POETIC GENIUS

BLAKE'S SUBLIME ALLEGORY, Edited by Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr.
 

This book is a useful addition to the Blake shelf in our library. It is easier to understand than some and more thorough than others. In addition to the helpful essay 'On Reading the Four Zoas' by Mary Lynn Johnson and Brian Wilkie, are several others including 'The Aim of Blake's Prophecies' by Jerome McGann, which I particularly like.

 

From page 16, I quote:

"...The demand is that we set the poem's terms into successively different types of relations to each other. Blake's art is a sort of Glass Bead Game. (Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game) To "make sense" of his works we establish in and for them different forms of order, based on shifting sets of dissociations and associations, contrasts and analogies. To cease the act of creating these relations, or ironically, unbuilding them again, is to lapse into single vision."

 

page 17 "Every line ought to be an opportunity for outwitting Satan's watch fiends, while every poem as a whole is designed as a spiritual exercise for the encouragement of universal prophecy."

 

page 20 "Golgonooza is the house whose windows of the morning open out to the worlds of eternity, where Jesus dwells. We were never meant to live in, or with it but through it."
 

page 21 "...artists must approach the world not with creations which will trap men but with visions that will encourage imaginative activity."

Wikipedia Commons

Book of Urizen
Plate 4

Trapped in the Cave of the Mind

The point to me is that Blake did not write poetry whose meaning is discernible in static images, methods, or rules. He wrote to encourage the kind of discernment or perception which characterizes intuitive, imaginative, immediate response to the image which presents itself.

The way he wrote, what he wrote, and why he wrote are all one piece: imagination permeates all. He didn't want us to exit by the same door we entered, so he closed that one door and left all the others open.