What was really fun about compiling all of the quotes for today was I realized how polarizing a poet he really is. Was, and still is. Undeniably important, undeniably in the canon – but after that, everybody disagrees.<\/p>\n
So here are two poems of the same topic – one from Songs of Innocence<\/i>, one from Songs of Experience<\/i>.<\/p>\n
The Chimney Sweeper<\/b> – from Songs of Innocence<\/i>
\nWhen my mother died I was very young,
\nAnd my father sold me while yet my tongue
\nCould scarcely cry ” ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”
\nSo your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.<\/p>\n
There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
\nThat curl’d llke a lamb’s back. was shav’d: so I said
\n“Hush. Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare
\nYou know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”<\/p>\n
And so he was quiet & that very night,
\nAs Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
\nThat thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned or Jack.
\nWere all of them lock’d up in coffins of black.<\/p>\n
And by came an Angel who had a bright key,
\nAnd he open’d the coffins & set them all free;
\nThen down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
\nAnd wash in a river. and shine in the Sun.<\/p>\n
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,
\nThey rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
\nAnd the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
\nHe’d have God for his father & never want joy.<\/p>\n
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark.
\nAnd got with our bags & our brushes to work.
\nTho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;
\nSo if all do their duty they need not fear harm.<\/p>\n
\nThe Chimney Sweeper<\/b> – Songs of Experience<\/i><\/p>\n
A little black thing among the snow:
\nCrying weep, weep, in notes of woe!
\nWhere are thy father & mother! say!
\nThey are both gone up to the church to pray.<\/p>\n
Because I was happy upon the heath,
\nAnd smil’d among the winters snow:
\nThey clothed me in the clothes of death,
\nAnd taught me to sing the notes of woe.<\/p>\n
And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
\nThey think they have done me no injury:
\nAnd are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
\nWho make up a heaven of our misery.<\/p>\n
\nThe eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow. — William Blake<\/p>\n
“He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. one obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble.” — F.R. Leavis<\/i><\/p>\n
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. — Blake<\/i><\/p>\n
“I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bit excessive?”
\n“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake.”
\nPause.
\n“William Blake?”
\n“William Blake!”
\n“William Blake???”
\n“William Blake!!!”
\n— Bull Durham<\/i><\/p>\n
“I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse.” — William Blake<\/i><\/p>\n
“The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life.” — Robert Graves<\/i><\/p>\n
“In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin.” — Edward Thomas<\/i><\/p>\n
“It is an honest against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.” — T.S. Eliot<\/i><\/p>\n
“Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.” — Blake<\/i><\/p>\n
“He is very eighteenth century.” — T.S. Eliot<\/i><\/p>\n
“The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.” — T.S. Eliot on “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”<\/i><\/p>\n
“In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a ‘dark night of the soul sort of,’ his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him – ‘I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of “Ah, Sun-flower,” and it suddenly appeared – the poem I’d read a lot of times before.’ He began to understand the poem, and ‘suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,’ he ‘heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.’ This ‘apparitional voice’ became his guiding spirit: ‘It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.’ On Ginsberg this ‘anciency fathered Howl<\/i>, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish<\/i> he was assisted by amphetamine injections. ‘The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.’ Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”<\/i><\/p>\n
“a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique … individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence.” — FR Leavis<\/i><\/p>\n
“You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas.” — TS Eliot<\/i><\/p>\n
“Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake’s ‘The Chimey Sweeper’, written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet’s dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep’s gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What was really fun about compiling all of the quotes for today was I realized how polarizing a poet he really is. Was, and still is. Undeniably important, undeniably in the canon – but after that, everybody disagrees. So here … Continue reading