Is this a holy thing to see
Mar. 20th, 2023 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo apparently when I am sick that is when I like to read nineteenth-century poetry, and I’m not quite sure what’s up with that, other than that the books are short and have the appropriate Being An Invalid vibes. But anyway, while I was waiting for Network Effect to be delivered I decided to read Essential Blake, a short volume of selections of William Blake’s poetry that I acquired in college.
The most important things to know about Blake are a) he was heavily involved in all sorts of mysticism/occultism/alchemy stuff and b) most of his contemporaries thought he was insane. I’ve had a soft spot for Blake ever since I read In the Forests of the Night as a preteen just beginning her vampire obsession, and I maintain that “The Tyger” is a fantastic poem. I’ve enjoyed the Blake I’ve read in various English classes throughout the years, as well. But there is something about sitting down and reading a whole volume of Blake, short as it is, to really drive home that, stuffy and terrible as most nineteenth-century Englishpersons were, probably the main reason Blake’s contemporaries thought he was insane is because the man appears to have been off his rocker. He also appears to have really, really hated Rubens, and the “miscellany” section at the end of the volume contains no less than three poems about how much Rubens sucks and how dumb everyone is for commissioning him. There’s also a whole section of epigrams titled “Proverbs of Hell” and most of them are just dumb, I’m sorry. So it turns out his most famous poems–mainly the ones in Songs of Innocence and Experience–are his best-known ones for a reason. Sometimes the poems veer into the political, which tends to be of mixed success artistically, and also Blake unfortunately manages to mash up his social conscience about child labor with some really unfortunate attempts at racial solidarity that do not do the thing he seems to have been trying to do, in part due to a chronically English-poet attachment to figurative language around the colors white and black. The results are, as the kids say, cringe! It becomes a relief to get back to something like “The Sick Rose,” which is actually good, and reminds us why we’re still reading this absolute weirdo 200+ years later.
The most important things to know about Blake are a) he was heavily involved in all sorts of mysticism/occultism/alchemy stuff and b) most of his contemporaries thought he was insane. I’ve had a soft spot for Blake ever since I read In the Forests of the Night as a preteen just beginning her vampire obsession, and I maintain that “The Tyger” is a fantastic poem. I’ve enjoyed the Blake I’ve read in various English classes throughout the years, as well. But there is something about sitting down and reading a whole volume of Blake, short as it is, to really drive home that, stuffy and terrible as most nineteenth-century Englishpersons were, probably the main reason Blake’s contemporaries thought he was insane is because the man appears to have been off his rocker. He also appears to have really, really hated Rubens, and the “miscellany” section at the end of the volume contains no less than three poems about how much Rubens sucks and how dumb everyone is for commissioning him. There’s also a whole section of epigrams titled “Proverbs of Hell” and most of them are just dumb, I’m sorry. So it turns out his most famous poems–mainly the ones in Songs of Innocence and Experience–are his best-known ones for a reason. Sometimes the poems veer into the political, which tends to be of mixed success artistically, and also Blake unfortunately manages to mash up his social conscience about child labor with some really unfortunate attempts at racial solidarity that do not do the thing he seems to have been trying to do, in part due to a chronically English-poet attachment to figurative language around the colors white and black. The results are, as the kids say, cringe! It becomes a relief to get back to something like “The Sick Rose,” which is actually good, and reminds us why we’re still reading this absolute weirdo 200+ years later.