Today's Topics:
Tom Dacre
Re: shortcuts in library research
Re: trickster figure in blake
Weep, weep
Re[2]: Frontispiece of "Europe" Again
C'mon, was I really cruel?
Re: Frontispiece of "Europe" Again
spamming Blake Online (was Re: Eastern Influence)
Re: Blake Online
Re: Yale Blake exhibit particulars please!
Re: shortcuts in library research
Re: RE: shortcuts in library research
Re: bad man/ good man query
Re: shortcuts in library research
New(ish) Blake Book
Blake Ball
Re: Yale Blake Exhibition/Mellon Collection
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 97 10:19 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com, Scranton
Subject: Tom Dacre
Message-Id: <199705211524.KAA21414@cc-gate.uiowa.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
Dear William,
First, a warm welcome! You'll find extensive discussion of *Dead Man*
in the archives of this group. I've never used this resource, but I'm
sure someone will be willing to tell you how to get into it.
You've put forward for discussion one of the most poignant and complex
of Blake's *Songs of Innocence,* "The Chimney Sweeper." (And you are
right, there is another poem of the same name in *Songs of
Experience.*) To refresh everyone's memory, the *Innocence* poem goes
like this:
When my mother died I was very young.
And my father sold me while yet my tongue,
Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre who cried when his head
That curl'd like a lambs back, was shav'd, so I said
Hush Tom never mind it, for when your head's bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.
And so he was quiet. & that very night
As Tom was a sleeping he had such a sight,
That thousands of sweepers Dick Joe Ned & Jack
Were all of them lock'd up in coffins of black,
And by came an Angel who had a bright key
And he open'd the coffins & set them all free.
Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run
And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.
And the Angel told Tom if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work
Tho' the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm.
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
The page is very crowded with text, with most of the stanzas
separated by tendrils (with minuscule human figures riding on one
part) of flamelike vegetation, some of which also grows out of the
letters of the title and twines and trails down the edges of the page.
A very small design is crowded into the bottom of the page - jubilant
chimney sweepers frolicing outdoors beside a stream; to the right an
angel in a white gown reaches down and pulls one figure, presumably
Tom, out of a black object on the ground - a chimney top embedded in
the soil, or a coffin?
Before delving into the poem it's helpful to know that in 1788,
probably about the time the poem was being written, a law was debated
in Parliament (it passed but was never enforced) that was supposed to
curb the horrible exploitation of "climbing boys" by their masters,
who pocketed the fees for their labor but kept them in rags,
half-starved, perpetually unwashed, barefoot year-around, with no
place to sleep except on top of their soot bags. The coalburning
chimneys were so small that only young children could fit inside them.
Starting around 5 years old, they had to learn to knee and elbow their
way up the insides of these chimneys, always sore and bleeding until
they formed protective callouses. Their heads were shaved to make it
easier to get up and down, but many still got stuck and suffocated.
They were even sent up lighted chimneys. By the time they were 12 or
so they were useless to the master and to anyone else - occupational
hazards were rickets and bowlegs from malnutrition and carrying heavy
bags, and cancer of the scrotum. (For more details, if you can stand
them, see Martin Nurmi's "Fact and Symbol in 'The Chimney Sweeper,' a
1964 article in *Bulletin of the NY Public Library* that has been
reprinted in Northrop Frye's *Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays,*
1966.)
I can see why you had the impression that "poof - everyone winds up
in heaven," but if you look more closely at the poem you'll see that
this is little Tom Dacre's dream of a paradise where sweepers will at
last be liberated, clean, and happy. Warmed and comforted by this
dream, he and the older sweep (the narrator) get up in the dark and
get to work.
I think it's helpful, in reading any of these poems, to keep in
mind the subtitle of *Songs of Innocence and of Experience*, which is
"Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul." Narrators of
*Innocence* poems are usually themselves in a state of innocence - and
may describe others in a still "more innocent" level of innocence. We
as readers start to see shades and degrees of awareness and sense that
these states aren't static, but that people move through them. In this
poem and "The Little Black Boy" the narrators seem to be on the verge
of losing their innocence, leaving this state altogether.
Look at the contrast between the narrator, a veteran chimney
sweeper, and Tom Dacre, newcomer to the trade. The narrator describes
Tom's first night under the master sweep - as a new initiate he is
having his head shaved for the first time, and he cries when his
beautiful curly hair is cut off. The older sweep comforts him by
saying that at least now his hair will be kept forever pure and clean.
Tom stops crying, goes to sleep, and dreams of freedom. But even in
the dream there's a catch: the angel tells him "If he'd be a good boy"
God will be his father and he'll never lack joy. In Tom's waking life,
being good means cleaning chimneys and keeping quiet. Tom is still
innocent enough to accept this, and he is warmed and comforted by his
dream. The older sweep can't quite put it even this positively; in his
summing up, the lesson to be drawn is "So if all do their duty, they
need not fear harm." If we do our duty of cleaning chimneys, the
master won't beat us.
But stepping back we remember the poem is addressed to homeowners:
the opening stanza tells the older sweep's history, as he remembers
it, from being left motherless to being sold by his father into a form
of slavery before he's even old enough to pronounce the word "sweep,"
and it comes out "weep," and the result is "your chimneys I sweep & in
soot I sleep." We readers/homeowners see more than the narrator can
see - that this is an evil system and that we as property owners who
use the services of sweeps are deeply implicated in it. The boys can't
change their situation but we can.
Oh, one last historical footnote: "Dacre" was the name of one of
the poorhouses in London. Tom is probably an orphan, a nameless
foundling, who was given the last name "Dacre" when he was turned out
of the orphanage to work for the master sweep. If that's what his name
is meant to suggest, then he wouldn't even have the narrator-sweep's
memory of a mother and father. Being befriended by the
narrator-sweeper ("Hush Tom never mind it) may be the closest thing to
family life he's ever known.
P.S. - My earlier general lament (intended for "edu" e-mailers) about
using Blake Online as a substitute for library research was not meant
to discourage use of this forum to ask time-saving quick questions or
to ask for tips on where to begin a search. I was just concerned that
as the whole world moves to the Internet people may use chit-chat as
their primary source of information. From the responses I've seen so,
few subscribers to Blake Online see this as a danger - so, enough
said.
-- Mary Lynn Johnson
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 10:46:00 -0500 (CDT)
From: Voice of the Devil
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: shortcuts in library research
Message-Id:
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Tue, 20 May 1997, DR. JOSIE MCQUAIL wrote:
>
> Sometimes I just throw out a casual question that I could maybe answer if I
> spent an hour or two in the library, but to me that's part of the point of
> this discussion list: sharing knowledge!
>
> Josie McQuail
>
>
Amen. That is why I joined the list as well. I figured that a group of
experienced Blake readers, scholars, students etc. would readily be able
to help in the quest for understanding of Blake. At my University, we do
not even get Blake Quarterly so I appreciate all the help I can get.
What would a University Professor be for if the only response he/she gave
to his/her students was, "Go look it up in the library" ? The internet
provides us with specialized groups were we can share our knowledge of
Blake and other interests with potentially the whole world, but it would
be absolutely impossible to do any type of serious research by the
internet alone because there simply is not enough out there.
I have looked. See what I found at
http://www.unomaha.edu/~wwwengl/blakeweb/
If you would like to add to this list with generosity and the desire to
educate others, please send me any critical works you have done and are
proud of and I will gladly put your work on-line.
Last word - Criticizing others for asking questions seems to be very cruel
and not in the best interest of scholarship. Remember there is no such
thing as a stupid question. Not asking the question is stupid.
Thanks for your time,
David
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 11:24:03 -0500
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: trickster figure in blake
Message-Id: <97052111240331@wc.stephens.edu>
I would also be interested to see any critical study of "tricksters"
in Blake, assuming it approaches the matter from a folkloric or
anthropological perspective, using "trickster" in the technical
sense common in those disciplines.
My guess is (especially in light of the recent discussion and
dissension over him on the list) that Orc is the best candidate for
trickster status in Blake's myth--he is rebellious, angry, sometimes
a transgressor of boundaries, sometimes too clever for his own good,
and a source of dismay or chagrin especially to authority figures.
There is, of course, the irrepressible scamp, himself, William Blake,
constantly subverting pieties and dogmas in the Songs, frequently
sending up the stuffy and established in his letters and annotations,
satirizing his own "circle" in Island in the Moon. Bringing a sense of
the trickster role to bear on Blake would be salutary, since it is all
too common that readers forget his sense of humor and elide his ironies
in favor of his sublimities. (I know; I do it myself.)
(I might add that to the extent that Orc embodies or represents the phallus
and all its embarrassments, that also aligns him with the trickster figure
as it appears in other contexts. But I still can't recall any published
discussion of this in this context.)
Tom Dillingham
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 12:12:24 -0500
From: tomdill@wc.stephens.edu (TOM DILLINGHAM)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Weep, weep
Message-Id: <97052112122465@wc.stephens.edu>
From: COSMO::TOMDILL "TOM DILLINGHAM" 21-MAY-1997 11:09:52.52
To: SMTP%"mare-bear@worldnet.att.net"
CC: TOMDILL
Subj: Chimney Sweepers
There are, indeed, two poems by Blake about the chimney sweeper. One is
from Songs of Innocence, the other from Songs of Experience. While
Blake did not completely match the songs from the two books, a number
of such pairings occur (the most famous is the Lamb/Tyger pair) and
the contrasts between the paired poems represent the differing angles of
perception on them identified in the titles of the collections. From the
perspective of "innocence," the chimney sweeper may "weep," but he
goes about his business in a "cheerful" way and "need not fear harm."
In this poem, especially, the "innocent" view is unusually naive and
unrealistic, since chimney sweeps in real life were subject to horrible
oppression and physical danger--they shaved off their hair so it would
not catch fire in the chimneys, but many still were burned by pockets of
burning soot, many suffocated in the chimneys, and as David Erdman pointed
out, testicular cancer was very common among them (along with other kinds
of cancers and glandular malfunctions)because of their exposure to toxic
chemicals. Blake, of course, did not know the epidemiology of these
problems, but he saw their effects and knew the horrors of child labor.
The corresponding poem in "experience" is extremely ironic, of course,
and recognizes the realities of the sweeps' condition--they do not,in
fact, end up in heaven. It is the exploiters (the mother and father who
go to church to pray while the child is working and who "make up a heaven
of our misery"--representing the society that benefits from such
oppression and *pretends* that the children are safe and happy) who
are exposed in the second poem.
I might add that "weep, weep" is the street cry that chimney sweepers used
to notify householders that they were in the street and available for work.
So that adds another fairly obvious irony to the poem.
I agree that Jarmusch's _Dead Man_ is a fascinating and even brilliant
film. If you check the archives of the Blake list, you will find a number
of comments about it--one lengthy post by Ralph Dumain is especially
informative and valuable. I don't remember the date of it, but I think
it was probably about February of this year; the others were much
earlier, closer to the time the film came out.
Tom Dillingham
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 97 13:23 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re[2]: Frontispiece of "Europe" Again
Message-Id: <199705211830.NAA16449@cc-gate.uiowa.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
If I recall correctly, Essick's *Separate Plates* may be where he
discusses Goyder's print as a Muir facsimile. I hope Sandy or Detlef
will correct me on this one.
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 97 13:44 CST
From: MLGrant@president-po.president.uiowa.edu
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: C'mon, was I really cruel?
Message-Id: <199705211851.NAA13492@cc-gate.uiowa.edu>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
Dear Blake friends and acquaintances,
I must be getting really dreadful at communicating my intended
tone. I certainly apologize for giving offense on the research issue.
I should never have used an example at all, and, as things turned out,
I suppose I shouldn't have even brought up the subject. But let me
repeat, in case people zapped my long message on "The Chimney Sweeper"
because it had my return address on it, my final paragraph:
My earlier general lament (intended for "edu" e-mailers) about
using Blake Online as a substitute for library research was not meant
to discourage use of this forum to ask time-saving quick questions or
to ask for tips on where to begin a search. I was just concerned that
as the whole world moves to the Internet people may use chit-chat as
their primary source of information. From the responses I've seen so
far, few subscribers to Blake Online see this as a danger - so, enough
said.
Old research technologies or new, there's no substitute for
friendly personal help and advice. Without an abundance of it, from
teachers and friends and colleagues all my life, I'd be totally
clueless.
I continue, however, to think there's a difference between sincere
naive questions, which one should never hesitate to ask a group like
this one, and questions that really mean, "Please do my homework for
me." But now I admit I might not be able to tell the difference. In
failing dismally, the other day, to communicate my own tone and
intent, I realize that I may also have become tonedeaf to others.
I hope we can get past this and go back to talking about Blake.
-- Mary Lynn Johnson
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 21:15:04 MET
From: "D.W. DOERRBECKER"
To: William F Halloran , blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Frontispiece of "Europe" Again
Message-Id: <4579268076C@netwareserver.uni-trier.de>
May 21st, 1997
Earlier today, William F. Halloran wrote:
> The most striking version I have seen was hanging on the wall
> at George Goyder's house in Long Melford when I visited him a
> few years back. Its background was black and its sun blood
> red. I will check the Lister book because from Jennifer's post
> it sounds as though the Goyder print resembles the one Blake
> made for Tatham. Could it be a copy?
It could.
> That leads me to two questions:
> 1) George Goyder believed his print was executed by Blake. He
> said, however, that Bob Essick, when he saw it, thought it was
> a copy.
Yes, Robert Essick thought "it was a copy", though not a forgery.
> I wonder if anyone has evidence or could point me to evidence
> either way. I have not seen any printed references to the
> Goyder print, perhaps for good reason. Bob Essick or Jerry
> Bentley would be the best people to respond on this point, but
> they seem not to be on the list. It may be also that the
> matter is a bit sensitive in the wake of George Goyder's death
> in January.
When, back in 1978, the richly coloured loose impression from the
Whitworth was hanging side by side with the late Sir Geoffrey
Keynes's and the late George Goyder's versions of "The Ancient of
Days" in the Tate Gallery's Blake exhibition, Martin Butlin (as well
as myself and probably many others) began to realize that, if
genuine, the three pulls would have had to be printed from *three
different relief-etched plates*, and this just didn't seem to make
*any* sense from a printmaker's point of view. But it was, to the
best of my knowledge, Robert N. Essick who first noted that some of
the lines in the cross-hatching of the clouds which show a much
cruder pattern in the Keynes and Goyder versions than in any copy of
*Europe* were applied *on top* of other colours (etc., etc.); this,
of course, is technically impossible if a pull from an etched plate
is being hand-coloured or colourprinted. And this in turn led Essick
to the discovery that the Keynes and Goyder impressions in fact
belong with a small edition of facsimiles of "The Ancient of Days"
produced by William Muir's Blake Press at Edmonton from the 1880s
onwards. The matter has been discussed by Essick in print and in
greater detail (probably in an appendix in his catalogue of *The
Separate Plates of WB*, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1983).
> That leads to a related question:
> 2) Can someone point me to the most current source of printed
> information about the various versions of this plate? Has
> there been an article on it in recent years I have missed?
> (Dare I ask this question after Mary Lynn's recent post?)
Whereas G. E. Bentley's *Blake Books* still listed a fairly large
number of separate pulls of the *Europe* frontispiece, Bentley's
*Blake Books Supplement* (Oxford, Oxon.: Clarendon Press, 1995) will
probably contain the updated chalcographic information you are
looking for.
--DW Doerrbecker
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 May 97 18:35:02 -0700
From: Seth T. Ross
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: spamming Blake Online (was Re: Eastern Influence)
Message-Id: <9705220135.AA09808@albion.com>
Content-Type: text/plain
KKR29@aol.com has been kicked off the list. For the record, anyone who uses
their Blake subscription to send spam or a chain letter will be removed with
extreme prejudice. I will also file a complaint with the postmaster of their
site. I apologize for this administrative interruption.
--Seth
Albion.com Sysadmin
Begin forwarded message:
Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 22:09:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: KKR29@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Eastern Influence
X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/4801
> The following income opportunity is one you may be interested
> in looking at. It can be started with VERY MINIMAL outlay and
> the income return is TREMENDOUS ...
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 13:21:16 +0000
From: hbri1@student.monash.edu.au
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake Online
Message-Id: <34D7D3A73FC@mfs06.cc.monash.edu.au>
To Mary Lynn Johnson,
Thank you for your detailed and informative reading of "The Chimney
Sweeper". I appreciate the time and effort taken to share that with
us.
I also note the disucssion taking place over the last few days about
using Blake-Online instead of library research, and your report that
most onliners feel it is not a problem. I thought I'd just mention
an interesting example of the accuracy risks of quoting Internet
sources in academic research.
I belong to another discussion group dedicated to Emily Dickinson and
linguistic issues. An english teacher from China wrote in asking for
information regarding Dickinson's indebtedness to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He received several contradictory replies, and someone suggested going
back into the archive of Internet entries of this discussion group.
This was done, and some ten or more relevant entries were thrown up.
However, and this is the point, these entries were then fed back into
the system as what looked like a very official and authoratitive
summary of the academic status-quo of the subject, whereas in fact it
was simply a compilation of various haphazard remarks reflecting
varying degrees of factual knowledge about Dickinson's relationship
or lack of it with Emerson. I realized this because I noticed my own
somewhat uncertain reply in amongst the entries.
So I throw that in as an interesting example of lifting casual
remarks out of context and representing them as facts. Always a
danger - even in books, of course!
Yours, Hassanah Briedis.
=========================================================
HBRI1@MFS06.cc.monash.edu.au
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 00:08:46 +0200
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Yale Blake exhibit particulars please!
Message-Id: <4302.199705212208@merlot.controls.eurotherm.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>OK, I could find all this out if I called Yale, but for anyone who has
>already attended the exhibition, what are the hours, does it cost anything,
Most people on the list probably already know this, but note that there is
also a concurrent exhibition of the so-called followers of Blake, including
Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, Calvert, and John Linnell.
Tim Linnell
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 20:36:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: GaryG332@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: shortcuts in library research
Message-Id: <970522203552_-2101483105@emout01.mail.aol.com>
While I expect to be considered a dinosaur, I do believe that there is no
substitute for first-person research in a library, and, yet, I lament the
demise of the researcher's best friend--the card catalog.
Gary Geoffrion
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 21:07:51 -0400 (EDT)
From: GaryG332@aol.com
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: RE: shortcuts in library research
Message-Id: <970522210749_-698007125@emout13.mail.aol.com>
John, et alia,
I've only been monitoring this site for a few months and have been trying to
figure out what it's about. You've helped, but I don't have a firm grip on it
yet. I've seen academic/sophomoric/new ageic/bizarroic stuff but no center.
I'm not suggesting, after so little exposure, that I understand what it ought
to be but am wondering if there is a controlling dynamic. What is the raison
d'etre for this site? I'm not being critical, just curious.
Gary Geoffrion
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 22 May 97 19:04:47 -0800
From: Tom Devine
To:
Cc: "Izak Bouwer"
Subject: Re: bad man/ good man query
Message-Id: <199705230203.TAA14010@scv2.apple.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Patricia Neal reported that
Morris Eaves had asked, on behalf of Richard Finneran,
for the identification of the source for the line in
W. B. Yeats: "The Words upon the Windowpane"
that reads: "The poet William Blake said that he never
knew a bad man that has not something very good
about him."
The quotation is from "Reminiscences" (1852) of
Henry Crabb Robinson. The quote can be found for
instance in G.E. Bentley : Blake Records (1969) page
548. The actual quote reads:
" I have never known a very bad man who had not
something very good about him."
The sentence in Crabb Robinson preceding this one
reads: "He digressed into a condemnation of those who
sit in judgment on others."
Izak Bouwer
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 07:18:56 -0400
From: Al Mardeuse
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: shortcuts in library research
Message-Id: <33857D20.6799@earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
GaryG332@aol.com wrote:
What is the raison
> d'etre for this site? I'm not being critical, just curious.
>
> Gary Geoffrion
As a new member of this site I can only say that it seems obvious to me
that the raison d'etre for this site is the "love and appreciation of
Blake & his work" how much greater a passion do you ned for a center?
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 16:03:12 +0200
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: New(ish) Blake Book
Message-Id: <12087.199705231403@merlot.controls.eurotherm.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
As a postscript to the discussion on paper/electronic copies of Blake's
work, I've just bought a book of reproductions of pictures and engravings,
which seems excellent value to me (it cost 30 UKP). It is a catalogue of
what seems to have been a very comprehensive Blake exhibition in Madrid last
year, and is entitled 'William Blake' (Fundacion "la Caixa") : ISBN
84-7664-537-6.
Text is in Spanish, but English translations are provided, and the
reproductions are of quite reasonable quality, mostly in colour. The book is
large in format, I suppose about 12" by 8", 259 pages. The work ranges from
early engravings to later work including Dante and Job, and as previously
mentioned seems very comprehensive.
By the way, does anyone know where I can contact Stephen Keynes (who
apparently helped organise the exhibition), who I take to be the son or
close relative of Sir Geoffrey?
Tim Linnell
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 15:39:35 -0500 (CDT)
From: Kathy Krejci
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Blake Ball
Message-Id: <199705232039.PAA19898@delyte.lib.siu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hello, list members!
I apologize for "crashing" your list but I was hoping some of you might have
information that a poor struggling librarian could use. Unfortunately I do
not have a sufficient knowledge base (or time) to pursue this on my own.
Any help would be appreciated.
"Blake Ball" is an animated film by Emily Hubley based on poetry by William
Blake. We have a copy of this film on video which I am in the process of
cataloging. If any of you are familiar with this film, would you know:
1) The year in which it was produced.
or
2) Which specific poems by Blake are quoted.
or
3) A brief summary of the film.
It appears that my record will be the first going on-line for this film so I
would like it to be as accurate as humanly possible.
Thank you for you time and in advance for any help you may be able to offer!
Sincerely,
Kathy Krejci
***************************************************************
"You fill me with inertia."
--Bedazzled, 1967
***************************************************************
Kathy Krejci
Cataloging - Morris Library
Southern Illinois University - Carbondale
Carbondale, IL 62901
(618) 453-1605
kkrejci@lib.siu.edu
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 16:55:43 -0500 (CDT)
From: reillys@ix.netcom.com (susan p. reilly)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Yale Blake Exhibition/Mellon Collection
Message-Id: <199705232155.QAA29336@dfw-ix4.ix.netcom.com>
Dear Listers,
Travelling in tandem or trio to view the Blake exhibit is probably not
advisable, as one or more members of the group are bound to have a
headache, become claustrophobic, or be looking for the nearest
ice cream parlour.
In my own case, consequently, I managed only the minimal
once-around of what is a rather large, extremely unusual, and very
impressive exhibition of Blake works which ranges from pencil sketches
to pen and ink drawings, relief etchings, watercolor
illustration, temperas and engraved illustrations.
I observed that no facsimile, however fine, can ever
adequately capture the delicacy of detail or the scale (large or small)
of Blake's work.
>From the huge folios of the illustrated works of Gray to the smallest
plates of S of I, there is a quality about the originals which cannot
be duplicated in photographic reproduction.
As to the Mellon collection and the dates of acquisition
of Mellon-owned Blake articles by YBCA: the most recent item in
the Blake exhibit seems to have been aquired from Mellon by Yale
in 1981, though Mellon, it seems, is STILL an avid collector
and may have donated other items to the permanent collection which
were not on display in this exhibit. Some items in the exhibit
were on loan from Mellon (and from elsewhere?). Perhaps this is where
the idea originated that some of Mellon's donations are "recent" (?).
Most of the items in the exhibit will revert back to the private
collection at Yale, housed, I assume, at the Beinecke, and will be
available there for viewing.
One of the curators informed me that _Jerusalem_ still remains the
private property of Paul Mellon.
Acquisition details aside, this is, as has been noted, an exceptionally
fine and beautifully displayed exhibit in which the Blakeophile can be
lost for hours.
Susan Reilly
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End of blake-d Digest V1997 Issue #61
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