EPIC POETRY

National Trust Collection

Characters from Spenser's Faerie Queene

Frye presents these three English poems Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost as the epics which would have been the exemplars for Blake. The goal which was before each serious poet, Frye believed, would have been to write a fourth English epic, building on the achievements of these predecessors. 

Below are quotes from Northrop Frey's Fearful Symmetry which have been helpful to me in attempting to understand Blake's Milton. Topics for study before one plunges into Milton may include Epic Poetry, John Milton's biography, William Blake's biography, Blake's The Four Zoas, Milton's Paradise Lost, and, of course, the Old and New testaments of the Bible. 

Fearful Symmetry - Page 9

"Blake's own definition of poetry:

'Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry. it is also somewhat in the same manner defin'd by Plato.'

...The corporeal understanding, then, canot do more than elucidate the genuine obscurities, the things requiring special knowledge to understand,
...The 'intellectual powers' go to work rather differently; they start with the hypothesis that the poem in front of them is an imaginative whole and work out the implications of that hypothesis 'Every Poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity,' said Blake: the identity of form and content is the axiom of all sound criticism."

Fearful Symmetry - Page 316

"The function of the epic, in its origin, seems to be primarily to teach the nation, or whatever we call the social unit which the poet is addressing, irs own traditions. These traditions are chiefly concerned with the national religion and the national history...The religion is not theological nor the history documentary: both are mythopoeic. "  

Fearful Symmetry - Page 319

"Milton thinks of himself continually as an inspired prophet sent by God to present his vision to the English people."

Fearful Symmetry - Page 340

"The primary social function of the epic is to teach the 'nation' its own traditions, and in Blakean terms this means recreating dead facts into living truths, the vanished spectres of tradition into imagination's eternal and infinite present. 

... the prophets did not turn their backs on their national history: they recreated it, and brought out of it the eternally present archetypes of the fall and redemption of man."

Fearful Symmetry - Page 346

"Blake is, therefore, trying to do for Milton what the prophets and Jesus did for Moses: isolate what is poetic and imaginative and annihilate what is legal and historical. This is also what he is trying to do for himself, and there will always be a curse on any critic who tries to see the Christianity and radicalism of Blake as a dichotomy instead of a unity." 

Fearful Symmetry - Page 352

"He (Milton) felt...that the family was the main breach in the visionary's defenses through which the powers of compromise came pouring with their threats and wheedling. The visionary's right to cut himslf loose from his family when his genius was in mortal danger was an essential part of Milton's conception of liberty and was perhaps the real reason for writing the divorce tracts...
When Satan is in charge of this world,
'A mans worst enemies are those
Of his own house & family'
Jerusalem, Plate 27, (E 173)

Fearful Symmetry - Page 355

"The Epilogue of the great poem is exquisitely managed. With the four Zoas sounding the trumpets of the Last Judgement in his ears, Blake falls into a swoon, and revives in his garden with his wife bending anxiously over him, and before him a singing lark and a wild thyme, the early-rising bird and the early-flowering plant of returning spring...

..Milton is the prelude to a longer poem on the theme it announces, the building of a continuing city in the England of the Satanic Mills."

Fearful Symmetry - Page 359 - Final quote from Frye

"[By] the time he wrote Jerusalem Blake was so accustomed to thinking in terms of his symbols that the latter had become a kind of ideographic alphabet...The justification for Blake's kind of dehydrated epic is a simple matter of literary honesty. Poems must take their own forms, and these precipitates of meaning are the form which poetry takes in Blake's crystallizing mind. An epic of such form cannot be expanded: it can only be padded, and padding is immoral...Blake's epics are brief enough to be examined plastically, reread so that their structural unity emerges along with their linear meaning, and as part of it. The beauty of Jerusalem is the beauty of intense concentration." 

Milton, Plate 2, (E 98)

"If you account it Wisdom when you are angry to be silent, and
Not to shew it: I do not account that Wisdom but Folly.
Every Mans Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individuality
O Satan my youngest born, art thou not Prince of the Starry Hosts
And of the Wheels of Heaven, to turn the Mills day & night?  
Art thou not Newtons Pantocrator weaving the Woof of Locke
To Mortals thy Mills seem every thing & the Harrow of Shaddai
A scheme of Human conduct invisible & incomprehensible
Get to thy Labours at the Mills & leave me to my wrath,

Satan was going to reply, but Los roll'd his loud thunders.   

Anger me not! thou canst not drive the Harrow in pitys paths.
Thy Work is Eternal Death, with Mills & Ovens & Cauldrons.
Trouble me no more. thou canst not have Eternal Life

So Los spoke! Satan trembling obeyd weeping along the way.
Mark well my words, they are of your eternal Salvation"