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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... vision of the chariot of God with its “wheels within wheels,” is a revolutionary vision of the universe transformed by the creative imagination into a human shape. This cosmology is not speculative but concerned, not reactionary but ...
... vision; and art is a technique of realizing, through an ordering of sense experience by the mind, a higher reality than linear unselected experience or a secondhand evocation of it can give. It is no use saying to Blake that the company ...
... vision of such beings would be able to penetrate all the mysteries of the world, searching into mountains or stars with equal ease, as in this description of the bound Titan Orc: His eyes, the lights of his large soul, contract or else ...
... vision of God which man develops with his fallen reason and the latter the vision communicated to him by inspired prophets. To Blake “There Is No Natural Religion.” The only reason that people believe in it is that they are unwilling to ...
... vision, seeing face to face after we have been seeing through a glass darkly. Vision is the end of religion, and the destruction of the physical universe is the clearing of our own eyesight. Art, because it affords a systematic training ...