Eden: ‘The Ecchoing Green’

Abstract

Some time in 1788 Blake perfected the new method of printing which his dead brother had revealed to him; and from then onwards most of his writings were reproduced by this process. The earliest known example is a sequence of ten minute and rather clumsy plates with the general title All Religions Are One (Keynes 1966, 98; Erdman 1975, 24–6). The seven ‘Principles’ which contain the main substance of this work identify the primary faculty as the ‘Poetic Genius’, affirm that it has the same basic form in all men, and conclude that all religions, being derived from the ‘universal Poetic Genius’, must be essentially one. This pseudo-logical tractate was followed by two comparable but technically superior sequences, each of which bears the general title There Is No Natural Religion (Keynes 1966, 97–8; Erdman 1975, 27–32). The first sequence argues that rational interpretation of sensory evidence could of itself produce only ‘natural and organic thoughts’, and that the ‘Philosophic and Experimental’ character is therefore dependent on the ‘Poetic or Prophetic’. The second affirms that man’s perceptions and desires are not circumscribed by the senses, and draws the conclusion that ‘God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is’. The repudiation of Lockean psychology thus opens the way for a celebration of the Poetic Genius as incarnate divinity.