Abstract
Critical commentary, says Thomas Weiskel, ‘now illuminates and surrounds Blake like a hovering cherub’.1 Commenting on the penultimate design of Jerusalem in which Jehovah leans upon and embraces a falling Jerusalem, Peter Middleton writes: The embrace could stand for the whole body of Blake criticism trying to encircle the texts with a close exegetic embrace’.2 The sheer volume of Blake criticism (annotation, exposition, elucidation of historical, literary and philosophical contexts) now constitutes something of an interpretive citadel in itself, as if Blake criticism aspired to be a saving corpus upon which, like the unsteady figure of Jehovah in the design from Jerusalem, Blake can safely lean.
If you have formd a Circle to go into
Go into it yourself & see how you would do
(Blake, ‘To God’)
And Felpham Billy rode out every morn
Horseback with Death over the fields of corn
(Blake, Notebook 180812)
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Notes and References
T. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore, 1976) p. 65.
P. Middleton, ‘The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake — Part I: The Critical Tradition’, in F. Barker et al. (eds), 1789: Reading Writing Revolution (Colchester, 1982) p. 110. The plate Middleton refers to is Jerusalem Plate 99E (reproduced in D. V. Erdman, The Illuminated Blake (London, 1975) p. 378.
P. Middleton, The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake: Part II — Silence, Syntax, and Spectres’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (1983) p. 37.
S. T. Coleridge, letter to Tulk, 6 February 1818: The Collected Letters of S.T. Coleridge, E. L. Griggs (ed.), vol. V (Oxford, 1956–71) p. 834.
M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London, 1973) p. xvi.
N. Frye, ‘Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype’, in M. H. Abrams (ed.), English Romantic Poets (London, 1975) p. 68.
T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (1966; London, 1990) p. 179.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art (Princeton, 1978) p. 35.
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1967) p. vii.
Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1977) p. 73.
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980) p. 23.
D. V. Erdman, ‘Blake: the Historical Approach’, in Abrams, English Romantic Poets (Oxford, 1975) p. 80.
Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1977) pp. 305–6.
Leopold Damrosch Jr, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, 1980) p. 4.
D. Punter, ‘Blake and Dialectic’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1984) p. 83.
D. Punter, Blake, Hegel and Dialectic (Amsterdam, 1982) pp. 198–9.
Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud (Cornell, 1980);
Christine Gallant, Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos (Princeton, 1978).
J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1977) p. 204.
H. Bldom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (London, 1982) p. 97.
Bloom, The Visionary Company: a Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Cornell, 1971 edn) p. 1.
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973) p. 29.
Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse (Cornell, 1970) p. 441.
W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Dangerous Blake’, Studies in Romanticism (special issue edited by Morris Eaves) vol. 21, no. 3 (1982) p. 411.
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© 1993 Steven Vine
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Vine, S. (1993). Critical Exclusions: Spectres and Blake Criticism. In: Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22619-1_1
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