William Wordsworth and William Blake – Nature and Anti Nature


Reading William Blake and William Wordsworth back-to-back brings to mind the similarities and differences between them. As they are contemporaries, and both are considered key figures in the Romantic movement in poetry, it’s natural to assume that they have much in common. But any close reading of the two reveals a different story. G.K. Chesterton sums it up in his biography of Blake:

It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti Nature.

Geoffrey H Hartman, in his essay A Poet’s Progress: Wordsworth and the Via Naturaliter Negativa (1962), says:

A number of readers have felt that his [ie Wordsworth’s] poetry honours and even worships Nature; and in this they have the support of Blake, a man so sensitive to any trace of ‘Natural Religion’ that he blamed some verses of Wordsworth’s for a bowel complaint which almost killed him.

But this wasn’t the only respect in which they differed. Blake was appalled by the following passage in Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion:

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep – and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength – all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form –
Jehovah – with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones –
I pass them unalarmed. Not Chanos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,
Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out
By help of dreams – can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look
Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man –
My haunt, and the main region of my song.

Blake’s retort: ‘Does Mr Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?’

Further light is shed on Blake’s attitude to his great Romantic contemporary in the annotations he wrote into his copy of Wordsworth’s 1815 Poems:

I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually, and then he is no poet but a heathen philosopher: at enmity against all true poetry or inspiration.

Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in men. Wordsworth must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in Nature. Read Michelangelo’s sonnet (as translated by Wordsworth, beginning ‘No mortal object…’)

On the other hand, Wordsworth had something altogether more positive to say about Blake:

There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.


7 responses to “William Wordsworth and William Blake – Nature and Anti Nature”

  1. In my opinion – I believe Wordsworth to be far inferior to Blake. Blake truly was a mystic poet.

  2. I agree, I am doing a research report on both and want to pull my hair out while reading Wodsworth’s work; however, I do enjoy ready Blake’s.

  3. I too, am currently studying both poets. I agree with Wordsworth’s view that we can learn far more from the natural world than that of the man made world. However, I much prefer the work of Blake. There are many more layers within his poetry to both analyise and enjoy than in Worsdworth’s. In fact I think his poetry is genius. In addition, if he were alive today his views on creation and divinity would be widely accepted and he would not have been looked upon as being mad at all.

  4. i am studying both poets i havent started reading any poems about blake so i dont know how how good he is but i am going to read one in school so far i have enjoyed all william wordsworth poems

  5. “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”

    Can you please advise on a literary source of this quote from Wordsworth? I am writing an essay on romanticism and Blake and would love to reference this point.

    Regards, Aarone

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