“A magnificent, extraordinary book. . . . Several great poets have written of Blake, but this book is the first to show the full magnitude of Blake’s mind.” ― The Spectator

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

A STUDY OF WILLIAM BLAKE

By NORTHROP FRYE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1947 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06165-8

Contents

PART ONE THE ARGUMENT……………………………………………..1. THE CASE AGAINST LOCKE…………………………………………..32. THE RISING GOD………………………………………………….303. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL…………………………………………….554. A LITERALIST OF THE IMAGINATION…………………………………..855. THE WORD WITHIN THE WORD…………………………………………108PART TWO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYMBOLISM……………………………6. TRADITION AND EXPERIMENT…………………………………………1477. THE THIEF OF FIRE……………………………………………….1878. THE REFINER IN FIRE……………………………………………..2279. THE NIGHTMARE WITH HER NINEFOLD…………………………………..269PART THREE THE FINAL SYNTHESIS……………………………………..10. COMUS AGONISTES………………………………………………..31311. THE CITY OF GOD………………………………………………..35612. THE BURDEN OF THE VALLEY OF VISION……………………………….404GENERAL NOTE: BLAKE’S MYSTICISM……………………………………..431NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS………………………………………….433NOTES TO THE TEXT………………………………………………….435INDEX…………………………………………………………….451

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE CASE AGAINST LOCKE

This book offers an explanation o£ Blake’s thought and a commentaryon his poetry. No effort has been made to deal at alladequately with Blake’s biography or with his work as painterand engraver: a study of his relation to English literature isprimarily what has been attempted. The attempt is not unique,though the amount of critical writing on Blake’s poetry is perhapsnot as large as it is often vaguely stated to be. After deducting theobsolete, the eccentric and the merely trivial, what remains issurely no greater in volume than a poet of such importance isentitled to. It is large enough, however, to justify a statement ofwhat is believed to be peculiar to this study.

Many students of literature or painting must have felt thatBlake’s relation to those arts is a somewhat quizzical one. Criticsin both fields insist almost exclusively upon the angularity of hisgenius. Blake, they tell us, is a mystic enraptured with incommunicablevisions, standing apart, a lonely and isolated figure,out of touch with his own age and without influence on the followingone. He is an interruption in cultural history, a separablephenomenon. The historian of painting has to abandon all narrativecontinuity when the time comes to turn aside and devotea few words to Blake’s unique output. The historian of poetry isnot quite so badly off; but even so it is only by cutting out two-thirdsof Blake’s work that he will be able to wedge the rest of it inwith that of the minor pre-Romantics.

For Blake is more than most poets a victim of anthologies.Countless collections of verse include a dozen or so of his lyrics,but if we wish to go further we are immediately threatened witha formidable bulk of complex symbolic poems known as “Prophecies,”which make up the main body of his work. Consequentlythe mere familiarity of some of the lyrics is no guarantee that theywill not be wrongly associated with their author. If they indicatethat we must take Blake seriously as a conscious and deliberateartist, we shall have to study these prophecies, which is more thanmany specialists in Blake’s period have done. The propheciesform what is in proportion to its merits the least read body ofpoetry in the language, and most of the more accessible editionsof Blake omit them altogether, or print only those fragments whichseem to the editor to have a vaguely purplish cast.

There is no a priori reason for this, apart from one or two hazyimpressions which need only a passing mention. One is, that Blakewrote lyrics at the height of his creative power and that he laterturned to prophecy as a sign that he had lost it. Yet his earliestbook, Poetical Sketches, is evenly divided between lyrics and embryonicprophecies, and one of his last and most complicatedprophecies contains his most famous lyric. Another is, that Blakeis to be regarded as an ultrasubjective primitive whose work involuntarilyreflects his immediate mood. The Songs of Innocenceare then to be taken at their face value as the outpourings of anaïve and childlike spontaneity, and the Songs of Experience asthe bitter disillusionment resulting from maturity—for whenBlake engraved the latter he was no longer a child of thirty-twobut a grown man of thirty-seven. It is logical inference from thisthat the prophecies can reflect only an ecstatic self-absorption onwhich it is unnecessary for a critic to intrude.

Now of course it is quite true that Blake was a neglected andisolated figure, obeying his own genius in defiance of an indifferentand occasionally hostile society; and he himself was well awarethat he was “born with a different face.” But he did not want -tobe: he did not enjoy neglect, and he had what no real artist canbe without, an intense desire to communicate. “Those who havebeen told,” he pleaded, “that my Works are but an unscientificand irregular Eccentricity, a Madman’s Scrawls, I demand of themto do me the justice to examine before they decide.” It is patheticto read his letters and see how buoyant is his hope of being understoodin his own time, and how wistful is the feeling that he mustdepend on posterity for appreciation. And it was not only recognitionhe wanted: he had a very strong sense of his personal responsibilityboth to God and to society to keep on producing the kindof imaginative art he believed in. He despised obscurity, hatedall kinds of mystery, and derided the idea that poets do not fullycomprehend what they are writing. All his poetry was writtenas though it were about to have the immediate social impact ofa new play. Besides, if we look at some of the other poets of thesecond half of the eighteenth century—Smart, Cowper, Chatterton,Macpherson, Fergusson, Collins, Burns—we shall find the percentageof mental breakdowns and social maladjustments amongthem abnormally high. It is clear that the spiritual loneliness ofBlake was not so much characteristic of him as of his age.

Therefore, as no one will deny that Blake is entitled to thesquare deal he asked for, we propose to adopt more satisfactoryhypotheses and see what comes out of them. These are, first, thatall of Blake’s poetry, from the shortest lyric to the longest prophecy,must be taken as a unit and, mutatis mutandis, judged bythe same standards. This means that the longer and more difficultprophecies will have to bear the weight of the commentary. Theyare what a great poet chose to spend most of his time on, and theyare what he hoped to be remembered for, as a poet, by posterity.He may have been mistaken in this, as poets often are about theirown work, but if he was the error is too consistent and giganticto be ignored. Second, that as all other poets are judged in relationto their own time, so should Blake be placed in his historical andcultural context as a poet who, though original, was not aboriginal,and was neither a freak nor a sport.

One of the most striking things about Blake is his genius forcrystallization. He is perhaps the finest gnomic artist in Englishliterature, and his fondness for aphorism and epigram runs steadilythrough his work from adolescence to old age. To produce theapparent artlessness of the lyrics he was ready to do the veryconsiderable amount of rewriting and excision that his manuscriptsshow. The meticulous clarity of his engraving is as evidentin the great sweep of Paolo and Francesca, in the Dante series, asin the microscopic marginal detail on the poems. It seems difficultto imagine, then, how Blake came to find an artistic satisfaction,or even relief, in writing such confused and chaotic monologuesas the prophecies are generally considered to be. I quote from anintelligent and sensitive study of his painting:

By way of more than passing interest, it is worthy of note that in thegarden of the house grew a grape-vine; but no grapes were enjoyed,for Blake held that it was wrong to prune the vine. Had Blake submittedthat vine to pruning, he might have enjoyed its fruit; and had hesubmitted the luxuriant vine of his Prophetic Books to more diligentpruning, more people might have lived to enjoy their fruit also. Itwould be one of those strange chances with which Life is for everteasing the children of men, that Blake should produce the largernumber of his books from a house from the windows of which he couldsee a parable from which he was not willing to learn.

Anyone who has glanced at the original versions of “The Tyger”or “The Fly” may perhaps wonder why the man who did thepruning of these poems should have been afraid of a grapevine.However, the story of the unpruned vine is merely one of theanecdotes that regularly go the rounds of artists’ biographies, thesource of this one being probably Vasari’s Life of Piero di Cosimo;we are concerned here only with the theory of wanton luxuriance.Blake’s poetry consists of one volume of youthful work publishedwithout his co-operation, a proof copy of another poem, a fewmanuscripts, and a series of poems the text of which was laboriouslyengraved backhanded on copper plates and accompaniedby a design. And when these poems were once engraved Blakeseldom altered anything more fundamental than the color-scheme:

    Re-engrav’d Time after Time,
    Ever in their youthful prime,
    My designs unchang’d remain.

The inference is clear: the engraved poems were intended to forman exclusive and definitive canon. And in this canon there is muchevidence, not only of pruning, but of wholesale transplanting andgrafting. His longest poem, The Four Zoas, Blake left abandonedin a manuscript full of lively sketches and loaded with deletionsand corrections. Much of its material was later used in Miltonand Jerusalem, which he did engrave; but, proportionately, Blakemay be said to have blotted more lines than any other importantpoet of English literature.

Further, Blake’s poems are poems, and must be studied as such.Any attempt to explain them in terms of something that is notpoetry is bound to fail. Many students of Blake have been lessinterested in what he wrote than in what he read, and have examinedthe prophecies chiefly as documents illustrating somenonpoetic tradition such as mysticism or occultism. This, thoughit also ignores Blake’s vociferous assertions that he belongs to notradition whatever except that of the creative artists, is again aperfectly logical inference from the overemphasis on his uniquenessalready mentioned. If even the lyrics are so isolated in thehistory of literature, the prophecies can represent only a completebreak with the literary tradition itself.

I am not speaking now of merely vulgar misunderstandings. Noone who has read three lines of our straightforward and outspokenpoet can imagine that he wished to be pursued by a band of superstitiousdilettantes into the refuge of a specialized cult. WhateverBlake’s prophecies may be, they can hardly be code messages.They may need interpretation, but not deciphering: there can beno “key” and no open-sesame formula and no patented systemof translation. The amateur of cabalism who accepts obscuretruisms for profound truths, and sentimental platitudes for esotericmysteries, would do well to steer clear of Blake. No: I mean thetendency to describe Blake in terms of certain stereotypes whichimply that he can be fully appreciated only by certain types ofmind, and which tend to scare the ordinary reader away from him.The poet who addressed the four parts of his most complicatedpoem, Jerusalem, to the “Public,” Jews, Deists and Christians—toanyone who cares to look at it—the poet who boasted of beingunderstood by children, would have resented this treatmentstrongly. It is true, however, that the poet who said “Exuberanceis Beauty” demands an energy of response. He is not writing fora tired pedant who feels merely badgered by difficulty: he is writingfor enthusiasts of poetry who, like the readers of mysterystories, enjoy sitting up nights trying to find out what the mysteryis.

The usual label attached to Blake’s poetry is “mystical,” whichis a word he never uses. Yet “mysticism,” when the word is notsimply an elegant variant of “misty” or “mysterious,” means acertain kind of religious technique difficult to reconcile withanyone’s poetry. It is a form of spiritual communion with Godwhich is by its nature incommunicable to anyone else, and whichsoars beyond faith into direct apprehension. But to the artist,qua artist, this apprehension is not an end in itself but a meansto another end, the end of producing his poem. The mysticalexperience for him is poetic material, not poetic form, and mustbe subordinated to the demands of that form. From the point ofview of any genuine mystic this would be somewhat inadequate,and one who was both mystic and poet, never finally decidingwhich was to be the adjective and which the noun, might berather badly off. If he decided for poetry, he would perhaps dobetter to use someone else’s mystical experiences, as Crashawdid St. Teresa’s.

I do not say that these difficulties are insurmountable, or thatthere are no such things as mystical poets. But they are very rarebirds, and most of the poets generally called mystics might betterbe called visionaries, which is not quite the same thing. This isa word that Blake uses, and uses constantly. A visionary creates,or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects ofperception in this one have become transfigured and charged witha new intensity of symbolism. This is quite consistent with art,because it never relinquishes the visualization which no artist cando without. It is a perceptive rather than a contemplative attitudeof mind; but most of the greatest mystics, St. John of theCross and Plotinus for example, find the symbolism of visionaryexperience not only unnecessary but a positive hindrance to thehighest mystical contemplation. This suggests that mysticism andart are in the long run mutually exclusive, but that the visionaryand the artist are allied.

Such a distinction cannot be absolute, of course, and one typeblends into the other. But Blake was so completely a visionaryand an artist that I am inclined to think that most true mysticswould reject his attitude as vulgar and insensitive. Porphyry speaksof his master Plotinus as having four times in his life, with greateffort and relentless discipline, achieved a direct apprehensionof God. Blake says:

    I am in God’s presence night & day,
    And he never turns his face away.

To Blake, the spiritual world was a continuous source of energy:he harnessed spiritual power as an engineer harnesses water powerand used it to drive his inspiration: he was a spiritual utilitarian.He had the complete pragmatism of the artist, who, as artist,believes nothing but is looking only for what he can use. If Blakegets into the rapt circle of mystics it is only as Mercury got intothe Pantheon, elbowing his way through with cheerful Cockneyassurance, his pockets bulging with paper, then producing hiseverlasting pencil and notebook and proceeding to draw rapidsketches of what his more reverent colleagues are no longerattempting to see.

· 2 ·

Any attempt to explain Blake’s symbolism will involve explaininghis conception of symbolism. To make this clear we need Blake’sown definition of poetry:

Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogetherhidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of theMost Sublime Poetry; it is also somewhat in the same manner defin’dby Plato.

It has often been remarked that Blake’s early lyrics recall theElizabethans: it is not so generally realized that he reverts to themin his critical attitude as well, and especially in this doctrine thatall major poetry is allegorical. The doctrine is out of fashion now,but whatever Blake may mean by the above definition, it is clearthat there is a right and a wrong way of reading allegory. It ispossible, then, that our modern prejudice against allegory, whichextends to a contemptuous denial that Homer or Virgil or Shakespearecan be allegorical poets, may be based on the way of the”corporeal understanding.”

What is the corporeal understanding? Literally, it is bodilyknowledge: the data of sense perception and the ideas derived fromthem. From this point of view poetry is something to be explained,and the notion that any kind of commentary will ever explainany kind of poetry is of course vulgar. Even if there is a hiddenmeaning, a poem which contains no more than what an explanationof that meaning can translate should have been written inthe form of the explanation in the first place. And if the literalsense of poetry is intelligible, the possibility that it may also beexplained allegorically might better be left alone.

The corporeal understanding, then, cannot do more than elucidatethe genuine obscurities, the things requiring special knowledgeto understand, like the contemporary allusions in Dante.The more it busies itself with the real meaning of the poem themore involved it gets, and Blake, like other difficult poets, hasbeen wrapped in a Laocoön tangle of encyclopedias, concordances,indexes, charts and diagrams. The “intellectual powers” go towork rather differently: they start with the hypothesis that thepoem in front of them is an imaginative whole, and work outthe implications of that hypothesis. “Every Poem must necessarilybe a perfect Unity,” said Blake: the identity of content and formis the axiom of all sound criticism. There is therefore nothingmysterious about the intellectual powers: on the contrary, theone thing they must include is a sense of proportion. If one wishesto make a necklace out of some beads and a string, one wouldbe well advised to start with the string and apply the beads to it.In the opposite procedure of laying the beads down in a line andtrying to stick the string through them, a comparatively simpletask becomes one of incredible difficulty.

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from FEARFUL SYMMETRY by NORTHROP FRYE. Copyright © 1947 by PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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