Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William BlakeThis brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study. Here is a dear and complete solution to the riddles of the longer poems, the so-called "Prophecies," and a demonstration of Blake's insight that will amaze the modern reader. The first section of the book shows how Blake arrived at a theory of knowledge that was also, for him, a theory of religion, of human life and of art, and how this rigorously defined system of ideas found expression in the complicated but consistent symbolism of his poetry. The second and third parts, after indicating the relation of Blake to English literature and the intellectual atmosphere of his own time, explain the meaning of Blake's poems and the significance of their characters. |
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... genius. Blake, they tell us, is a mystic enraptured with incommunicable visions, standing apart, a lonely and isolated figure, out of touch with his own age and without influence on the following one. He is an interruption in cultural ...
... genius in defiance of an indifferent and occasionally hostile society; and he himself was well aware that he was “born with a different face.”1 But he did not want to be: he did not enjoy neglect, and he had what no real artist can be ...
... genius for crystallization. He is perhaps the finest gnomic artist in English literature, and his fondness for aphorisrn and epigram runs steadily through his work from adolescence to old age. To produce the apparent artlessness of the ...
... nineteenth century a reaction against this attitude set in, and the opposition of artist and society reached a very high tension which suggested that genius itself is a morbid secretion of society, and art a 12 THE flRGUMENT.
... genius and the madness of the commonplace mind, and it is here that he has something very apposite to say to the twentieth century, with its interest in the arts of neurosis and the politics of paranoia. .3. BLAKE distinguishes between ...