Today's Topics:
Merrill poem
Re: Dictionary
OFF REUTERS
CLR JAMES ON RECORD ABOUT WILLIAM BLAKE
Worms, "Europe", Ginsberg...
Re: Not this pig.
Re: In Mourning
Quote
Quote
Re: Dictionary
Re: villanelles
Allen Ginsberg: 1926--1997
Re: new member inquiry
Remove
Re: Allen Ginsberg
Question
Re: Question
Re: a source for an image in Night Thoughts
Re: Question
Re: Urizenic Roses and Worms of Orc -Reply -Reply
Surrealist -Reply
Re: Quote -Reply
In Mourning -Reply
Re: Quote -Reply
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 05 Apr 1997 23:09:13 -0800
From: Hugh Walthall
To: Blake@albion.com
Subject: Merrill poem
Message-Id: <33474C19.22D7@erols.com>
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There is a wickedly arch James Merrill v. in his 1974 chapbook "The
yellow pages". The end words are one, two, three, four, five, and six.
Of course six also appears as sikhs, two as tu, etc.
Hugh Walthall hugwal@erols.com
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 00:28:43 -0800
From: Michael Asch
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Dictionary
Message-Id: <33475EB8.74C1@community.net>
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TOM DILLINGHAM wrote:
>
> Who could plumb the depths of hugwal/wahu's ironies. Not this pig!
> (Accolades to the sharpeyed reader who catches that allusion to yet
> another significant contemporary poet.) Even so, let us explore the
> matter of the dictionary.
> I have always taken it as a matter of faith that a mark of even a good
> poet, certainly of a great poet, is a kind of radical freedom with the
> language she or he uses--everything from rugged independence of convention
> through active defiance and obliteration of rules and expectations when it
> comes to language. Part of the earlier thread about Walcott and others has
> to do with the assertion of independence from the conventions of an oppressive
> language and at the same time a demonstration of the power to overcome the
> limits set by both the language itself and the social or cultural values it
> embodies.
> But we have the assertion that Blake is the last great poet untrammeled by
> the evil devices and engines of the "the dictionary." How so? Well,
> Blake was fairly "personal" in his spelling on occasion and almost always
> personal in his punctuation (but "rules" of punctuation were still very
> fluid then, more so even that spelling, but spelling was also relativley
> fluid). Either this is an assertion that Blake was the last great poet
> of the English language or that all poets since him have been slavishly
> or involuntarily limited by the tyranny of the dictionary. The former
> might be argued, I suppose, though I would not accept it. The latter seems
> entirely unhistorical, since I can think of many poets (not just Gerard
> Manley Hopkins and ee cummings) who have treated the language with great
> independence and quirkiness, even creativity.
> So I wonder if hugwal/wahu may be confusing anglophone poets with
> francophone poets. Now a case could be made about the French if only
> because their own poets complain all the time about the domineering
> and repressive forces of their Academie and its constrol of the
> dictionary and the rest of the language. Poets from Chenier to Hugo
> to (certainly!) Rimbaud to Artaud to the glorious Francis Ponge have
> all, in various ways, threatened to grab their language by its throar
> throat and either shake it out of its smug certainties or obliterate
> meaning altogether (and Mallarme more or less succeeded at that). (Ponge,
> by the way, is a major anti-Blake poet, if I understand him right.)
> (And then there is Jabes -- accent grave over that e).
> But how is this true of English poets. Certainly Shakespeare would never
> have seen a dictionary (much less the OED), unless possible he perused
> John Florio's Italian/English translation dictionry--but so what?
> Milton didn't use a dictionary either, nor would have Pope (and I would
> include them where wahu has left them out in favor of Tennyson). What is
> the evidence that poets since Blake have been intimidated by the dictionary?
> Regularized spelling and punctuation just offer the independent poet more
> opportunities to refuse to toe the line, while others (James Merrill comes to
> mind) may show their virtuosity and originality while scrupulously chalking up
> the prizes for spelling correctness.
> It's probably not worth arguing--but the dictionary seems to me the least
> of threats to poetic creativity in this urizenic world.
> Tom Dillingham
Wow! Wasn't that Kenneth Patchen? (Not this Pig).
masch
ps spelling and punctuation are overrated.... of course, there is a
place for structure in these dimentions! (becoming enamored with it...
is sort of a trap... imho)
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 18:37:59 +0800
From: ching
To: SHAKSPER@WS.BowieState.edu, blake@albion.com, milton-l@urvax.urich.edu,
EALSL@GWUVM.GWU.EDU, JAZZ-L@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU
Subject: OFF REUTERS
Message-Id: <33477D07.54CD@pacific.net.sg>
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Dear everybody, I'm not sure if everyone has heard, or if you find it
even relevant, but here is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT news. I've produced
verbatim and cross-posted. ponder everybody...
ching
Beat Generation Poet Allen
Ginsberg Dies
NEW YORK (Reuter) - Allen Ginsberg, who died Saturday
of complications from incurable liver cancer at age 70, gave
the alienated, bohemian beat generation its best-known and
most powerful poetic voice with works such as ``Howl'' and
''Kaddish.''
``I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves
through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,''
were the oft-quoted opening lines of ``Howl,'' published in
1956.
His raw, angry verse captured the spirit of the beat
generation, disillusioned and frustrated by the shackles of
convention.
He died at 2:39 a.m. EST surrounded by family and friends
at his apartment on the lower East Side of New York, said
Morgan, his bibliographer and unofficial spokesman.
The primary cause of death was cardiopulmonary arrest with
the secondary cause cancer of the liver, he said.
Ginsberg's inoperable liver cancer was discovered when the
poet, who had been suffering from severe fatigue and
jaundice, underwent a biopsy, his physician, Dr. David
Chain, said in a statement released on Wednesday.
Chain said at the time that he expected Ginsberg, who was
working at home on a new collection of poems, to live for
four to 12 months.
``We never thought he would go so quickly,'' Morgan said.
Morgan said that after Ginsberg got home on Wednesday, he
worked all day and into the night writing poems and talking to
old friends.
``On Thursday, he was very tired and slept most of the day,''
Morgan said.
During Thursday night, Ginsberg slipped into a coma and
never regained consciousness, he said.
Ginsberg had suffered for many years from hepatitis C, which
led to cirrhosis of the liver that was diagnosed in 1988.
The beats, a literary movement of intellectual outlaws such as
Jack Kerouac, author of ``On the Road,'' Gregory Corso,
William Burroughs, author of ``Naked Lunch,'' and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reveled in free prose, poetry readings
and experimental plays.
They were influenced by an eclectic array of surrealism,
dadaism, jazz, Asian philopsohy and experiments with
hallucinogenic drugs.
``The thing that you can say that we had in common is an
interest in an open form of some kind, spontaneity in writing,
the breaking up of old forms in both prose and poetry,''
Ginsberg said in a 1983 interview. ``In that there was a
common insight as well as the correlative of opening up of an
awareness of consciousness.''
The term beat always defied definition, prompting the editor
of the ``Beat Coast East'' anthology once to attempt to define
it by polling ``an assortment of squalid squares and plastered
saints'' in the streets of Greenwich Village.
Ginsberg once said: ``The beat generation has its usefulness,
but it also has its disadvantage of putting things in a box
which are outside of the box.''
The anti-establishment movement was largely centered in
New York City, where Ginsberg and others were students at
Columbia University, and in San Francisco.
Not every reception to Ginsberg's work was laudatory.
``Howl and Other Poems'' was the subject of an obscenity
case, based on its graphic sexual references, but Ferlinghetti,
its publisher, was cleared in a landmark decision in 1957.
And some critics were outraged, such as writer Norman
Podhoretz, who condemned the beats for ``expressing
contempt for coherent, rational discourse.''
Ginsberg published more than 40 books of poetry. Among
his best-known works are the mockingly humorous
``America'' and ''Kaddish,'' a moving lament about his
mother, a mentally disturbed, left-wing Russian emigrant.
His book ``Fall of America'' won the National Book Award
in 1972, and he was elected to the American Academy and
the Institute of Arts and Letters.
U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, referring to Ginsberg's line,
``America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,'' once
said: ``He gave all of us who are queer -- not necessarily
sexually -- a lot to meditate on. In that one line, there's
patriotism, determination to help, beauty, ornery resistance
and good humor.''
At the cutting edge for decades, Ginsberg became a
spokesman for the 1960s' counterculture, a ubiquitous figure
at poetry readings on college campuses, a strident critic of
the war in Vietnam, an outspoken gay rights advocate and a
passionate Buddhist. He was instrumental in a broad
dissemination of Buddhist texts in the United States, and an
adviser for Tricycle magazine, a quarterly Buddhist review.
He traveled widely, befriending Soviet dissident poets such
as Yevegeny Yevtushenko during the Cold War, and Czech
dramatist and statesman Vaclav Havel.
At home, he was a friend to the Hell's Angels motorcycle
gang, writer Ken Kesey and his unruly Merry Pranksters
band of musicians, writers and drug users, LSD guru Timothy
Leary and musicans such as Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead's
Jerry Garcia, punk artists Patti Smith and the Clash and
avant-garde composer Philip Glass.
Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, where he was
scheduled to teach a class on poet William Blake this
summer.
Born in Newark, New Jersey, and a longtime resident of
New York City's East Village, Ginsberg was a Distinguished
Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
He was working on a new collection of poems and
photographs at the time of his death, his staff said.
His father, Louis, who also was a poet, died of liver cancer in
1968.
REUTERS Reut16:40 04-05-97
(05 Apr 1997 16:31 EST)
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 04:02:37 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: CLR JAMES ON RECORD ABOUT WILLIAM BLAKE
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19970406060129.2287b164@pop.igc.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
At long last we have some solid documentation on James's awareness of Blake,
but this too encompasses only the famous prefatory poem to Milton. As far
as I know, James made one and only one record album, and this is where he
talks briefly about Blake. Here is the reference:
James, C.L.R. "The Old World and The New: Shakespeare, Melville and Others"
(record album). Detroit, MI: Facing Reality Publications, 1970. c. 60 min.
phonograph record (33 1/3 LP).
This is a recording of a talk given at Indiana University in December 1969.
It marks a return to the themes of James's talks in the U.S. in 1953.
Mostly this talk concerns Shakespeare and Melville, the former being the
most characteristic writer of the Old World and Melville the most
characteristic and profound of the New.
James begins by facing the problem of making generalizations about entire
literatures. He cites an anecdote concerning James Joyce, who, when asked
to instruct his Italian students in English literature, chose to do only two
lectures, one on Daniel Defoe, and the other on William Blake. James
follows Joyce's example, stating that Joyce has put his finger on the
English sense of what is real, stressing the empirical habits of the British
in spite of all mysticism. James speaks at length, citing Marx too, of
Defoe as the exemplar who realistically describes all of the essential
characteristics of capitalism even while writing about an island castaway.
Then James turns to Blake. He contrasts the last two stanzas of the preface
to Milton (without naming the poem). "Bring me my bow of burning gold ...":
here Blake is mystical and imaginative. But he's an Englishman, and the
English always come down to Earth: "Till we have built Jerusalem, In
England's green and pleasant land." The Englishman rarely leaves objective
reality.
James briefly recites from the ending of MOBY DICK, where all is swept away
by the sea, and then returns once last time to Blake, retiterating that
Blake starts in the sky but returns back to earth. English writers are
aware of their society and history. Americans are aware of "the instability
of society and the fundamental unsoundness of the whole structure of human
existence." The American writer comes into his own at the end rather than
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
This is only the introduction to the lecture, in which James
characteristically tells the audience what he is about to say and why.
There follows one brief anecdote about Sartre on the history of French
literature, and James is off on a detailed description of Shakespeare's
lifelong campaign in drama against monarchy.
James's characterization of the English empirical temperament is most
amusing, coming from a West Indian. I sense that he is not only describing
the English temperament, but identifying himself with it as his own. When
James did lecture tours in the US during his stay in 1938-1953, he was
characteristically billed as a noted British author and lecturer. I wonder
how people reacted when they arrived and saw a black man speaking in a
foreign accent about English culture. What America taught James is a whole
other subject.
Which brings us finally to Allen Ginsberg, to whose memory I dedicate this
post. Ginsberg's America, like James's, like mine, begins not with the
pioneers but with Ellis Island. The one time I visited Ellis Island,
following its restoration as a museum, I wept for hours, haunted by millions
of ghosts. Who knew what they were creating, just following the contours of
history and the exigencies of survival? How could Paterson, New Jersey have
predicted what it spawned as a part of itself becoming conscious of itself
at last? And how unconscious we as a society remain in announcing
Ginsberg's death. What is the price of experience? Wisdom is sold in the
desolate marketplace where none come to buy.
Ralph Dumain, Sunday 6 April 1997, 6:10 EDT
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 11:55:56 -0400
From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Worms, "Europe", Ginsberg...
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
John Hecklinger quotes two of my favorite plates of "Europe":
>"Then Enitharmon down descended into his red light,
>And thus her voice rose to her children, the distant heavens
> reply.
This is from Plate 4. And visually, to me, Enitharmon looks like nothing
less than the Wicked Witch of the West, tempting poor Orc, naked like a
seductress, to be like one of those monkey creatures that flies out in _The
Wizard of Oz_. He's too young to know what his evil mother is unleashing.
He only wants to do GOOD!
>PLATE 5
>Now comes the night of Enitharmons joy!
>Who shall I call? Who shall I send?
>That Woman, lovely Woman! may have dominion?
>Arise O Rintrah thee I call! & Palamabron thee!
>Go! tell the human race that Womans love is Sin!
This sounds to me with "On Prancer, On Comet, On..." letting loose the
equivalent of twelve hellion reindeer. And she throws out a double bind of
wanting women to have dominion, yet have her sons tell them that woman's
love is a sin. No wonder the warrior/knight looks baffled, while the
clothed angels *seem* like they're blessing him.
As for the rest of your interpretation of the plate... well... good guess!
Other views?
>That an Eternal life awaits the worms of sixty winters
>In an allegorical abode where existence hath never come:
>Forbid all joy, & from her childhood shall the little female
>Spread nets in every secret path.
>
>My weary eyelids draw towards the evening, my bliss is yet but
> new. "
>
>One possible reading:
>Enitharmon sends Rintrah and Palamabron to convince humanity that
>"woman's love is sin." Enitharmon intends this belief to allow "Woman"
>to have "dominion." The "worms of sixty winters" have forsaken sensual
>enjoyment and their reward will be allegorical non-existence. Now, who
>is the "little female"? The nets she spreads catch those on secret
>paths, the non-believers who travel the crooked roads of genious and the
>perilous paths of visionary subversion. Am I making sense?
As an addendum, I'd also like to say "goodbye" and yet "stay with us",
Allen Ginsberg. A great guy, a friend of Frank O'Hara's, and a popularizer
of Blake for at least two generations. Sorry he stopped at 70. But at least
he kept burning through to the end.
"Better to burn out
than to fade away..."
---Neil Young, from "My My, Hey Hey", _Rust Never Sleeps_
-Randall Albright
------------------------------
Date: 06 Apr 97 11:54:11 EDT
From: vultee <76507.222@CompuServe.COM>
To: "INTERNET:blake@albion.com"
Subject: Re: Not this pig.
Message-Id: <970406155411_76507.222_FHU38-1@CompuServe.COM>
TOM DILLINGHAM wrote:
>
> Who could plumb the depths of hugwal/wahu's ironies. Not this pig!
> (Accolades to the sharpeyed reader who catches that allusion to yet
> another significant contemporary poet.)
To which M. ASCH replied:
>
>Wow! Wasn't that Kenneth Patchen? (Not this Pig).
Sorry, Michael; it's from "Animals Are Passing from Our Lives" by
my fellow Detroit native and former Wayne State University student
Philip Levine. Anyone who teaches the English Romantics ought to
read, in addition to his poetry, a great op-ed piece he wrote for the
New York Times a couple of years ago called "Keats
in Detroit" (NYT, Oct. 29, 1995).
Denise Vultee
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 11:30:57 -0500
From: joz@cove.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: In Mourning
Message-Id:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Dear Tom Dillingham,
I liked you description of Ginsberg as free happy and noble. But on the
difference between them - Blake I think was a poet but his intent was not
poetical as that might be commonly understood. Ginsberg intent was to be a
poet as it is commonly understood, and the world reviled him, loved him and
so honoured him as a poet. Like Byron. He had a role. To me Blake is
involved in something different. Shakespeare was a poet too, but like
Blake his adgenda was different.
But to more important things, I was wondering, What do you mean by a
"tuner" of Blake's Songs in refering to Ginsberg?
joz
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 09:51:47 -0700
From: "Charlie K."
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Quote
Message-Id: <199704061648.JAA07279@gost1.indirect.com>
"All Religions are One" means that the material world provides a
universal language of images and that each man's imagination speaks
that language with his own accent. Religions are grammars of this
language. Seeing is believing, and belief is vision: the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
-- Northrop Frye
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 10:22:36 -0700
From: "Charlie K."
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Quote
Message-Id: <199704061719.KAA09319@gost1.indirect.com>
[Blake's definition of the Spectre; from Jerusalem, plate 10]
And this is the manner of the Sons of Albion in their strength
They take the Two Contraries which are calld Qualities, with which
Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good & Evil
>From them they make an Abstract. which is a Negation
Not only of the Substance from which it is derived
A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer
Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power
An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives every thing
This is the Spectre of Man; the Holy Reasoning Power
And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of Desolation
Therefore Los stands in London building Golgonooza --
Compelling his Spectre to labours mighty; trembling in fear
The Spectre weeps. but Los unmovd by tears or threats remains
[so Los is able to overcome and control his own Spectre or Negative
Reasoning Power, despite the uncomfort that doing so inevitably
creates in This World... even though the Spectre does pop in from
time to time and has his say... but of course this say helps direct
Los as it makes him aware of the other, more common, way of looking
at things, which is indeed what he is working to overcome to build up
Golgonooza. thus the way things are in this age, it takes much
prophetic and poetic power to put the Spectre in his place so that
This World may be all that much improved -ck]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 13:25:28 -0500
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Dictionary
Message-Id: <97040613252844@wc.stephens.edu>
Good guess Patchen, but no cigar.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 11:42:55 -0800
From: David Rollison
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: villanelles
Message-Id: <3346B90A.4BE6@marin.cc.ca.us>
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Also from Roethke:
"And I dance with William Blake
For love. For love's sake.
As everything comes to one,
And I dance on, dance on, dance on."
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 11:50:00 -0800
From: David Rollison
To: "blake@albion.com"
Subject: Allen Ginsberg: 1926--1997
Message-Id: <3346BAB2.40FE@marin.cc.ca.us>
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Among the best minds of his generation---may he rest in peace.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 14:35:50 -0500
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: new member inquiry
Message-Id: <97040614355082@wc.stephens.edu>
The lines Nobody quotes to William Blake (how do we know Nobody is
mistaken about the identity, by the way?--the movie implies the
possibility at least that the character really is William Blake)
are from "Auguries of Innocence," one of the poems from the
Pickering Ms. Erdman (like other editors) publishes two versions--
a transcription of the ms. and an "editorial arrangement." In both,
the quoted lines come near the end of the poem.
Tom Dillingham
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 17:59:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: SavFerris@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Remove
Message-Id: <970406175945_143979253@emout04.mail.aol.com>
REMOVE Sav Ferris@aol.com
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 18:01:00 -0400 (EDT)
From: SavFerris@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Allen Ginsberg
Message-Id: <970406180059_1883814864@emout18.mail.aol.com>
Allen Ginsberg passed away this Saturday with a heart attack.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 06 Apr 1997 20:20:12 -0700
From: Chris Sachs
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Question
Message-Id: <334867EC.B78@pacbell.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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My first question is in regards to Jim Jarmusch's movie: Dead Man,
starring Johnny Depp, l996. An Indian mistakes Depp for the real
William Blake and quotes these words:
"Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to endless night"
Does anyone know the title of this poem? Chris Sachs
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 13:59:32 +0000
From: hbri1@student.monash.edu.au
To: chaz@take3soft.com
Cc: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Question
Message-Id: <10C573B97A9F@mfs06.cc.monash.edu.au>
To "Charlie",
who sends in so many delightful quotes.
Unlike Ralph Dumain, it doesn't bother me that Charlie doesn't
include comments with these quotes, unless he really has a comment
he needs to make. BUT
could you please include the source of the quote.
For someone working on a thesis on Blake, the sources are essential
if the quote is to be put in context and used in discussion.
However, thank you for your quotes, but give some thought to my
request . . .?
Hassanah Briedis
=========================================================
HBRI1@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 14:23:34 +0000
From: hbri1@student.monash.edu.au
To: blake@albion.com
Cc: jmillett@kormilda.nt.edu.au
Subject: Re: a source for an image in Night Thoughts
Message-Id: <10C5DA9A639D@mfs06.cc.monash.edu.au>
to JMillett,
don't know if M or F
I enjoyed your self-introduction, and, indeed, who can be sure if you
know what you're talking about or even who you really are?
But I assume you are up in the Northern Territory - Darwin?
My brother and his family live up there but it's too hot for me.
I can't help you with De Loutherbourg (although he sounds like he may
have been named after Lex Luther's proposed real-estate holdings [see
Superman II ]. I assume you know Night Thoughts is by Edward Young -
I guess the significance of Blake's illustration may depend on
Young's text, and unfortunately I don't have my copy of it by me
either. But I'm very interested in the connection you have obviously
made in your mind regardiang the serpent-family-flood association.
Could you elaborate on this and see where the association takes you?
I'd discuss it further, but I think first we need to establish just
whose _Night Thoughts - and what textual excerpts we are referring
to.
Hassanah Briedis (down in Melbourne)
=========================================================
HBRI1@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 1997 00:52:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: TomD3456@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Question
Message-Id: <970407005252_-1670544830@emout18.mail.aol.com>
Charlie,
I think the best answer to your question about the engravings for The Grave
is to look at the existing version of at least one of the designs engraved by
Blake and compare it with the more familiar version by Schiavonetti.
I'm in the wonderful city of New Orleans on an extended trip, far from my
books, so perhaps someone else could point you to the proper sources. If I'm
not mistaken, there is at least one Blake engraving of one of the Grave
designs, and it is in a far rougher and less conventional style than
Schiavonetti's. My impression is that Cromek (? the publisher) thought that
Blake's more radical style would put off the public.
This is all from distant memories, and I would appreciate confirmation or
correction from other members of the list.
--Tom Devine
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 09:12:40 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Urizenic Roses and Worms of Orc -Reply -Reply
Message-Id:
I sometinmes refer to the Romance of the Rose when teaching Blake's
'Garden of Love' and `Thel', but I do not think there is specific evidence
of his having read this .. . it was surely very well known, though. He
may also have known of this symbol via Alchemy, Kabbalah or even
Dante, whose work he illustrated. In some alchemical texts, the rose is
shown accompanying illustrations, and from Blake's own work, it is
clear that he saw it as the opposite of the fungus which he equates with
the deformed growth of life in the dark abyss and womb of Nature. Pam
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 09:25:15 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Surrealist -Reply
Message-Id:
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Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 09:33:07 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Quote -Reply
Message-Id:
The views represented in the quotation are not Blake's views , however,
but represent his vision of love in the fallen world where the meek man
is despised (Jesus cast out and the Forgiver, too, in favour of the
Accuser and the Warrior). Blake creates an on-going dialectic between
Los and his Spectre in which their opposed views are dramatised. Pam
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Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 10:25:47 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: In Mourning -Reply
Message-Id:
As a small tribute to Alan Ginsberg, I'd like to tell you how I happened to
end up reading some of his poems at a convent in Johannesburg instead
of the prescribed poems. I was teaching Standard 6 (Grade 8 in USA, I
think) and the students staunchly maintained that they all hated poetry.
As I had to pass by a bookstore on my way to work every day, I came
across a volume of poems with Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and
thought I'd see whether these poems would arouse any interest. They
certainly did ... perhaps because forbidden fruit is always sweeter. So, I
wedged the prescribed works between readings from whatever else
the students fancied and ended up with a class which loved poetry
classes. Blake, of course, came naturally into the picture. Pam
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Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 10:54:40 +0200
From: P Van Schaik
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Quote -Reply
Message-Id:
Dear Charlie, Oh, Brave New World, that hath such people in it! You
speak like a true Blakean and deserve a true soul-mate. Meanwhile, here
is a string of hugs: ********************************************** Pam
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End of blake-d Digest V1997 Issue #41
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