Kazin, Alfred,1915- II. Title.
[PR4142.K3 1976] 821’.7 76-47594

eISBN : 978-1-101-12761-2

 

 

Acknowledgment is made to the edition of Makers complete writings edited by Geoffrey Keynes, issued by the Nonesuch Press, London, and Random House, New York.

Thanks are due to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, Rosenwald Collection, for permission to reproduce from its set of the engravings for The Book of Job and to the Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection, for those from The Gates af Paradtse

 

 

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A LINE is a line in its minutest subdivisions, straight or crooked. It is itself, not intermeasurable by anything else. Such is Job. But since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable by one another: certainly a happy state of agreement, in which I for one do not agree. God keep you and me from the divinity of yes and no too—the yea, nay, creeping Jesus—from supposing up and down to be the same thing, as all experimentalists must suppose.

BLAKE: April 12, 1827

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The selections for this volume have been taken almost entirely from the “Nonesuch Press” edition of Blake’s complete writings in poetry and prose, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, (Nonesuch Press, London; Random House, New York). I cannot easily express my indebtedness to Dr. Keynes, who did the real work for this volume, and to his American publishers, Random House, Inc., who have facilitated its publication. The selections from Crabb Robinson’s Reminiscences have been taken from Arthur Symons’s supplement to his William Blake, London, 1907, where the notes on Blake were printed as a separate unit for the first time.

I should like to express my indebtedness to John Sampson’s edition of Blake’s “Poetical Works” (Oxford University Press), for guidance in making my own selections from The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, I am equally indebted to D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, editors of the Clarendon Press (Oxford, 1926) edition of Blake’s Prophetic Writings in two volumes. Without their editorial analysis, list of variants and unique glossary of Blake’s symbols, my own work would have been far more difficult.

I owe a great debt to many pioneer scholars in the field of Blake scholarship. In particular I should like to acknowledge, with gratitude and pleasure, the work of Swinburne; Joseph Wicksteed; S. Foster Damon; Max Plowman; Alexander Gilchrist; Mona Wilson; Arthur Symons; William Butler Yeats; John Sampson; Ruthven Todd; Geoffrey Grigson; J. Bronowski.

I should like to thank Pascal Covici for suggesting this work, and for his friendly encouragement. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Ruth Bunzel for many valuable suggestions. I owe much to John Marshall and David Stevens of the Rockefeller Foundation, and to Louis Wright and the staff of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, for making possible a study of Blake manuscripts. And emphatically not least, I should like to thank here my students and friends at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, with whom I read Blake in the Fall quarter, 1944.

A. K.

INTRODUCTION

The real man, the imagination.

 

In 1827 there died, undoubtedly unknown to each other, two plebeian Europeans of supreme originality: Ludwig van Beethoven and William Blake. Had they known of each other, they could still not have known how much of the future they contained and how alike they were in the quality of their personal force, their defiance of the age, and the fierce demands each other had made on the human imagination.

It is part of the story of Blake’s isolation from the European culture of his time that he could have known of Beethoven, who enjoyed a reputation in the London of the early 1800’s. The Ninth Symphony was in fact commissioned by the London Philharmonic, who made Beethoven’s last days a little easier. The artistic society of the day was appreciative of Beethoven. It ignored the laborious little engraver, shut off by his work and reputed madness, who was known mainly to a few painters, and held by most of them to be a charming crank.

It is hard to imagine Blake going to concerts or reading accounts of Beethoven’s music.