Today's Topics:
'Never Pain' & 19th century editors
McQUAIL RE DEAD MAN & BLAKE BIBLIO
Re: Blake in the library
Blake's Early Popularization
Re: Blake in the library
Re: Blake in the library:postscript
Slight Correction on Emerson
Re: Blake's Early Popularization, Boston, & Emerson
Blake & Emerson
Yet once more: Emerson, Blake, Letters, & Social Aims
Four Zoas: Luvah, Los & Orc
Dolly
Blake & Emerson
Dumain's folly, the cloak of knavery
Re: The Latest Blast from Dumain
19th Century Literacy
Raine?
Emerson, Blake, And... Madness
Re: Raine?
Re: Blake's Early Popularization, Boston, & Emerson
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 97 12:27 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com, reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
Subject: 'Never Pain' & 19th century editors
Message-Id: <199702261842.MAA28526@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>
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Just a very quick reply: Since there's (perhaps mercifully) no such
thing as a Blake Variorum Edition, I don't think there's any
one-stop-shopping way of checking which 19th (or 20th) century editor
did what to any given poem by Blake. (For instance, I am shocked to
see that in our Norton Critical Edition we did not even bother to
inform readers that Blake had totally and unmistakably cancelled the
first stanza of 'Never /seek/ pain to tell thy love.' I don't know of
any modern edition that omits the stanza entirely, but it is usually
at least bracketed or italicized.)
Deborah Dorfman's *Blake in the Nineteenth Century* (1969) tells
something of Rossetti's heavy-handed editorial interventions -- worse,
almost, than anything that was done to Emily Dickinson -- and his and
his brother's involvement in helping Anne Gilchrist complete her
husband's biography of Blake. (There's a 1954 dissertation on Blake's
19th century reputation by Louis Crompton that I recall as being more
readable and better organized than Dorfman's published work -- but I'm
getting off the subject.)
If I recall correctly, it was through the generosity of W. A. White's
daughter, a Mrs. Emerson of Cambridge MA, that the Notebook she
inherited went to the British Museum, while other items went to
Harvard. White wrote a book on his mania for collecting books, but I
don't recall whether he specifically discusses the development of his
interest in Blake. Tim Linnell may dispute this, but the taste for
collecting Blake on a grand scale developed earlier in this country
than in Britain; hence the richness of the Blake holdings of American
respositories such as the Rosenwald collection in the Lib. of
Congress, the Huntington Lib. in San Marino, CA, the Paul Mellon
collection already given to or destined for Yale, the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A gossipy aside that I
hope I'll be forgiven for if I've already broadcast it on this
hot-line: the reason those Blakes are in Philadelphia is that Anne
Gilchrist sold off part of her collection to support herself in her
(needless-to-say) unsuccessful pursuit of Walt Whitman in nearby
Camden, NJ. -- Mary Lynn Johnson
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 07:52:51 -0500 (EST)
From: WATT
To: Blake@albion.com
Subject: McQUAIL RE DEAD MAN & BLAKE BIBLIO
Message-Id: <2551520726021997/A63488/RUTH/11B2D1F42D00*@MHS>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII
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I don't know about printings of anything other than some of the Songs, but
Swinburne's book on WB came out, I think, in the late sixties and Ellis &
Yeats' three volume Complete Works in the nineties. Someone else,
doubtless, will have a more complete bibliographical sketch.
------------------------------
Date: 26 Feb 1997 11:01:27 -0800
From: "Tom Vogler"
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake in the library
Message-Id:
Reply to: RE>Blake in the library
Apropos of the question of BlakeUs accessibility in the nineteenth century, I
recommend Debora DorfmanUs _Blake in the Nineteenth Century_ (Yale UP, 1969).
I donUt recall offhand if she has anything to say specifically about lending
libraries, but she covers the printed versions and comments on Blake with some
care.
--tomvogler
___________________________________________________
Tim, I think you are right. The late 19th century looks to be exactly the
period in
which Blake's works came into popular favor and probably went into lending
libraries.
At the least it was a time when a great flurry of publishing activity on the
collected
works commenced.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 16:07:09 -0500
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com, rananim@rananim.prestel.co.uk
Subject: Blake's Early Popularization
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
It seems to have taken Emerson until 1876 to include an essay that
discussed him, called "Poetry and the Imagination" in _Letters and Social
Aims_. (Emerson's earlier works talk frequently about Kant, Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, for example.) This may tie in with the publishing date that
Susan P. Reilly notes in a Boston edition of Blake's stuff:
>AS for the libraries: the publisher Bell in London began bringing out
>collections of
>the poetical works in 1874 (I think this was the first Bell edn). The
>collection
>went through reprints and varying editions in 1883, 1888, 1890, 1891,
>1893: at least 4
>edns and I-don't-know-how-many reprints. In 1875 it was pub'd in Boston.>>>
Here is how Emerson spoke of Blake in that essay, under the "Imagination"
section:
"William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Wordsworth said, interested
him more than the conversation of Scott or Byron, writes thus: 'He who does
not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better
light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.... I
question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window
concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.'
"'Tis is a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy
and Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded.
Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul
reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is driven
to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and
at leisure plays with the resmeblances and types for amusement, and not for
its moral end, we call its action Fancy."
Later, in the same essay, Emerson makes another point:
"Tis easy to repaint the mythology of the Greeks... but to point out
where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public
assemblies; to connect the vivid energies acting at this hour in New York
and Chicago and San Francisco with universal symbols requires a subtle and
commanding thought."
= + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = +
D.H. Lawrence's friend, Jessie, gave him _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of
Experience_ for Christmas, "probably in 1905. Blake's passionate dialectic,
his hatred of scientific truth and fact, his insistence upon the supreme
value of the individual in the face of the social norm-- these became
things which stayed with Lawrence."
---John Worthen, _D.H. Lawrence, The Early Years_
= + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = + = +
-Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 15:09:37 -0600 (CST)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake in the library
Message-Id: <199702262109.PAA14928@dfw-ix1.ix.netcom.com>
Yes, Tom
Mary Lynn Johnson mentioned the work in her interesting reply on the
subject wch, unfortunately, she did not post to the list. More later.
Susan
You wrote:
>
> Reply to: RE>Blake in the library
>
>
>Apropos of the question of BlakeUs accessibility in the nineteenth
century, I
>recommend Debora DorfmanUs _Blake in the Nineteenth Century_ (Yale UP,
1969).
>I donUt recall offhand if she has anything to say specifically about
lending
>libraries, but she covers the printed versions and comments on Blake
with some
>care.
>--tomvogler
>
>___________________________________________________
>Tim, I think you are right. The late 19th century looks to be exactly
the
>period in
>which Blake's works came into popular favor and probably went into
lending
>libraries.
>At the least it was a time when a great flurry of publishing activity
on the
>collected
>works commenced.
>
>
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 15:22:50 -0600 (CST)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake in the library:postscript
Message-Id: <199702262122.PAA16017@dfw-ix6.ix.netcom.com>
I think MLJ's post did eventually arrive at albion.com. sometime after
I received it. So I won't go over the ground she has already covered.
S. Reilly
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 17:01:28 -0500
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Slight Correction on Emerson
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
According to Robert Richardson's _Emerson, The Mind on Fire_, the original
date of "Poetry and Imagination" in which he quoted Blake was 1872. The
bundling in a package was therefore (from my Oxford Authors edition) the
1876 date.
-R.H. Albright
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 16:43:06 -0600 (CST)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake's Early Popularization, Boston, & Emerson
Message-Id: <199702262243.QAA06121@dfw-ix9.ix.netcom.com>
I'm sure you must be right: once Blake's works became available in the
U.S. (and they must have been readily accessible to Emerson in Boston)
the references to his works start turning up prominently in American
Lit.
And that was kind of my original point about the "ins" and "outs" of
canon-formation and publication histories: that first of all, unless
the work finds its way into print (mostly through the efforts of
[other] authors & poets, scholars, and publishers and patrons) you
don't even have a work to talk about (Derrida would say "disseminate"),
and you don't have the ripple effect of its influence in the writing
which follows.
Blake as you know privately published editions of his work 100 or so
copies at a time for private circulation (a practice wch dates back at
least to 15th or 16th century Eng Lit) but it's not till much later,
with the rise of a reading (i.e. literate) public and innovations in
printing like the steam and stereotype press that you get really wide,
large, and international circulations.
Amen.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 17:42:28 -0600 (CST)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Blake & Emerson
Message-Id: <199702262342.RAA11276@dfw-ix13.ix.netcom.com>
Assuming your dates are correct, don't forget that Emerson had traveled
to England and met with Colerdige, Carlyle, and Wordsworth in 1833.
Anyone out there know more about the Emerson-Blake connection?
Susan
You wrote:
>
>According to Robert Richardson's _Emerson, The Mind on Fire_, the
original
>date of "Poetry and Imagination" in which he quoted Blake was 1872.
The
>bundling in a package was therefore (from my Oxford Authors edition)
the
>1876 date.
>
> -R.H. Albright
>
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 18:24:41 -0600 (CST)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Yet once more: Emerson, Blake, Letters, & Social Aims
Message-Id: <199702270024.SAA08451@dfw-ix4.ix.netcom.com>
By the way, the earliest date of publication for Emerson's "Letters and
Social Aims" seems to be 1875. Where, Randall, does Richardson say it
was pub'd in 1872, and by whom?
SR
------------------------------
Date: 26 Feb 97 19:26:21 EST
From: Philip Benz <100575.2061@CompuServe.COM>
To: "internet:blake@albion.com"
Subject: Four Zoas: Luvah, Los & Orc
Message-Id: <970227002620_100575.2061_GHW70-2@CompuServe.COM>
I've got a few questions from my reading of _The Four Zoas_, if
there are any Blakeites not yet unsubscribed from this list .
1) Is Luvah's lament from Night the Second about his lost sexuality,
his regrets at the imposed sublimation of his primal physical energy?
I'm tempted to read the following passage as an allegory for Luvah's
masturbation and subsequent self-insemination:
. If I indeed am Valas King & ye O sons of Men
. The workmanship of Luvahs hands; in times of Everlasting
. When I calld forth the Earth-worm from the cold & dark obscure
. I nurturd her I fed her with my rains & dews, she grew
. A scaled Serpent, yet I fed her tho' she hated me
. Day after day she fed upon the mountains in Luvahs sight
. I brought her thro' the Wilderness, a dry & thirsty land
. And I commanded springs to rise for her in the black desart
. Till she became a Dragon winged bright & poisonous
. I opend all the floodgates of the heavens to quench her thirst
Is it too primitive of me to read the earth-worm/serpent/dragon as
the growth of the phallus, followed by its explosive release? In the
subsequent lines, I see two possible interpretations: either Luvah has
impregnated (him)self to give birth to Vala, or else "the Great deep"
(whoever that is!) has briefly served as a surrogate mother.
2) As you may recall from previous posts, I have been struggling
with the paradoxical birth of Orc to Los & Enitharmon, even though Orc
must be interpreted as a reincarnation of Luvah. I was also perplexed at
Los' inexplicable jealousy of Orc -- at least inexplicable within the
sole context of _The Book of Urizen_.
But in _FZ_, later in Night the Second, I see Los & Enitharmon
"joying" with Urizen & Ahania, Luvah & Vala. I see the roots of Los'
(and Enitharmon's) jealousy in the contact with Urizen, and the roots of
Orc's birth in the contact with Luvah. How does Orc first manifest in
_Ur_? As a worm & a serpent. Could Orc be a son begot on Los' wife
Enitharmon *by Luvah*?
Linked to this is the later portrayal of Orc as the Christ of the
crucifixion -- Christ was also a bastard son of sorts. Seeing Orc as the
bastard son of Enitharmon & Luvah frees me from linking Orc with his
nominal father, Los. It also gives further determination to Los'
jealousy.
A further determination arises when Los "became what he beheld" near
the end of Night the Fourth -- subsequently Los seems to have
internalized many Urizenic traits that he must struggle to shake off in
order to build Jerusalem.
3) Blake really seems to have the most fun when he's writing about
Urizen. Some of the best passages from _FZ_ are about Urizen's ordered
empire. I particularly enjoyed the *counter-sublime* aesthetic of
Urizenic art:
. Innumerable the gins & traps; & many a soothing flute
. Is form'd & many a corded lyre, outspread over the immense
. In cruel delight they trap the listeners, & in cruel delight
. Bind them, condensing the strong energies into little compass
The trapping and petrifying through Urizenic arts is the functional
inversion of the Blakean Sublime, intended to stimulate imaginative
vision. It is a wry paradox that through the early parts of _FZ_ the
word "sublime" is consistently used in reference to the depths and
heights of Urizen. only belatedly is sublimity recuperated in the sense
proper to the Blakean Sublime.
OK, OK, I'm rambling and re-inventing the wheel here. Just tell me
that I've got it all wrong, and especially *why* I'm a few spokes short
of the rim.
Cheers, --- Phil
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 20:14:02 -0600 (CST)
From: Richard Johnson
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Dolly
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
I cannot believe that no one on this list has been moved to ask, apropos
this week's clone, Dolly, "Little Lamb WHO made THEE?"
Richard E. Johnson
Department of English
Loyola University
New Orleans, LA 70118
(504)-865-2475
rjohnson@beta.loyno.edu
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 21:34:19 -0500
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Blake & Emerson
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Assuming your dates are correct, don't forget that Emerson had traveled
>to England and met with Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth in 1833.
Yes, Susan. But it's interesting that he waited until 1872ish to include
Blake in his pantheon. If indeed Wordsworth and Coleridge thought more than
what the "classical" view of them towards Blake was (that he was crazy), it
seems also reflected in Emerson abstaining from naming Blake in works like
"The American Scholar" (1837).
His thoughts of the real Coleridge that he met aren't completely positive,
by the way... And Coleridge thought he would "get over" his Unitarian
phase. He did, however, make a lasting friendship with Carlyle.
-Randall
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 22:33:43 -0700 (MST)
From: fawman@compusmart.ab.ca (Steven Mandziuk)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Dumain's folly, the cloak of knavery
Message-Id: <199702270533.WAA18454@bernie.compusmart.ab.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Albright, you are a fool. Do you really want to debate political
>science on a Blake list? You don't have much of a leg to stand on
>when it comes to idealizing Robert Kennedy, let alone comparing
>him to Blake in any way. BUt I suspect you will continue to be a
>jackass until everone has unsubscribed from the
>Albright-free-association Blake list. Get an intellectual life,
>Albright, before you waste any more of our time.
>
>
Hey Dumain: soon, you will be alone on this list. Go to one of the
children's sites if you want to act like this. Are you deliberately trying
to lower the level of discussion so that you can understand it? Go talk to
Barney the Dinosaur - maybe you'll learn something. In short, bugger off
and leave us all alone. Maybe try really reading a book rather than just
pretending to have read one. I am,
"A true friend">
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 22:37:22 -0700 (MST)
From: fawman@compusmart.ab.ca (Steven Mandziuk)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: The Latest Blast from Dumain
Message-Id: <199702270537.WAA18995@bernie.compusmart.ab.ca>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Mr. Albright:
You have done well, but remember, Dumain never reads past his own name. It
sends him into a frenzy of self-love, and we all know where that leads. He
has provided a living example of a syphilitic brain and the horrors of
excessive masturbation.
"Tim"
>Mr. Dumain:
>
>My friend.
>
>Talk about four fold vision, DEAD...
>
>As well as people speaking in glass houses...
>
>Blake's work has implications in many domains, including science, political
>science, philosophy, religion, and art.
>
>Both you and Mr. Dillingham like to use the word "fool" in deriding those
>(maybe it's just "me", right? Only "I" have this different face that you
>love to use as a punching bag?) who don't tow your particular Blake line.
>Blake had a certain amount of respect for Shakespeare, who gave some of his
>greatest lines to "fools" and "clowns", while the tragic heroes themselves
>often became the REAL fools.
>
>Check out Fritjof Capra's _The Web of Life_, hippie-dippie fools who think
>that Bateson was on to some good stuff, as well as Capra with _The Tao of
>Physics_. Read Voltaire's _Philosophical Dictionary_ to see what HE was
>deriding. Read Mary Wollstonecraft's desperate 1795 letter from Paris,
>while Blake was busy touching up "Good and Evil Angels" in England. How
>would Blake have survived in Revolutionary France, with what some may have
>considered his "blasphemous" doctrine? Why was Voltaire so envious of
>England's relative freedom of speech?
>
>See if _The Divided Self_ and _Knots_ by R.D. Laing have nothing in common
>with Blake. R.D. Laing, I have been told, is now exposed as a charlatan in
>his real life practice. Freud messed up his daughter, in real life. Is
>there no truth in those men's books, now that they have been "exposed"? See
>if there's any connection between the way that Nietzsche or D.H. Lawrence
>writes and Blake's stuff. It's for you, the reader, to either connect or
>disconnect these pieces in a puzzle called Blake or life. Got it all summed
>up? Down pat? Roland Barthes has something to say about this in _The Rustle
>of Language_.
>
>Part of the point in Blake is to MAKE connections. In old-style
>universities, there were sometimes departments called Comparative
>Literature that tried to do this. This process of getting outside of one
>man's head, seeing things from new perspectives, is both the domain of a
>scientist as well as an artist who does not have a weak and timid mind. For
>an academic? Maybe certain ones are too concerned with protecting their own
>little constructs, like sandcastles, to hear the REAL ocean roar.
>
>And prove _The Economist_ magazine article in the March 16, 1996 issue,
>"Moreover", subtitled "Crimes of Reason", a mechanistically reductionist
>wrong view of The Enlightenment, as well as of Blake, when the author(s)
>say:
>
> "Blake was an artist, poet and mystic. Fervently anti-rationalist,
>he had no interest in challenging rationalism analytically. But many
>philosophers, among them Hegel (builder of intellectual systems _par
>excellence_), echoed his view."
>
>And who was it who started her Penguin introduction to the _Complete Poems_
>with "Blake was the rebel artist _par excellence_?"
>
>I M A G I N A T I V E C O N N E C T I O N
>
>is at least as valid as of a starting point as
>
>L O G I C
>
>in talking about this man.
>
>And, by the way, the Strand depends largely on estate sales. They swing
>from being inundated by the library of someone who died and was a Blake
>lover, to being bought out by perhaps just one new Blake lover. Such are
>the undulations known to bookstores, and to life.
>
>-Randall Albright
>
>
>
>
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 23:44:17 -0800
From: Hugh Walthall
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: 19th Century Literacy
Message-Id: <33153B51.7BF3@erols.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
America was an extremely well read nation in the 19th Century. There
were no video stores where one might rent raggedy-assed westerns with
intellectual pretensions. No recorded music. No airplanes. So, long
railroad trips and long novels. (And the odd civil war.)
There was a Blake Boomlet in the 1860's as several folks on this list
have pointed out. And one again in the first decade of this century
(see Shaw's preface to Heartbreak House for passing mention of this.)
Who was it who said, no one would let Mozart starve, if they only knew
who Mozart was?
Hugh Walthall hugwal@erols.com
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 12:23:00 +100
From: "VLADIMIR GEORGIEU"
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Raine?
Message-Id: <2D3CD353FB@picasso.ceu.hu>
Dear friends,
Has anybody of you, even Dumain, read Kathleen Raine's >Blake and
Tradition<. 1-2. Princeton (N.J), 1968 and does it include a section
or a chapter on Gnostic influence in Blake? Any comments are
welcome.
Yours:
Vlado.
vladimir Georgiev
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 08:59:39 -0500
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Emerson, Blake, And... Madness
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Susan Reilly--
Now maybe this is where I should go private, but... maybe others are
interested, I don't know.
I've been fascinated with what I've found to be Blake/Emerson affinities
for awhile, so this is actually something that I tried to research, and was
incredibly disappointed at first to find them only being kind of "kindred
spirits", Emerson NOT mentioning Blake. But I saw Emerson as a fervent
proponent of Blakean concepts as far back as his first essay, Nature
(1836), which is really a manifesto to which he stuck for the rest of his
life. "American Scholar"'s call for NEW myths? Who could fit the bill
better than Blake, I thought, pulling out of his own topicality universal
truths? Then, in "Self Reliance", he echoes what sound like Blakean
sentiments: "To be great is to be misunderstood." And in "The Poet" (now
we're in the early 1840s), he's bemoaning the lack of new forms, which
Whitman in Brooklyn was reading, and of course... and Emerson got this
anonymous mail package from Walt, the first edition of "Leaves of Grass",
over which he immediately ran ECSTATIC.
So I couldn't understand why someone who could so easily embrace radical
people like Thoreau, for his time, and Whitman later, would not have
mentioned Blake. And I also didn't chalk it up to "Well, people still think
Blake is crazy, so I'd better scratch that reference", because Emerson
DARED so much, like Blake, and actually got very little respect from
Harvard, is Alma Mater, until very late in his life. "Nature" was an
initial flop, with cartoons of him as the "transparent eyeball", for
example. He was called in to do the Phi Beta Kappa speech ("American
Scholar") only at the last moment, when the original speaker cancelled. And
another sign of his own "rebel artist" self is that he got a lot of shit
for defending Whitman against what were initially quite harsh critics. At
one point, he withdrew to a point of saying (paraphrase) "All I can say is
that *I* find it to be a work of utter genius."
So I started scouring through biographies, and sure enough: the
ultra-famous _Waldo_ by Gay Wilson Allen doesn't even mention Blake. But
that was, perhaps, also because it was written at least 10 years ago,
before the current Blakean revival as well as deeper fascination with
Hindu-Buddhist stuff, which Richardson talks about in better depth. The
page in my hardback (Richardson is now available in paperback) is p.517
from the chapter "89. English Traits", in which Richardson shows the
contrariness of Emerson himself, so used to showing us New Worlders that
we're BETTER than the old, but himself immersed IN the old! The date, again
according to Richardson (maybe it's a misprint) is 1872. His sources were
the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard, and the Concord Library, to name perhaps the
most important. (Harvard did end up with the vast majority of Emerson's
written legacy-- even fools can become wise!)
But this also ties in with what was, a little less than a year ago, a
heated debate that I started about whether Blake "was or was not" insane. I
agree with the point that William James makes in masterpieces like
_Varieties of Religious Experience_: it doesn't matter! Same with Van Gogh,
or Nietzsche, or whomever. "Insanity" itself, as Jennifer Michael at the
time pointed out, is a moving target. The real question, according to James
(and he's very much in the Emersonian tradition), is whether the piece of
work has MEANING to you, has VALUE. Just because you're "sane" or "insane"
doesn't mean that your "inspirations" will do anything. Blake's have done
much, for many, on different levels. Perhaps that's a POWER of what some
may call "schizophrenia", and merely shows how much we're STILL in the Dark
Ages about what mental health is all about.
-Randall Albright
http://world.std.com/~albright/
>By the way, the earliest date of publication for Emerson's "Letters and
>Social Aims" seems to be 1875. Where, Randall, does Richardson say it
>was pub'd in 1872, and by whom?
>
>SR
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 08:10:52 -0600
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Raine?
Message-Id: <97022708105251@wc.stephens.edu>
Vlado The answers are yes and yes. The discussion is not extensive
compared to other aspects of what Raine and her folk refer to as
"the tradition" (and so on). In her introduction, for a sample, she
announces "Sublime art does not speak a private language. Jung's
philosophy has its roots in this tradition [i.e., the myths and
symbols that are the language of knowledge of the tradition].
and a very great part of Blake's affinity with Jungmay be explained
without recourse to analytical philosophy: Blake and Jung had both
studied the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, and the alchemists." (I, xxvi).
Those who resist the premise so clearly stated here (the "affinity
with Jung") tend to find Raine's work an entertaining grabbag or
sometimes an irritating farrago. For others, true believers, Raine
is gospel.
Tom Dillingham
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 08:35:07 -0600
From: jmichael@seraph1.sewanee.edu (J. Michael)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake's Early Popularization, Boston, & Emerson
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>Blake as you know privately published editions of his work 100 or so
>copies at a time for private circulation (a practice wch dates back at
>least to 15th or 16th century Eng Lit) but it's not till much later,
>with the rise of a reading (i.e. literate) public and innovations in
>printing like the steam and stereotype press that you get really wide,
>large, and international circulations.
>Amen.
Good point, Susan. That's why I resist the common reading of the
Introduction to _Songs of Innocence_ as a "fall" from pure music to verbal
song to the written word.
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read
Until the work is published and "disseminated," it remains a private
performance between piper and child: lovely, but not very accessible or
democratic. So in spite of all that staining the water, I see the last
line as a triumph: "Every child may joy to hear": not just the child on a
cloud.
Of course, the limited circulation of Blake's work at the time makes that
argument extremely ironic: it's only *now* that every child (with at least
a dollar to spend on a Dover paperback) can "hear" the songs.
Jennifer Michael
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End of blake-d Digest V1997 Issue #25
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