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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... Man's. I will not Reason 8: Compare: my business is to Create.15 It is always dangerous to assume that any poet ... Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self evident thing is a Knave.”16 But that Blake was often ...
... man perceived is a form or image, man perceiving is a former or imaginer, so that “imagination” is the regular term used by Blake to denote man as an acting and perceiving being. That is, a man's imagination is his life. “Mental” and ...
... man's imagination speaks that language with his own accent. Religions are grammars of this language. Seeing is ... man pays for being stupid; the value of science depends on the mental attitude toward it, and the mental attitude of Bacon ...
... man's purposes. And if this tendency to explain the World as a complication of simple mathematical formulae is, as we suggest, intermediate between magic and science and psychologically allied to both, we should expect Blake's attitude ...
... man; he disliked Rousseau enough to give an attack on him a prominent place in ]erusalem. Civilization is in more than one sense supernatural: it is something which man's superiority over nature has evolved, and the central symbol of ...