William Blake on his poetry and painting : a study of A descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and Jerusalem

200 Pages·2011·3.051 MB·English

by  Blake, William, Adams, Hazard

William Blake on His Poetry and Painting
ALSOBYHAZARDADAMS
ANDFROMMCFARLAND
Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations (2009)
Academic Child: A Memoir (2008)
William Blake
on His Poetry
and Painting
A Study of A Descriptive Catalogue,
Other Prose Writings and Jerusalem
HAZARD ADAMS
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Adams, Hazard, 1926–
William Blake on his poetry and painting : a study of A
descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and Jerusalem /
Hazard Adams.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-4986-6
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Blake, William, 1757–1827. 2. Art and literature—
England—History—19th century. I. Blake, William, 1757–
1827. II. Title.
PR4142.A75 2011
821'.7—dc22 2010040905
British Library cataloguing data are available
© 2011Hazard Adams. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Front cover: William Blake, “Vala, Hyle and Skofeld,” from
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, black carbon ink
and watercolor 6''×81⁄2'', 1804–1818, Fitzwilliam Museum.
Background © 2011Shutterstock
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
With thanks, this book is for
Brian Culhane,
Michael Mays,
Susan Sailer
and
the late Murray Krieger
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Contents
Preface 1
Introduction 3
PART I
1. A Descriptive Catalogue 7
2. A Vision of the Last Judgment 47
3. A Public Address 59
4. On Homers Poetry and On Virgil 67
5. Laocoön 74
6. On His Arts: In the Letters 82
7. Retrospective: The Early Tractates 94
PART II
8. On Poetry, His Poetry, and Other Poets 101
9. From the Prose to Jerusalem 123
10. From Jerusalem and the Prose to Yeats and Joyce 162
Postscript 185
Index 187
vii
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Preface
This book continues the study of William Blake’s prose writings
begun with Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations
(McFarland, 2009).
Part I presents studies of Blake’s writings in which there is emphasis
on his art and art generally, especially painting, engraving, and poetry.
The chapter on Blake’s letters limits itself to these subjects and does not
attempt to treat them as of biographical interest. The chapters in this
part are presented chronologically with the exception of the last one on
the tractates All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion, which
Blake composed earlier than any of the other works studied. The chapter
is retrospective and considers the extent to which certain of Blake’s views
later developed, changed, or remained the same. Scholars of Blake have
often had recourse to and quoted from the writings I discuss, but there
has been no separate extended study devoted to the writings themselves.
In Part II, I do not limit myself to study of one work but consider
Blake’s attitudes toward certain other poets and to poetry in general. I
then pass to Blake’slong poems Milton and Jerusalemto see how Blake’s
prose writings inform and are informed by those works. Part II ends with
a movement from Blake to Yeats and Joyce, two major twentieth-century
writers whose quite different works display interesting affinity to and dif-
ferences from Blake’s thought. There is deliberately from time to time
some repetition, for the book is designed so that readers, particularly stu-
dents beginning study of Blake and readers more casually interested in
his thought, may conveniently consult a particular chapter on a particular
work.
1