Romanticism Contributions William Blake

Influences and References  Ominous forces were at work in the contemporary world and led him to complicate the symbolic obliquities by which he veiled the unorthodoxy of his religious and moral opinions, as well as the radicalism of the many allusions to contemporary affairs that he worked into his poems

Definitive Style  Mature lyric technique of compressed metaphor and symbol which explode into a multiplicity of references  “The Tyger”

Philosophy inspires Mythology  Gradually thought about human history and his experience of life and suffering— articulated themselves in the “Giant Forms” and their actions, which constitute a complete mythology  Wrote them in the persona, or “voice,” of “the Bard! Who Present, Past, & Future sees” (follows Spenser, especially Milton, in a lineage going back to prophets of the Bible)

Blake’s Mature Myth  Mythical premise is not a transcendent God but the “Universal Man” who is himself God and who incorporates the cosmos as well  Blake describes this founding image as “the Human Form Divine” and names him Albion  The fall, in this myth, is not the fall of humanity away from God but a falling apart of primal people, a “fall into Division” calling the original sin “Selfhood”  “Four Mighty Ones” Zoas: Urthona, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro

How the Myth Operates  Redeemer--human imagination which is operative in prophetic poet  Vala— “Nature” the material universe perceived through the senses  We achieve redemption by liberating and intensifying the bodily senses by attaining and sustaining that mode of vision that transfigures the fallen world by revealing the lineaments of its eternal imaginative form

Reflecting on the Work  How are Blake’s philosophical ideas present in his works?