From: blake-d-request@albion.com Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 1996 11:39 AM To: blake-d@albion.com Subject: blake-d Digest V1996 #40 ------------------------------ Content-Type: text/plain blake-d Digest Volume 1996 : Issue 40 Today's Topics: Blake and a Viewer's Vision Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Paglia and Blake Re: Blake and a Viewer's Vision Blake, Paglia, and Me Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Blake & Paglia, etc. Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me S&M and The Mental Traveller Thanks again Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Re: The Blurs of Innocence and Experience Correction on Harold Bloom ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 18:02:06 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake and a Viewer's Vision Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" hmm wrote: >Since we're on the subject of assuming, I say you assume things of people >because that's what your posts imply. Your responses to others' >disagreements appear to boil down to either, "it's so OBVIOUS" or "Why >can't you get past your prejudices against S&M?">>> Do they? I was arguing one view of "The Clod and The Pebble", and since the only responses I got were criticisms, not support, I did feel it necessary to buttress my argument. But what bothered me, Hmm? Instead of giving the group THEIR view of the poem, some, including you, merely used mine to deconstruct and say what was wrong with it, to which I DID feel obliged to further my case. In a private post, someone told me that I was "wrong" to blur Songs of Innocence with Songs of Experience." So I'm not the only one privately talking to people. My recent post on that subject again merely shows my point of view. If you want to critically, creatively, and with whatever other faculties you have, look at those poems and see them a different way... go for it. Jennifer's view of "The Clod and the Pebble" is perhaps historically correct. Mark Trevor Smith gave a brilliant interpretation of "The Clod and the Pebble", and I wrote to him privately about it to commend him as well as further the discussion. Maybe that should have been public, in retrospect. I have re-read my posts, "hmm", upon your recommendation. Are they scary? Insulting? Did my interweaving with Isak Bouwer's beautiful contemplation of the visual image from "The Clod and the Pebble" sound like someone on a permanent rage? I have yet to see someone say what YOU think of the Newton drawing/painting, which my essay on the subject attempted to do. First someone said, "Well, there's a book..." Then you, "hmm", described how books have explained Blake's view toward Newton. But is that YOUR vision of the drawing? Talk whatever you want to talk about. Delete my messages if they're merely a thorn in your side. But my point was: what do YOU think of the Newton drawing/painting, before OR after reading the books about Blake's view of Newton. To me, that's what brings art alive. It's like reading criticism versus creating your own. In fact, I wouldn't even call my stuff "criticism" as much as "interpretation." My WebSite is all about "views," for example, intentionally implying that there are more than just mine. What does anyone out there think of the God Creating Man drawing/painting, for example? (My initial analysis is way back there in my first Clod and Pebble posting.) There's a wealth of information that Blake has given to us. I would also note, "hmm", that my initial post on "The Clod and the Pebble" brought a spark of life into this group. When I first joined, it seemed like alot of private e-mails were being distributed through the care of Albion. I've seen new people speak up, even as old ones were... I don't know what. You can always create your own threads if you don't like mine. http://world.std.com/~albright/ -R.H. Albright ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 18:28:24 +1000 From: jfk@netspace.net.au (John F. Keogh) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Clod and The Pebble -Reply Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" >All- > > It looks like I am surrounde my more knowledgeable folks than >myself on this topic... > > I do remember however what the sadist said to the masochist when >the masochist said "Hit me....please" > > To which the sadist replied, "NO!" The sadist actually replied "PERHAPS . . . " which is more sadistic... also more Blakeian. ***************************************************************************** * "THINGS GET WORSE" * ***************************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 96 05:09:51 -0400 From: James Stanger To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake's Drawing/Painting of Newton Message-Id: <9604210909.AA03988@uu6.psi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 04:56 PM 4/20/96 -0400, you wrote: >jlehto- >I would appreciate any suggestions on where to start with Boehme. I've found >him very difficult reading, even more so than Blake. So I'd appreciate any >suggestions you might post for a first Boehme experience and for any good >biographical or critical sources. >Thanks, >Tom Devine Hey Tom: Perhaps the first thing to take into consideration is to make sure you are reading the edition of Boehme that Blake likely would have read. This would be the "Law Edition" of Boehme (or, as he was popularly referred to in 18/19 century England, "Behmen"), published from 1764-1781. Any good university library will have either the original in its rare book room. I think there is a facsimile, but don't hold me to that. Here is a t-script of volume 1's title page: The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher. Volume I. Containing I. The Aurora. II. The Three Principles. To which is prefixed, The Life of the Author. With Figures, illustrating his Principles, left by the Reverend William Law, M.A.. LONDON, Printed for M. RICHARDSON, in Pater-noster Row. 1764. Some of the best discussions of Boehme that I have found have been in R.N. Essick's -William Blake and the Language of Adam- (1989), and especially -Bryan Aubrey's -Watchmen of Eternity- (1986). For further reading, take a look at G.E. Bentley's -Blake Books- and -Blake Books Supplement-. To further understand Boehme, it also might be helpful to read up a bit on Paracelsus. This is the name given to the man 'Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hoehnheim,' a Swiss-German surgeon and alchemist. I guess his friends called him Paracelsus for short. Go figure. Boehme read Paracelsus a lot. These two had a lot of influence on the continent (and in England) during Blake's time. It is debated that Swedenborg read Boehme, but Swedenborg denied, at one time anyway, that he ever read Boehme. Still, I say thatt if Swedenborg didn't read Boehme, then Swedenborg sure *sounded* like him anyway. Whether Blake was so greatly influenced by Boehme, or whether Blake simply saw a kindred spirit and not much more is, as you might already know, a matter of debate. It seems to me, anyway, that the latter is more plausible. It seems that his reading of Boehme gave Blake, betimes, an idiom through which he could discuss his already formed ideas and desires. There's my two cents. As far as where to start actually reading Boehme (who has influenced the likes of Kant, Heidegger, and many others), I suppose -The Aurora- is a good place to start. Hope this helps. Sincerely, James Stanger University of California at Riverside jamesst@csnsys.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 04:46:53 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Paglia and Blake Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Have any of you read the chapter in Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE on William Blake? It's called "Sex Bound and Unbound: Blake." If so, would you care to share your views on Paglia's vision of Blake? If not, it's only 30 pages and I think it's a good read. I'll talk about my view of Paglia's view on Blake in a later posting. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 13:15:59 -0500 (CDT) From: hmm To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake and a Viewer's Vision Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 20 Apr 1996, R.H. Albright wrote: > Instead of giving the group THEIR view of the poem, some, including you, > merely used mine to deconstruct and say what was wrong with it, to which I > DID feel obliged to further my case. I won't try to speak for anyone else, but I never said your interpretation was wrong; I just said it wasn't as obvious as you claimed. You're right, though, in that I only gave a partial explanation of my interpretation. So here goes -- 'The clod and the Pebble' is actually one of my favorite Blake poems because it paints for me a relatively simple (for Blake) and accurate picture of the two human views of love taken to their extremes. It's interesting that the clod, whom I presume is used to being "Trodden with the cattle's feet" holds the view of love as self-sacrifice, as a feeling that puts us in "Hells despair," but allows us to create Heaven in that despair. The pebble, solid and steadfast before the constant flowing of the stream (speaking of water, it's also interesting that the clod would be permeated by water to its very core where the pebble is only wet on its surface), sees love as another's sacrifice, a feeling that leads us to use and trap another, turning an emotional connection that should be Heaven into a Hell. We can see these different attitudes today in how people we know treat their lovers. > Jennifer's view of "The Clod and the Pebble" is perhaps historically correct. I'm not sure how you mean this... > I have re-read my posts, "hmm", upon your recommendation. Are they scary? > Insulting? Did my interweaving with Isak Bouwer's beautiful contemplation > of the visual image from "The Clod and the Pebble" sound like someone on a > permanent rage? Scary? No. Insulting? At times. > I have yet to see someone say what YOU think of the Newton > drawing/painting, which my essay on the subject attempted to do. First > someone said, "Well, there's a book..." Then you, "hmm", described how > books have explained Blake's view toward Newton. But is that YOUR vision > of the drawing? I did not give my intrepretation of the picture itself because I haven't seen it (which I believe I said in my post). I did give my vision of Blake's views of Newton and the scientific mindset Newton represents. In this case, I happen to agree (for the most part) with some of the books. I think Blake's problem with Newton (and I think he used Newton as a fitting metaphor for the Enlightenment mindset) was that he relied too much on science and Reason, and this reliance forever doomed him to a limited vision of Eternity. Call me a sheep if you will, but I refuse to change my interpretation (or be ashamed of it) simply because someone thought of it and wrote about it first. > Delete my messages if they're merely a thorn in your side. This is much too fun for that...) > I would also note, "hmm", that my initial post on "The Clod and the Pebble" > brought a spark of life into this group. When I first joined, it seemed > like alot of private e-mails were being distributed through the care of > Albion. I've seen new people speak up, even as old ones were... I don't > know what. You can always create your own threads if you don't like mine. Sparks come and go...there are always dead times. But you can take credit for this latest spark... m c647749@showme.missouri.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 19:57:39 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Blake, Paglia, and Me Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" INTRODUCTION I happen to like some of Camille Paglia's stuff, and I think it's great that Camille Paglia has achieved fame. She's shaken things up. Some may put her down as "pop," byt who else in the mass media is talking about the brilliance of D.H. Lawrence's WOMEN IN LOVE or Edward Said's CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM? And she can talk about them quite eloquently. I may disagree (bigtime) with what she says about Emerson and Whitman. But one chapter of SEXUAL PERSONAE that continues to endure for me as a piece of brilliant literary criticism is on William Blake: "SEX BOUND AND UNBOUND." THE OPENING SHOCK She starts the chapter with a classic Paglian thesis: "William Blake is the British Sade..." And my first instinct is "No!" Blake had elements of cynicism to his work which differentiates him from other Romantics, but I have not found any evidence that he gleaned pleasure from sadomasochism as the Marquis seems to have enjoyed... even if much of it was only in Sade's mind. BLAKE'S BREAK WITH DEAR, NAIVE ROUSSEAU Still, that first sentence is a provocative way to shake the reader to attention, and the more I have read and re-read this chapter, I am impressed with her understanding of Blake. For me, replacing the name "Sade" with "cynic" helped my reading of her view. And for me, the following sentences from the chapter are sheer genius: "Romantic solipsism, a self-communing and self-fructification, becomes sterile in Blake. Why? Because Blake, though he follows and extends Rousseau's politics, sees nature with Sade's eyes. In Blake, Rousseau's tender nature mother makes a fin-de-siecle leap into daemonic monumentality." BREATHING LIFE INTO BLAKE She then goes on to show how Blake is interested in "coercion, repetition-compulsion, spiritual rape. He sees sadism and vampirism in male authority figures." To me, this is Paglia at her best, cutting through a mere academic reading of Blake and seeing his work directly, freshly. She's breathing life into Blake. And she has witty remarks to bring the experience into our 20th century world, like this: "The white hair of the lamblike chimney sweep, little Tom Dacre, expresses his premature adult experience. The child-slaves advance from childhood to old age without passing through adult virility. As in the penalty card of capitalist Monopoly: 'Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.'" Paglia is not afraid to go back and reconstruct thoughts from college notes on such a seemingly simple poem as "Infant Joy" in SONGS OF INNOCENCE, because, in my eye, she is admitting how complicated the poem really is. GOD CREATING ADAM I disagree slightly with her view of Blake's watercolor of "God Creating Adam." She says: "Winged Urizen, Blake's tyrant Jehovah, hovers with a smothering weight above the corpselike Adam, stretched flat as if crucified. God is a vampire snatching back man's Promethean fire. The picture seems to show an unnatural sex act, homosexual and sadomasochistic." While I see a sort of sadomasochism here, I find it much more complex. And I don't see the sex or implied homosexuality at all. To me, Adam is nailed, flat on his back. But God looks baffled, saddenned perhaps by the legacy with which he is infusing life into his "alter ego." We were created in God's image, and it's quite a complex, in many ways cruel, legacy that He gave. The snake wrapping up Adam's leg: to me, it's worse than ropes or chains. It's alive, and there's no escape! If God is not a mere sadist, neither is Adam a mere masochist. He's strong. He looks like he's saying, "Oh no! What am I getting into?" And of course he has no choice. None of us do. BLAKE'S LONG PROPHETIC POEMS I agree with Paglia on these two points: "Blake's long prophetic poems have a curious psychological system. Bear with me for a synopsis hacked out of the jungle of Blake scholarship, much of it frustratingly contradictory..." She then offer a decent paragraph synopsis, after which she says: "Until commentary becomes simpler and more persuasive, Blake's long poems will languish unread, known only by Blake specialists, the same parochialization suffered by Spenser. " Agreed, Camille. CONNECTIONS TO THE GOTHIC AND BEYOND Paglia also says: "It should be immediately evident- though nowhere pointed out in central Blake studies- that Blake's Spectres and Emanations are equivalent to the ghosts of the contemporaneous Gothic novel. The late eighteenth century was the end of something and the beginning of something. The disintegration of the Apollonian Enlightenment produced a psychic fragmentation or splintering." Yes. Something was happening. Blake was turning a corner against the Enlightenment, toward Romanticism and Mysticism. Later, the Arts and Crafts Movement would look back to him as inspiration to fight the hideous blah-blah monotony that the industrial world seemed bent on cramming down everybody's throats. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Apr 1996 22:44:05 -0500 From: tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Message-Id: <96042122440517@womenscol.stephens.edu> Lo, it is the goddess! You may know her by her gait! Indeed, how did we ever miss the lurking face of Herself behind the "barefoot boy with cheek of tan." There he was, walking the walk and talking the talk, but somehow we took him a face value-- just another disciple of the new view that public discourse is best defined by ad hominem rants and shouts (a la McLaughlin) of WRONG! and blustering insistence that anyone who disagrees or dares to suggest an alternative view is just stupid and benighted, probably immersed in some bath of pseudo-intellectual and derivative complexity--and who needs complexity after all, since everything is so OBVIOUS! But now we know. It's not just Crossfire and the McLaughlin Group joining us with all their enthusiasms and yawps, but Herself, and who could have missed it. So, of course, it is Ms. Paglia who informs us that Blake's prophetic works will remain unread because they are so opaque and the commentaries on them are so complicated to read. It is Ms. Paglia who finds S&M and Sade (why not?) in Blake, though of course she will not bother to advance beyond simplistic paraphrase (or, oops, is that the barefoot boy?) to engage in serious critical discourse. What? Discuss the ambiguities of meaning in a single word? BALDERDASH WRONG 2 SECONDS YES OR NO IS BLAKE A SADIST OR A MASOCHIST DON'T QUALIFY JUST ANSWER--SAVE YOUR QUIBBLES FOR THE INTELLECTUALS AND ACADEMICS AND MILQUETOASTS. It's too bad that Herself finds the prophetic works too complicated to be read--but maybe Blake can respond for himself on that one-- "That which can be made explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care." Tom Dillingham (tomdill@womenscol.stephens.edu) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 00:11:49 EDT From: BPPU83C@prodigy.com (MS TRACEY C GAUGHRAN) To: Blake@albion.com Subject: Blake & Paglia, etc. Message-Id: <097.06552790.BPPU83C@prodigy.com> -- [ From: Tracey Gaughran * EMC.Ver #2.10P ] -- I agree with Mr. Albright's assessment of Paglia's perspective on Blake. One of my favorite quotes: "Blake sees sexual personae as false advertisement. As a moralist, Blake is a spiritualist. As a sexualist, he is a materialist. Never the twain shall meet. Arguments with one's self make art. Blake's poetry is border strife, communiques from the endless guerrilla war between sex and good intentions." Another meaty one: "Blake desires free imagination, but he exalts eroticism and makes chastity a perversion. This is impossible. There can be no active sexuality without surrender to nature and to liquidity, the realm of the mother. Blake wants nature bound but sex unbound." Personally, I don't believe Paglia's chapter on Blake to be the best of her work. Her chapter on Coleridge - particularly her discussion of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - however, is absolutely superb. Not only does she make what seems to me an obvious connection; between the "disjunction of form and content" in Coleridge and that of Poe, whom she calls "Coleridge's heir", but she also manages to crack some profound one-liners: "The Ancient Mariner, a rhapsody of the male heroine, is filled with piercing arias: 'Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony.' Emotional expressionism of this kind is possible in Italian but not in English." If any of you are interested, I also think that her chapter on Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is stunning - good enough to serve as a primer for first time readers. In a few paragraphs, she manages somehow to capture the essence of Wilde's play as no one has before her: "Meeting and mating with their counterparts, the play's Art Nouveau androgynes speak Wilde's characteristic language, the epicene witticism, analogous to their personae in its hardness, smoothness, and elongation....Yet Wilde's bon mots are so condensed they become things, artifacts. Without metaphor his language leaps into concreteness....An optimal performance of Earnest would be a romance of surfaces, male and female alike wearing masks of superb impassivity." (Pardon my trespassing into realms un-Blake...) - I AM! -- Tracey. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 08:54:19 -0400 (EDT) From: "R.H. Albright" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Well Mr. TomDill... Am I a disciple of Paglia? Or is Paglia a disciple of me? My thoughts on the Clod and the Pebble, for those of you who are going to use them in your dissertation, happen to be MINE, not Dr. Paglia's. And my S&M study was done in 77, 13 years before I read SEXUAL PERSONAE. Another snippy writeoff, in my opinion. Yale University Press doesn't publish garbage ALL the time, you know. And Anthony Burgess and Harold Bloom aren't exactly lightweights in the world of letters. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 09:04:14 -0400 (EDT) From: "R.H. Albright" To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I'm sorry, Tomdill, I wasn't finished yet. Do you know who wrote the introduction to the new Complete Works of William Blake available on Penguin Press? Harold Bloom, Paglia's mentor at Yale. Also, if you had bothered to see what I was doing in my posting, I was creating dialogue, not "Yes Ma'am" concurrence, with Paglia. And, lastly, since it appears you have seen my Website besides throwing letter bombs in my IN box, did it ever make you wonder why on my Paglia page and the related 4 or 5 subpages, it would sound like I'm more in disagreement with Paglia than a loyal ally? The reason is simple: I, like Paglia, am a free thinker. Some of what she says is, to me, right on. Other stuff is not. But enjoy. Did you ever give us YOUR side of the Clod and the Pebble. What did YOU think of the 30 pages she bothered to write, with rather high verbal skill, in SEXUAL PERSONAE? That may bolster your case from mere bomber to one with which intelligent dialogue could begin. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 10:20:08 -0400 (EDT) From: izak@igs.net (Izak Bouwer) To: blake@albion.com Subject: S&M and The Mental Traveller Message-Id: <199604221420.KAA01524@host.igs.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Thank you, Mark Trevor Smith, for your very moving posting last week. Could you tell more about ACTS OF INCLUSION of Michael Cooke, including details of publication. I would like to get it from the library. You are right. There is a whole lot of S&M going on in the Mental Traveller. However, what is going on there may also be something "that cold earth- wanderers never knew." In "The Mental Traveller: Man's Eternal Journey" (Blake Quarterly 47,Vol.12, Number Three, Winter 78-79) IZAK BOUWER and PAUL McNALLY wrote: "..the business of the poem is with eternal things..Man's eternal states are determined by a simple two-fold process in which truth is discovered as error is destroyed..This two- fold process extends logically to encompass the entire myth of Man's fall and redemption: in the period when error, or the Natural prin- ciple, is dominant, the states of Man are those associated with the fall and Man's subsequent history in the dimensions of time and space; in the period when truth, or the Spiritual principle, is dominant, the states of Man are those associated with the apocalypse and Man's sojourn in paradise. There is one state where there is no error,and in this state Man is wholly divine and coincident with God.This state,the state of Eden, closes the biblical narrative into a circle. We contend that "The Mental Traveller" describes this same circle.Because Blake shows the continuity of states, the circle appears to be a repetitive cycle, but is in fact merely complete. The poem is anti- Aristotelian and, like eternity, has no beginning, middle or end.In Blake's vision in the poem, Man,composed of contrary but complementary principles, is seen as a continuous progression of states which in themselves form a unity, the perfect form of the circle. The two principles in Man, the Spiritual and the Natural, are personified, respectively, by the principal male and female figures of the poem, the age of each represen- ting the extent to which the corresponding principle manifests in the being of Man... The poem begins at the point..where the Natural principle is in its fullest manifes- tation, and the incarnation of the Divine into the world of the Natural takes place. This incarnation is represented by the birth of the Male Babe, who is most naturally associated with Jesus. As the Spiritual gains in strength, the Natural principle becomes correspondlingly less dominant until, at the left-most point of the circle, it is overpowered by the Spiritual principle. In the life-cycle of Man, this overpowering of the Natural by the Divine corresponds to the spiritual awakening of Man at the apocalypse. In the process of the Last Judgment, the errors of the natural world are progressively destroyed as eternal truths are recognized. This process reaches its completion only when the natural delusion has decreased to vanishing point and all creation is consumed. Here, at the topmost point of the circle, Man finds himself in the state of Eden, where he is coincident with God, the "Heavenly Father." When the Natural principle reappears as the Female Babe, it is in the growing phase, and increases in strenth until, at the right-most point of the circle, the Spiritual is drawn into its power. This overpowering of the Divine by the Natural corresponds to the fall, where Man sinks into a spiritual sleep. The Natural principle continues to gain in strength, while the Spiritual principle grows correspondingly weaker, until Humanity identifies itself with purely natural Man, who lives in the state of the earthly paradise, or lower garden. Thus we arrive again at the point where the incarnation of the Spiritual principle is to take place." Gloudina Bouwer ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 13:53:15 -0400 (EDT) From: "Michelle L. Gompf" To: blake@albion.com Cc: blake@albion.com Subject: Thanks again Message-Id: Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII SEveral months ago I asked for help with a conference paper I was working on called "Revolution Born of Rape: Blake's _America: A Prophecy_ and _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_" I just wanted to let everyone know that their suggestions were very helpful and that the paper went over well. BTW, it was for a Baylor University conference (in Waco, TX) called "Chaos, Death, and Madness: the use of the Disruptive in Literature" -- someone at Baylor has a sense of humor. Michelle ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 96 15:56:00 EDT From: "Fabian, Matthew" To: "'SMTP:blake@albion.com'" Subject: Re: Blake, Paglia, and Me Message-Id: <317BE485@smtpgate1.moodys.com> I've never read his book, but isn't Harold Bloom's thesis on Blake that WB's only source text was the Bible? Does anyone know how he justifies that? -Matt Fabian ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 16:59:58 -0500 (CDT) From: HXNEWSAM@ualr.edu To: blake@albion.com Subject: Re: The Blurs of Innocence and Experience Message-Id: <960422165958.6021eb53@ualr.edu> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT I just wanted to make a comment on your reading of the "break this heavy chain" and "free Love with bondage bound" being a connection to S&M. From what I know of Blake, and have read and heard the free love in bondage in here might be more a reference to this cult of virginity that exists in Blake's work. I've heard that Blake believed that love/sex/desire was restrained in the God of Thou Shalt not and the church doctrine of restraint. His encouragement therefore might be a simple encouragement to fulfill desires, to break the religious and moral chains that bind desire, whatever the sexual satisfaction may be. The second thing I wanted to comment on is your reading of the Tyger. I think your concentration on who is the speaker of the Tyger is the right question, but another question that the narrater poses himself is are the creators in the two poems the Lamb and the Tyger the same? The opposition of the two animals might be a good thing to concentrate on also. Yes, the two species of tigers and wolves are now nearly extinct. And no matter how victimized the actual animals are the tiger still has an allegorical other life in literature, just as the lamb (how often is a lamb really just a lamb and not Christianity Christ, and lots of other unwritten things?) The imagery that surrounds the Tyger was suggested recently on the list to be that of Los. Blake's other self so to speak that is surrounded by forges and smith furnaces and fire. I really like this idea. The roots of ancient mythologies can't be overlooked also: Prometheus' fire and Icarus' wings. The Tyger has a much deeper meaning as do all the poems, aside from a hunted animal. Tigers were not near extinction when Blake wrote the poem so other possibilities for meaning might also be explored. Just some Additions for Discussion, Heather ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 19:20:02 -0400 From: albright@world.std.com (R.H. Albright) To: blake@albion.com Subject: Correction on Harold Bloom Message-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" He wrote the Commentary, not Introduction, for an even larger body of Blake's work than Penguin's complete poems. It's: _The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake_ Anchor Books/Doubleday 1988 -------------------------------- End of blake-d Digest V1996 Issue #40 *************************************