The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.

I’m just reading Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Amazon affiliate link). I think she is my favourite interpreter of poetry, and this might be her greatest work. Every page is revelatory.

One of her major themes is that a consideration of ‘form’ in lyric poetry is vital for a full understanding of the poet’s expression: ‘A set of remarks on a poem which would be equally true of a prose paraphrase of that poem is not, by my standards, interpretation at all.’ (Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Introduction, note 5, page 40).

Vendler demonstrates that lyric poetry of the type represented by these sonnets has very little of interest to impart if we concentrate purely on the propositional ‘meaning’ on the surface:

‘I have insomnia because I am far away from you’ is the gist of one sonnet; ‘Even though Nature wishes to prolong your life, Time will eventually demand that she render you to death,’ is the ‘meaning’ of another. These are not taxing or original ideas, any more than other lyric ‘meanings’ (‘My love is like a rose’, ‘London in the quiet of dawn is as beautiful as any rural scene,’ etc.). Very few lyrics offer the sort of philosophical depth that stimulates meaning-seekers in long, complex, and self-contradicting texts like Shakespeare’s plays or Dostoevsky’s novels.

Vendler goes on to discuss how the poem’s ‘linguistic strategies’ need to be taken into account to yield a comprehensive interpretation of lyric poetry.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet form

The 14-line sonnet form as worked out by Shakespeare in his collection of sonnets consists of four parts: three four-line ‘quatrains’ and one ending ‘couplet’. As Vendler illustrates, Shakespeare (in a totally new way) manipulates the relations between these four parts, putting them in a wide range of logical relationships with each other.

Sometimes the parts are successive and equal, sometimes they contrast with each other, sometimes they’re analogous, at other times logically contradictory. The four ‘pieces’ of any given sonnet may also be distinguished from one another by changes of agency (‘I do this; you do that’), of rhetorical address (‘O muse’; ‘O beloved’), of grammatical form (a set of nouns in one quatrain, a set of adjectives in another), or of discursive texture (as the descriptive changes to the philosophical), or of speech act (as denunciation changes to exhortation). Each of these has its own poetic import and effect.

What Vendler demonstrates is that these formal features represent an ‘inner emotional dynamic’, as the fictive speaker of the Sonnets ‘sees more’, ‘changes his mind’, ‘passes from description to analysis’ and so on. In other words, these formal devices are ‘designed to match what he is recording – the permutations of emotional response’.

I found these perceptions invaluable in appreciating the extraordinary range of expression in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There seems to be an inexhaustible energy of creativity behind them, and once you take into account the ways that the formal and propositional elements interact to create wider perspectives of meaning, the true nature of Shakespeare’s genius emerges.

I wonder if this also accounts for the experience I had while reading through the complete sonnets in sequence – which I can only describe by saying that I fell in love with them. Reading Vendler’s analysis this makes total sense. Shakespeare’s Sonnets enact the emotional/logical confusion, perplexing variety and breadth of vision that accompanies love itself.

As Vendler asserts, ‘no poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets’.

I’ve written here before on meaning in poetry and it’s a subject that continues to fascinate me. Many of our discussions at Culture Club meetings concern meaning (particularly the heated debates around meaning in Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), and I still suspect that this is not necessarily the question we should be asking.

Rather than ask the question ‘what does this mean?’ when faced with art of any kind, I’m more and more drawn to the view that the real question should be ‘what is this?’

Here’s a quote by C.G. Jung, from his lecture ‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’, 1922 (published in The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature):

We have talked so much about the meaning of works of art that one can hardly suppress a doubt as to whether art really ‘means’ anything at all. Perhaps art has no ‘meaning’, at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps it is like nature, which simply is and ‘means’ nothing beyond that. Is ‘meaning’ necessarily more than mere interpretation – an interpretation secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been said, is beauty, and ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’. It needs no meaning, for meaning has nothing to do with art.

Where does that leave the appreciation of art? Perhaps in trying to understand how a piece of art works, how it achieves its effects, its structure, form, etc. Meaning comes into that, but not as the primary focus of our attention.

What do you think – does it matter what art ‘means’?

Elizabeth Bishop’s Sandpiper is concerned with the particular. Through a controlled tightening of focus, like the turn of the lens on a telescope, Bishop draws our attention ever closer to the minutiae of existence, of which the bird is solely conscious: from the water glazing over its feet, to its toes, to the spaces between its toes, to the grains of sand, and finally to the very nature of each grain, their precise colours and the stones and minerals that constitute them.

But while it is concerned with the specific, the poem makes us very much aware of the larger stuff that is outside of this focus. The sea is referenced in a way that we, unlike the sandpiper, cannot completely ignore. Its roaring is the first thing that the poem announces, along with the fact that ‘every so often the world is bound to shake’. The roaring and the shaking are not trivial events. And it is not merely water, or even the sea, but that gigantic ocean the ‘Atlantic’ that drains between its toes.

By drawing attention to that which is ignored, the poet foregrounds the apparent oddity of a consciousness that can shut out something as vast and imposing as an ocean. It provides a kind of irony throughout the poem, that beside something all-encompassing one can focus on something so minute.

It also highlights ‘particularity’ at another level, that of language. The sandpiper ignores the sea, but the poet names it; this isn’t any sea, it’s the particular sea known as the ‘Atlantic’. Likewise, the bird isn’t just any bird, it’s a sandpiper. Or just ‘sandpiper’, as the poem’s title has it, minus the definitive article.

It is common to the point of cliché in literary criticism to state that a poem is about poetry itself, but here this inference can’t be ignored, for we are surely meant to see the type of ‘the poet’ in the qualities of the sandpiper. The reference to Blake is part of this characterisation, with both the Romantic artist and the bird sharing the oxymoronic quality of ‘controlled panic’. The connection between the two is continued through the focus on grains of sand, which echoes Blake’s lines from the Auguries of Innocence: ‘To see the world in a grain of sand.’ It also captures another oxymoron of Blake’s; that the world is both ‘vast and minute’. It is this strain of thought that suggests the tide may be higher and lower at the same time, or at least the difference no longer matters.

But it is surely not the point of this poem to draw our attention to the similarities between a sandpiper and William Blake. The fact that the medium of this message is poetry can only serve to highlight the connections between all poets, and particularly the poet named Elizabeth Bishop, to the subject of which she writes. This impression is driven home by the lightly comic references to the fussiness of the bird, running across the sands, ‘finical, awkward’. Bishop’s tone here suggests that she is only too familiar with these personality traits, not merely from a knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of William Blake but from an awareness of her own character. Read in this way, there is something slightly smug about the poem’s tone, a faux self-deprecation in the line ‘Poor bird, he is obsessed!’ It’s the sort of thing one hears from a certain type of middle class lady who says, ‘Look at me, I’m so scatty’, when what she’s really saying is ‘Look at me, I’m so creative.’

The central meaning of the poem is clear. Bishop is saying that a sensitivity to minute details constitutes a poet’s special view of the world. Or to coin it as another literary cliché, the poet finds generalities in particularities.

Formally the verse is beautifully handled. The random accentuation of the first two lines provide a sense of stasis: ‘The roaring alongside he takes for granted, and that every so often the world is bound to shake’. This is contrasted with the pattering pentameter of ‘He runs, he runs, to the south, finical, awkward’, and in its rhythm we feel the darting movements of the bird.

Other aspects of the form, such as the rhyme scheme and regular syllable count of each line, provides further contrast to the scattered stress patterns, dramatising the sandpiper’s condition – the poem’s organised chaos reflecting the bird’s ‘controlled panic’.

It is, in the end, a highly effective poem, tightly controlled and vividly realised. Only the image of the beach that ‘hisses like fat’ is out of place, a metaphor that bears no relation to the rest of the poem and therefore stands out for the wrong reasons.

Finally, it is the ambiguity behind the sandpiper’s actions that strikes us most forcefully; the sense of mystery that we can all relate to, of ‘looking for something, something, something’. The trochaic metre of this line creates a fitting contrast to the iambic that dominates the poem. The poem ends with a contemplation of the finest detail of the scene, as if to suggest that we can find beauty and truth in the smallest particles, in contemplation of ‘quartz grains, rose and amethyst’.

In Reading Chekhov – A Critical Journey, Janet Malcolm discusses an aspect of Chekhov’s work that is focused on by the so-called Jacksonian critics, namely his repeated references to religion.

It is a kind of ‘Purloined Letter’ situation: the references to the Bible and to the Russian Orthodox liturgy have always been there, but we haven’t seen them, because we took Chekhov at his word as being a rationalist and a non-believer… However, if we slow the pace of our reading and start attending to every line, we will not fail to pick up the clue in a remark like Asorin’s ‘I feel as though I had woken up after breaking the fast at Easter,’ or in Ryabovitch’s feeling that he has been anointed with oil. Indeed, we will find that whenever a Chekhov character undergoes a remarkable transformation, an allusion to religion appears in its vicinity, in the way mushrooms grow near certain trees in the forest. These allusions are oblique, sometimes almost invisible, and possibly not even conscious.

We have Chekhov on record as saying to Diaghilev, ‘I squandered away my faith long ago and never fail to be puzzled by an intellectual who is also a believer.’ And in a letter to Shcheglov, ‘When I think back on my childhood it all seems quite gloomy to me. I have no religion now.’ According to Malcolm, the Jacksonians are careful never to claim that they have found their way to Chekhov’s intentions, so we are left asking ourselves, are these allusions conscious and purposeful, or do they reveal a different strand of meaning at odds with the author’s own intentions?

This issue of an artist’s intention is a critical one, in my view, and it often comes up in discussions of an artist’s work. Christopher Ricks tackles this question early on in his great discourse on the work of Bob Dylan, Dylan’s Visions of Sin:

Briefly I believe that an artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative unconscious or subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual. So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is conscious of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he probably isn’t. And if I am right, then in this he is not less the artist but more. There are such things as unconscious intentions (think of the unthinking Freudian slip). What matters is that Dylan is doing the imagining, not that he be fully deliberatedly conscious of the countless intimations that are in his art.

Ricks quotes Dylan himself on the creative process:

As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your brain not to think too much.
(Bob Dylan, interview with USA Today, 15th February 1995).

He also quotes TS Eliot: ‘The poet does many things upon instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody else.’

This discrepancy between an artist’s intention and an artists’s critical reception is powerfully revealed in Ben Watson’s astonishing book on Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. This unique 600-page tome approaches Zappa’s art through a Marxist/Freudian lense, drawing on Theodor Adorno’s writings on aesthetics. Watson is an intellectual, and his writing is packed full of fascinating insights into Zappa’s art and the state of late 20th-century culture in general. At the end of the book, Watson considers the idea of meeting Zappa and discussing his analysis with the artist himself. He approaches this with some trepidation, but sends him the chapter on ‘Apostrophe and King Lear’, which compares Zappa’s mid-70s album Apostrophe with Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece. Watson finds many startling resonances, pointing to the frozen desolate landscape, the references to ‘nothingness’, the loss of sight and reliance on smell, the philosophical implications of power and social domination, and he concludes that overall the two pieces are juggling with ‘some of the heaviest themes in European culture.’ The response from Frank Zappa and his wife Gail is in many ways surprising:

Gail [Zappa] telephoned. She told me that she and Frank had found the comparison of Apostrophe with King Lear hilarious – they both laughed and laughed – ‘how much of this stuff is there?’ she asked. ‘How long have you been doing this? Where has it been in print? Why has it taken so long for you to get in touch?’ She was so charming – relaxed and amused – I asked if I could bring the manuscript in person, and the reply was yes.

Watson does go to California and the encounter with Zappa and his family is extraordinarily revealing. At this stage Frank Zappa is dying of advanced prostate cancer, but he welcomes the unknown critic into his household, and asks him to read sections of the manuscript to him, his wife and children, their employees and friends (including The Simpsons creator Matt Groening):

I was asked to read from the book, and delivered the section on the cover of Uncle Meat. When I finished my dissertation on reification, Nazism and teeth Frank simply reached over and shook me by the hand… The conversation moved on to the fact that Frank did not read philosophy, and therefore could not have consciously parodied (Plato’s) The Phaedo. Frank remained enigmatically silent. I countered that artists deal intuitively with words and concepts, do not consciously plot every resonance of the symbols and themes they play with. Frank nodded. Certainly the Fido/Phaedo pun – hinted at eight years later (but never actually made) by Jacques Derrida – is a stunning example of what Gail [Zappa] calls Frank’s ‘prescience’:

There are many many examples of things that Frank has said that have happened. Some of them really very inside, just silly references. A perfect example of that is just the title Chunga’s Revenge – if you look in the artwork, there’s the vacuum cleaner dancing around in the studio, a gypsy dancer… and we didn’t know this, but in Spain there’s a very very famous dancer called La Chunga who does the flamenco dances with the castanets and everything. That’s a bizarre example, not of prescience perhaps, but of being in tune with something on a cosmic level – more of that cosmic debris.

For Zappa himself, the whole experience seems to have given him mixed feelings:

I was secretly relieved when Zappa told me he could not bear to hear any more… Reading out the book had been taxing on us both. Frank pointed out that whenever I quoted Theodor Adorno he lost the thread. I replied that that was inevitable, since he did not come from a Hegelian-Marxist philosophical tradition: ‘I’ve never read any philosophy at all,’ he commented. When I compared my work to ‘translation’ – translating Zappa’s art into a theoretical language – he agreed, and said the process was ‘valid’… Later Gail came with a message from Frank saying that he was tired and ill, listening was a strain – but he had not developed an aversion to my writing and he did not want me to draw that conclusion.

As for the critic and his conclusions:

It is the dream of the critic to be approved by the artist. Despite the warm reception – Frank actually called me a ‘genius or something’ at the Friday soiree – I had to recognise that we talk different languages, operate on different lines.

In researching this post, I found a bit of Cosmic Debris flung my way. As I took the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play down from my shelf to look up my dimly reflected memories of the meeting between artist and critic, the book fell open at a page with the following reference:

In 1975 Jeremy Prynne told a shocked gathering of undergraduates that any literary critical ‘analysis’ of the lyrics of Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa was a vain exercise…

Jeremy Prynne, of course, being the subject of inquiry for this month’s Culture Club meeting. I then discovered that the book was dedicated thus: ‘For Jeremy Prynne and Danny Houston, the true gurus on this one.’ Now as far as I know, I’d never heard of Jeremy Prynne before someone in the Culture Club brought him to may attention just last month, so this has to be just one of those coincidenes; perhaps, in the Jungian sense, a meaningful one, or perhaps, in Frank Zappa’s phrase, just a piece of cosmic debris. As neither an artist nor a critic, I suppose I’m not qualified to say.

In her excellent book Reading Chekhov – A Critical Journey, Janet Malcolm discusses Chekhov’s attitude to romantic love and beauty. She refutes Gary Saul Morson’s view, as expressed in his essay ‘Prosaic Chekhov: Metadrama, the Intelligentsia, and Uncle Vanya’, which reads the play as the apotheosis of the prosaic. Morson understands Chekhov to be faulting Astrov for rejecting the estimable, plain Sonya and pursuing the useless, beautiful Yelena: ‘Chekhov, like Tolstoy, usually regards love based on passion or romance with deep suspicion.’

Janet Malcolm disagrees fundamentally with this approach to Chekhov’s play:

Yes, Chekhov adopts the Tolstoyan position in [his short story] The Duel, but in Uncle Vanya he swerves sharply from it. In his own life, far from regarding romantic love with suspicion, Chekhov considered it the sine qua non of marriage. He could not have put the matter more plainly than he did in a letter of 1898 to his younger brother Michael (who had been urging him to marry):

To marry is interesting only for love. To marry a girl simply because she is nice is like buying something one does not want at the bazaar solely because it is of good quality. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; all the rest is dreary and cannot be reckoned upon however cleverly we make our calculations. So the point is not in the girl’s being nice but in her being loved.

Indeed, in Uncle Vanya, far from faulting Astrov for rejecting Sonya and pursuing Yelena, Chekhov suggests that Astrov can do nothing else. It isn’t a matter of choosing between a good course of action and a bad one. In these matters, one has no choice. ‘Alas, I shall never be Tolstoyan! In women, what I like above all is beauty,’ Chekhov wrote to Suvorin in 1891. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ echo throughout the play. Far from celebrating prosaic virtue, Vanya mourns its pitiful insufficiency. The action of the play is like the throwing of a stone into a still pond. The ‘beautiful people’ – Yelena and Serebryakov – disturb the life of the stagnant household of Voinitsky and Sonya, stir up the depressed and exhausted Astrov, and then abruptly depart. The waters close over the stone and are still again. Uncle Vanya is a kind of absurdist Midsummer Night’s Dream. Strange events take place, but nothing comes of them. Visions of happiness appear and dissolve. Everything is as it were before. In the heartbreaking speech with which the play ends, Sonya speaks to Vanya of her faith in a ‘bright, lovely, beautiful’ afterlife. Real life remains lustreless, uninteresting, unbeautiful.

Richard Gilman has written a very good introduction to the Penguin edition of Chekhov’s plays. I always read introductions after I’ve got myself thoroughly familiar with the works in question, and I found the following passage illuminated some of the issues I was grappling with around the two Chekhov plays we’re looking at (The Seagull and Uncle Vanya):

Many ways exist for getting Chekhov wrong, so herewith a short guide to avoiding them. Don’t look for ‘realism’ in these plays; don’t expect conventional endings, happy or otherwise; be aware of how Chekhov often has one character subvert another’s point of view, when it threatens to harden into ideology or melt into sentimentality; keep alert to the hints and nuances in speeches, along with the literal words; don’t look for answers, to your problems or life’s dilemmas; throw away any idea you might have that drama is always about ‘conflict’, or, rather remember that in these plays conflict is more often internal – within characters – than between them; keep in mind that no single character in any play speaks wholly for Chekhov, the most unbiased and democratic of authors; don’t ever regard, admiringly or not, a Chekhov play as an exercise in ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ – they’re solid works of imagination, not emotional vapours. Here is Virginia Woolf writing in 1920: ‘It is, as a rule, when a critic does not wish to commit himself, or to trouble himself, that he speaks of atmosphere.’ Don’t forget that Chekhov is often very funny, so feel free to laugh, aloud if the impulse strikes you.

As an aside, I wish I’d had that Woolf quote (on ‘atmosphere’) to hand at the last meeting, when some of our esteemed Culture Club members were content to look on Bob Dylan’s song Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts as an exercise in creating atmosphere, and in itself devoid of any meaning.

My favourite track from the 2006 Dylan album, Modern Times, is the song When The Deal Goes Down. The video casts a different angle on the song, and features current it-girl Scarlett Johansson in a nostalgia-drenched American dreamscape. Not too sure what the relevance to the song is, but it’s worth a look if you want to warm your heart up on valentine’s day, or any other day for that matter. Watch out for Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNv02iE_9rU

When we picked the works for this month’s Culture Club, we chose them based on the concept of the supernatural, and the idea of ‘moving between different worlds’. But I’ve discovered another common theme among the major works we’re discussing (Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Powell & Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death) that has nothing to do with the supernatural, and yet is perhaps central to them all. This theme is: the argument between law and love.

I first came across this idea in connection with Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and its antinomian stance (antinomian in the sense that the gospel of Christ is in direct antagonism to the ‘moral law’ of the old testament), which I outlined in an earlier post. To summarise, in his book Witness Against the Beast EP Thompson makes the following case:

The signature of antinomian sensibility will be found, not at two or three points only in Blake’s work, but along the whole length of his work, at least from 1790 until his death. They are manifest in the Songs [of Innocence and Experience]. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is an antinomian squib thrown among Swedenborgians. In the early prophecies, Urizen is the author of the Moral Law; in the major prophetic books the argument between law and love, repression and regeneration, is intrinsic to their structure.

Now look at A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play opens with Theseus and Hippolyta preparing for their nutpials, but the action begins when Egeus enters and holds up the threat of Athenian law against his daughter (death or banishment to a nunnery). He does this in order to stop her marrying Lysander, whom she loves, and to ensure that she marries his own favourite suitor, Demetrius. In the introduction to the Arden Shakespeare edition, Harold F. Brooks says:

As is usual in Shakespeare, the romance in the comedy springs partly from threat: here the initial threat is brought by Egeus. As a ‘heavy father’ thwarting his daughter’s choice in love, he is the successor of the Duke in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and perhaps of Capulet. North mentions Theseus’ responsibility for ‘preservation of the laws’; and like Duke Solinus at the start of The Comedy of Errors, in the Dream he affirms his inability to extenuate or mitigate them: like him, despite reluctance, he can do no better than pass a superended and conditional sentence. Still like Solinus, eventually he does what he had declared impossible, but in changed circumstances when no sensible and magnanimous ruler could have done otherwise.

In a footnote Brooks quotes Alexander Leggatt, from his book Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love: ‘it is the law itself, and not the prince’s will, which constitutes the threat.’ And what is threatened by this law is ‘true’ love. Brooks concludes, ‘In the Dream, it is only after supernatural intervention that Theseus’s reason and goodwill can decide the outcome and assure the lovers’ happiness.’

The film A Matter of Life and Death provides the most bald statement of this theme. The last act of the film is a trial in heaven, in which Carter has to prove that he loves June in order to circumvent the natural law that demands his life. This is clear enough, but the final line of the film seals it:

The law may be the strongest thing in the universe, but on Earth nothing is stronger than love.

More posts on William Blake at Culture Club:

• William Blake, the Ghost of a Flea
• William Blake and the Romantic Conception of the Individual
• William Wordsworth and William Blake: Nature and Anti Nature
• William Blake Invents Free Verse in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• G.K. Chesterton on William Blake and Mysticism
• Was William Blake Mad?
• William Blake and the Tradition of Antinomianism
• Terry Eagleton on William Blake: Sex, Art and Transformation

E.P. Thompson’s excellent book on William Blake, Witness Against The Beast, provides a brilliant  analysis of the religious and political traditions which helped form Blake as an artist, and the source of ideas behind many of his poems and paintings. In it he outlines how Blake’s work can be seen as part of a strand of thinking known as antinomianism. Antinomianism essentially means ‘against law’, and represents the idea that, as Thompson puts it, ‘The Ten Commandments and the Gospel of Jesus stand directly opposed to each other: the first is a code of repression and prohibition, the second a gospel of forgiveness and love.’

Blake makes unequivocal antinomian affirmations throughout his work, and very specifically in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Only think of the following from plate 23:

I tell you no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments… Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.

The Moral Law (as he refers to the Ten Commandments) also stands for the State and the Church, and Blake was not alone at this time in his radical dissent. Thompson describes a dizzying array of sectarian Christian groups from the 1640s to the late 18th century, and discovers many possible derivations for the ideas expressed by Blake in his religious works, especially those ideas proposed by the Muggletonians. Thompson sums up his position as follows:

[Blake] composed a symbolic world for himself in which the robust tradition of artisan and tradesman antinomianism reasserted itself, not as literal doctrines, but as a fund of imaginative possibilities and as intellectual footholds for an anti-Enlightenment stance.

More posts on William Blake at Culture Club:

• William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea
• William Blake and the Romantic Conception of the Individual
• William Wordsworth and William Blake: Nature and Anti Nature
• William Blake Invents Free Verse in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• G.K. Chesterton on William Blake and Mysticism
• Was William Blake Mad?
• Terry Eagleton on William Blake: Sex, Art and Transformation
• The Argument Between Law and Love – A Common Theme

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.

More posts on William Blake at Culture Club:

• William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea
• William Blake and the Romantic Conception of the Individual
• William Blake Invents Free Verse in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell
• G.K. Chesterton on William Blake and Mysticism
• Was William Blake Mad?
• William Blake and the Tradition of Antinomianism
• Terry Eagleton on William Blake: Sex, Art and Transformation
• The Argument Between Law and Love – A Common Theme