Blake’s Bowers of Bliss: The Gitagovinda, The Four Zoas, and Two Illustrations for L’Allegro

Abstract

William Blake’s poetry and art received a flood of new images to stimulate and inspire in the form of Hindu poetry, pictures and engravings with the publication of Sir William Jones’s Asiatick Researches (established in 1788) and Edward Moor’s The Hindu Pantheon (1810).² Their explorations of India’s art, poetry, mythology and philosophy had enormous influence on the British artists and writers of the day. Blake perceived the fantastic power of this ‘new’ art and poetry, unabashedly instilling many Eastern themes and ideas into his own oeuvre. Although these British scholars and artists modified much of what they saw and knew — negotiating that fuzzy line between the truth of experience and the tastes and expectations of their audience at home — their influence was considerable. Jones’s effort to share India with the British people came first in the form of an essay explaining the religion of Hinduism to a Christian audience, via the filter of Greek and Roman mythology (‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, published in the first volume of Asiatick Researches in 1788). Blake may have adopted some of the ideas that Jones shared when he created, among other things, the unique facets of the Zoas and the universal character of Albion, and when he described an alternative notion of time.³