Conclusiones

John Vance Cheney (1848-1922) was an American librarian, poet, and writer. His inclusion of an essay on Blake in That Dome in Air: Thoughts on Poetry and the Poets is a measure of Blake’s gaining canonical status.

Cheney also considers the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Lowell,

John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Bryant, Walt Whitman, William Cowper, and William Wordsworth, a select and transatlantic cohort.

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Blake, in his lifetime, was known to many as a madman, but let us not be too hasty in consigning great gifts to the asylum; for Coleridge, De Quincey, Byron, and even Wordsworth, have been tracked beyond the bounds of sanity.

The spice of madness demanded for the poet, Blake assuredly had; and this is all that concerns us at present.

The many make too little of such a mind, while a few make too much of it. mr. Gilchrist and Swinburne are guilty on the side of over-appreciation.

if, here and there, are applied to Blake adulatory adjectives larger than his erratic genius can well carry, he is very different from what he has been found to be by his detractors. The sympathetic reader finds a deal of queerness, a medley of ezekiel, Ossian, and an innominable tertium quid; finds independence, intolerance, wildness; finds incoherence, vast scattering, rhapsody thinning away into nebula, mysticism slipping into nonsense,—in short, defiance of much that is right in thought and in method; finds this, but, mingled with it, strains and whole poems possible only to the poet pure and simple, to the singer by the grace of God. indeed, Blake, at his best, is, what we should always joy to discover, an excellent illustration of the old notion, the true notion, of the poet; with imagination, vision, faith, enthusiasm, he has the poet’s kind of thought, his straight sight, and his swift method, his fire and his music shining and singing along the native, inevitable lines. as we read the place of his birth, there is something prophetic in the names, “Broad Street, Golden Square”; of a truth, he was the babe for a spacious, radiant cradle.

it is a waste of time to look for system in the work of such a mind; as in the case of emerson, the light is too white for more than gleams, flashes. Blake is a reporter, a flesh-and-blood conduit for the high might that descends, through certain rare organisms, to become the precious possession of men.

We get from him occasional meteor streaks of prophecy; we get scattered blossoms of philosophy; we hear the voice of the teacher, indirect, trembling with passion; we listen to the joyous songs of nature and of “humble livers”

from the lips of one the color of whose singing-robe matches the sunset purple of Wordsworth’s; we hear the last echo of the days when youth and music ruled the english world; and, having this, we have something harder to find than theories and systems.

The vision is mightier in this poet than the faculty divine. He sees so much that he forgets the blindness of the world; with so much of the poet in himself, he forgets how little of the poet there is in us; he draws the rapid outlines, dashes off the sketch, and our own imagination is left to complete the picture. it should not be forgotten, however, that in many cases the poems are but half the artistic whole; that it was Blake’s habit to engrave his poems, illustrating them with colored drawings round the page or on a separate page. To read the poems apart from the designs is like listening to Wagner’s operas, blindfold. To be sure, the poems must stand or fall by themselves; still it is only right to bear in mind that without the illustrations we do not realize the full action of the author’s imagination.

emerson describes himself as a “transparent eyeball,” yet his vision is normal; Blake’s vision is abnormal. if emerson sees more than he can tell, Blake is determined that language shall fellow his limitless vision:—

i assert for myself that i do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. ‘What!’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?’ ‘Oh no, no! i see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the lord God almighty!’ i question not my corporeal eye, any more than i would question a window, concerning a sight. i look through it, and not with it.

The more we inquire into the matter of art, the more evident it becomes that patience is of the very essence of success in it; but, unluckily, all the patience of the little Blake family was in the heart of faithful, black-eyed Catherine. Had it been among the temperamental treasures of the master of the house, what might he not have done, he that in green boyhood can remind us of the old masters of the drama? . . .

if on the one side is madness, on the other is good old-fashioned sanity;

in fact, it is not difficult for Blake to be as worldly-wise as one could wish.

Despite his abnormal vision and incoherent utterance, despite his inequality and his thousand vagaries, Blake was a close critic of life. While his vision was abnormally active, the range is round a few elementary principles. it is the safe circuit of epictetus himself; the favorite themes, love, youth, and childhood, indicating not only sanity, but special qualification for the office of poet. Sweet-tempered and joyous, barring the few lapses unavoidable by one with so ardent a temperament, he saw the world as the old prophets saw it, beautiful, good; he trusted it, looked up from it to the maker of all, and sang as he journeyed, angels overhead and lambs at his feet. No man has lived a

more thoroughly poetic life; few men have come closer to a realization of his own happy phrase, a “shining lot.”

—John Vance Cheney, “William Blake,”

That Dome in Air: Thoughts on Poetry and the Poets, 1895, pp. 170–176