Introduction: ‘What is now proved was once, only imagin’d’

Abstract

Over twenty-five years ago W.J.T. Mitchell expressed the hope that in future critics would give attention to the ‘dangerous… nasty… filthy’ Blake sanitized by earlier scholars in the process of making him ‘safely canonized’, and the study of his works properly professional (Mitchell 1982, 410, 411, 414). During his prophetic musings, Mitchell identified a fat streak of Blakean sexual obscenity, which often took very queer forms and though it’s now uncomfortable to witness his herding of homosexual fellatio, effeminacy and lesbian voyeurism along with rape, lust and sadomasochism under the single (dirty) banner of ‘abnormal sexuality’, the vivid— heterosex- confounding— scenes he revealed (414) made it reasonable to assume that when queer came in from the cold, Blake Studies would offer a warm welcome. At that decade’s end Camille Paglia’s (1990) lurid account of Blake as ‘the British Sade’ (270) certainly suggested a similar critical future. Her apparition of the poet may tremble and thrash beneath ‘the Great Mother’ but Oedipal terror gifts queer insight too, for ‘Blake’s dreadful fate was to see the abyss from which most men shrink: the infantilism in all male het- erosexuality’ (287). And, in the 1990s, queer glimmers did occasionally flash out from scholarship on gender, particularly that which tried to leap the brick wall that feminist criticism had come up against in trying to adjudge Blake’s ‘misogyny’.