some of the ways in which the intellectual and imaginative transaction proceeds between author and reader via the medium of the iIIurninated text as physical artifact. That text comprises a fertile intersection among frequently differing <and in no case identical) systems of reference applied to the text by author and readers, each of whom brings to the reading activity different degrees of cultural conditioning. I wish to thank the University of Nebraska Research Council for funding that enabled me to conduct research at some of the most important Blake collections, as weIl as for the summer fellow­ ship that enabled me to devote the summer of 1990 to the final stages of this study. I thank, too, the National Endowmnent for the Humanities for a Travel Grant that facilitated my return to England to conduct additional research as the project neared its conclusion. I am grateful for the advice and assistance I have received at numerous institutions whose Blake collections have figured in my research for this book. Arnong these, I extend special thanks to the staffs 01 the Tate Gallery (and to Martin Butlin especially), the Fitzwilliam Museum (and Jane Munro), the British Museum, the Library of Congress and the Huntington Library. To those colleagues and friends who graciously read and com­ mented on parts of the manuscript, and especially to Marcia Pointon, I extend my thanks as weil. To Patricia FIanagan Behrendt I owe a particular debt of gratitude, both for her insightful readings of the viii Preface ix manuscript in its various stages and for her unfailing support and enthusiasm. Studying with Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., at the University of Wisconsin some twenty years ago, I came to what is proving to be a life-Iong interest in Blake and in the lively and complex milieu of his times. To this superbly gifted scholar, stimulating colleague and good friend, I dedicate this book. STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT List of Plates 1. America: A Prophecy, frontispiece (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 2. America, plate ii (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 3. America, plate 1 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 4. America, plate 2 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 5. America, plate 3 (Copy 0), Fitzwilliam Museum. 6. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, title page (Copy T), British Museum. 7. "The Blossom" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 8. "The Divine Image" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 9. "The Human Abstract" (Songs of Innocence and of Experience), (Copy T), British Museum. 10. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, title page (Copy 0), British Museum. 11. Europe: A Prophecy, plate 11 (Copy K), Fitzwilliam Museum. 12. The Book of Urizen, title page (Copy D), British Museum. 13. The Book of Urizen, final plate (Copy D), British Museum. 14. Milton, plate 18 (Copy A), British Museum. 15. Mi/ton, plate 42 (Copy A), British Museum. 16. Jerusalem, plate 99 (Copy E), Paul Mellon. To minimize confusion, I refer to these illustrations through­ out the text not as "Plates," but as "Figures," to distinguish them from references to Blake's finished "plates". x Key to Abbreviations All quotations from Blake's writings follow The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, revised edition, ed. David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1982). These are identified in the text as "E", followed by page, plate and line numbers. A helpful monochrome visual guide to Blake's illuminations is David V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), which reproduces copies of the illuminated plates. Where the differing order of plates in various co pies of Blake's poems makes dting pages by plate numbers alone insufficient, I have also included references to this edition, citing them in the text as "IB", followed by page number. Abbreviations of Titles Cited T The Book of Thel MHH The Marriage of Heaven and Hell VDA Visions of the Daughters of Albion A America: A Prophecy E Europe: A Prophecy SL The Song of Los BU The Book of Urizen BA The Book of Ahania BL The Book of Los M Milton J Jerusalem FZ The Four Zoas VLJ AVision of the Last Judgment DC Descriptive Catalogue xi A Note on Copies Generally, I refer in this book to the plates of Blake's iIluminated poems without distinguishing among copies unless there is particu­ lar reason for calling attention to one copy rather than another. With this compromise the Blake purist must inevitably find some fault, for the variations among copies are often very great indeed. One finds, for instance, significant differences among copies in quality of printing, nature and extent of coloring, degree of "finish" and other technical details, as weIl as - in many wor ks - the order of the plates themselves. Unfortunately far the average reader, there is simply no substitute for seeing Blake's texts in the original. Even the finest of reproductions, as for instance the magnificent facsimiles issued by the Blake Trust, fail adequately to "rcproduce" the originals. Same guidance on the complicated matter of variants is available in David V. Erdman's The Illuminated Blake,l although the observations about colors and details that accompany the monochrome reproduc­ tions are frequently idiosyncratic and subject to very considerable dispute, as is inevitable with any such attcmpt to catalogue the minutiae of Blake's illuminations. In the course of writing this book I have studied many of the copies of Blake's works in Great Britain and the United States. Doing so has reminded me of just how profound are the differences among copies of individual works, and how profound tao are the differences in the effects which those various copies have upon a reader. Early works like the Songs of Innocence and of Experience display some of the most dramatic variations. Early copies of Innocence, for instance, are generally only lightly colored, with some wash effects that do not extend into the verbal text areas, while in late copies (Iike Copy Z, the Roscnwald copy of 1826; Library of Congress) the coloring is very elaborate: figures and details are colored carefully and intensely, gold and silver touches are added, colored washes of varying intensity are applied to the area of the verbal text, and in general virtually no "white space" is Ieft on the pages. This heightened finish characterizes most of the copies of his works Blake prepared after 1800, and is particularly apparent in the splendid late copies of works Iike America: A Prophecy (Copy 0, Fitzwilliam Museum) and Eurape: A Prophecy xii A Note on Copies xiii (Copy K, Fitzwilliam Museum) that he prepared for lohn Linnell in about 1824.