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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... mind, and which tend to scare the ordinary reader away from him. The poet who addressed the four parts of his most complicated poem, Jerusalem, to the “Public,” Jews, Deists and Christians—to anyone who cares to look at it—the poet who ...
... mind; but most of the greatest mystics, St. John of the Cross and Plotinus for example, find the symbolism of visionary experience not only unnecessary but a positive hindrance to the highest mystical contemplation. This suggests that ...
... mind he experienced which were very near to madness, both what he meant by madness and what he implied by sanity have dropped out of our language. He thought of madness as a completely sterile, chaotic and socially useless deviation ...
... be is to be perceived”: Mental Things are alone Real; what is call'd Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, 8c its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where 14 THE .ARGUMEJV'T.
... Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool?23 The unit of this mental existence Blake calls indifferently a “form” or an “image.” If there is such a thing as a key to Blake's thought, it is the fact that these two words mean ...