A program toward prophecy: eighteenth-century influences on the poetry of William Blake

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 1974Even in in his own time, Blake posed a problem for literary criticism. The reactions of his contemporaries make it apparent that Blake was, in their opinion, significantly out of phase with the literary norms of the day, especially those having to do with the "decorum" and "authority" of a given literary work. And, as is all too often the case with those who choose to deviate from socially-sanctioned norms, Blake's choice of artistic strategics earned for him the stigma of "madness" in certain circles. The pejorative connotations of this label have long since been erased, it is true. But perhaps the very thorough ness with which we have gone about reclaiming Blake's reputation has obscured a minor but salient aspect of the reputation he earned in his own time: some critics thought him mad, some did not, but none of those who knew Blake's work in the first third of the nineteenth century judged it on anything but purely literary premises. Put another way -- no matter what sort of critical dialogue, or dialectic, he generated, Blake was judged by his contemporaries in terms of norms generated by a received literary tradition, encompassing "serious" English literature from the time of Chaucer to the Romantic era. Some critics, Crabb Robinson, Lamb, Southey and Wordsworth among them -- considered Blake mad, while others -- the German painter Gotzen- berger, Coleridge and Benjamin Heath Malkin among them -- judged in favor of genius rather than, madness. All shared a common basis for their judgments, however. It is Blake's relationship to the great and near-great literature of England that was taken into consideration by all of the above men in forming their estimate of his importance