Abstract
The works we have discussed so far are clearly minor. Tiriel and Island are unfinished as well, and their psychological themes are relatively accessible. With The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, however, we are dealing with a work of acknowledged importance that appears consistent thematically as well as in religious, historical, or philosophic terms.1 The question now is whether Blake in his successful work continues to express the strong psychological preoccupations we found earlier and whether the emotional content continues to structure the work. One may also ask if aspects of this content have been ignored by critics using a more traditional approach. One is struck primarily by the extent to which most interpretations deny hostile intent on Blake’s part and discuss the work under quite different categories. Blake’s attacks on figures of authority are seen as necessary to his moral purpose. Northrop Frye, for example, brilliantly rationalises Blake’s expressions of hostility as self-defence: a fearful society indeed seeks to destroy the poet. David Erdman similarly justifies Blake on the grounds of his social conscience. Others simply ignore hostility while concentrating on sexual aspects of the poem. Robert Gleckner is an exception. He senses Blake’s irrational hostility, particularly toward Swedenborg, and concludes that ‘with passion as its basis, the artistic subtlety characteristic of Blake’s other works is understandably lacking’.2
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Notes
Martin K. Nurmi, ‘Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell: a Critical Study’, Kent State University Bulletin, 1975, p. 15.
See, for example, Nurmi (in Kent State University Bulletin, 1975, p. 31), who sees Blake’s pairing of directly opposing emotions as irrelevant to his main argument.
My ideas about Blake’s struggle with Swedenborg and other predecessors were confirmed by reading Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence
and his A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
Bloom’s note in David V. Erdman (ed.), The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor Books, 1970) p. 811.
Nurmi, in Kent State University Bulletin, 1975, p. 38.
an association first brought to my attention by the British analyst Marion Milner (‘Joanna Field’) in her book On Not Being Able to Paint (London: William Heinemann, 1950) p. 80.
See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1955) ch. 2.
Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963) p. 83.
Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (Paterson, NJ: Littlefield, Adams, 1960).
(see Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Anchor Books, 1964) p. 25).
See Dr Phyllis Greenacre, ‘A Study on the Nature of Inspiration’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 12 (1964), for a discussion of the prototype of inspiration as it occurs in childhood in the phallic phase.
But see Morris Eaves, ‘A Reading of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 17–20’, in Blake Studies, 4 (1971), for a different view of Blake’s progress.
Nurmi, in Kent State University Bulletin, 1975, p. 56, suggests that, in the same spirit, Blake is turning Swedenborg’s doctrine of marriage against him, since Swedenborg had said that marriage based on dominion appears as open strife after death.
David V. Erdman, ‘Reading the Illuminations of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) p. 201.
Nurmi, in Kent State University Bulletin, 1975, p. 63.
Robert Essick, ‘The Art of William Blake’s Early Illuminated Books’ (PhD dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1969) p. 135.
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© 1983 Brenda S. Webster
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Webster, B.S. (1983). The Case for Impulse. In: Blake’s Prophetic Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06299-7_4
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