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Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925), essayist and poet, is best known for his libretto to the 1902 coronation anthem, “Land of Hope and Glory”.

The anthology of essays in which the following critique of William Blake appears also deals with John Hales, John Earles, Henry More, Andrew Marvell, Vincent Bourne, Thomas Gray, John Keble, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Bradshaw, Christina Rossetti, and Edmund Gosse.

Benson upholds an inflexible poetic standard throughout and judges Blake here, not on his own terms, but against Bensonian notions of poetic form (so that, for instance, half-rhymes are “incredibly careless”).

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Blake, in spite of the extravagant claims made for him by his admirers, must be held to have been primarily an artist. if he had not been an artist his poems could hardly have survived at all. mr. D. G. Rossetti says of the Songs of Innocence that they are almost flawless in essential respects. But few will be found to endorse this verdict. The fact is, that those who are carried off their feet by the magnificent originality of Blake’s artistic creations, read in between the lines of his delicate and fanciful, but faulty and careless verse, an inspiration to which he laid no claim.

Blake’s poetry is, from beginning to end, childish; it has the fresh simplicity, but also the vapid deficiencies of its quality—the metre halts and is imperfect;

the rhymes are forced and inaccurate, and often impress one with the sense that the exigencies of assonance are so far masters of the sense, that the word that ends a stanza is obviously not the word really wanted or intended by the author, but only approximately thrown out at it. This may be illustrated by a line from the Nurse’s song in the Songs of Experience, where he says

Your spring and your day are wasted in play, and your winter and night in disguise.

where the sense requires some such word as “disgust” or “weariness.” again, his use of single words is often so strained and unnatural as to rouse a suspicion that really he did not know the precise meaning of some word employed. We may cite such an instance as the following from “london”

(Songs of Experience)—

i wander thro’ each chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames doth flow.

and also in the “ideas of Good and evil,” the first two lines of “Thames and Ohio”—

Why should i care for the men of Thames and the cheating waters of chartered streams

Whatever the word ‘chartered’ means, it is obvious, from its iteration, that Blake attached some importance to it; but what does it mean? in ordinary speech the word of course means ‘licensed,’ in a metaphorical sense, ‘enjoying

some special immunity,’ as ‘chartered buffoon.’ is it possible that Blake confused it with ‘chart,’ and meant ‘mapped out’ or ‘defined’? Conjecture is really idle in the case of a man who maintained that many of his poems were merely dictated to him, and that he exercised no volition of his own with regard to them.

His rhymes too are incredibly careless—we have ‘lambs’ rhyming with

‘hands,’ ‘face’ with ‘dress,’ ‘peace’ with ‘distress, ‘vault’ with ‘fraught,’ ‘Thames’

with ‘limbs,’ and so forth, in endless measure.

it may be urged that it is hypercritical to note these defects in a poet like Blake; it may be said that he was a child of nature, and that it is in the untamed and untrained character of his poems that his charm lies. “i regard fashion in poetry,” he wrote, “as little as i do in painting.” But Blake was a foe to slovenliness in the other branch of his art; in his trenchant remarks upon engraving, in the “Public address,” he is for ever insisting on the value of form; he is for ever deploring the malignant heresy that engravers need not, nay ought not to be draughtsmen. He maintains that this degrading of the engraver into a mere mechanical copyist has killed the art; so had he devoted himself scientifically to poetry, he would have been the first to realise and preach that it is the duty of the artist to acquire a technical precision, so sure, so instinctive, that it ceases to hamper thought. . . .

The fact is that what Blake wanted was culture; in literature he is a good type of how ineffective genius may be, if it is too narrow in its republicanism. Blake was self-absorbed and obstinate. His sympathy with certain qualities and aspects of life—simplicity, innocence, natural purity, faith, devotion—was innate and deep; but he had no idea of making himself appreciate what he did not at once understand: he was his own standard.

Consequently, within certain limits, he has left beautiful and refined work, though never with the added charm of elaborateness; the imagination is pleased with Blake’s poetry as it may be attracted by an innocent face, a wild flower, a thrush’s song; the heart may hanker after a purity that it has lost or possibly never enjoyed. But Blake can only charm idyllically: he can never satisfy intellectually: he has not the simplicity, let us say, of the Gospel, which enters into and subdues the complexity of human hopes and desires. like the little maid that attended Guinevere, “who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness, that often lured her from herself,” it is away from the true and myriad-sided self of man that he wins; his is not the poverty of spirit which comes of renunciation, but the cleanness of soul which results from inadequacy. Self-reverence he has, but not self-knowledge, nor the self-control, the need of which comes home to the human heart through

its imperious passions. Wordsworth proposed the remedy of simplicity for healing the diseases of the soul, but Blake’s simplicity is not medicinal; it is the calm of the untroubled spirit, not the deeper content which comes of having faced and cured the heaven-sent maladies of mortal nature.

Thus it is that his Songs of Innocence have a charm denied to the Songs of Experience, because he was at home in the former region, and did not really understand the meaning of the latter. The critical faculty, the power of seeing the merits latent in work whose scope and aim is not sympathetic, the gift of delicate appreciation was, in Blake, almost wholly in abeyance. He praised and condemned wholesale, vehemently, violently, as a child might judge, deciding from the superficial aspect of the object. Occasionally, as for instance, when he said of milton in the Spiritual world, “his house is Palladian, not Gothic,” he uttered a deep and suggestive criticism. But such sayings are very rare. Probably his own work gained in originality. The man who could work from morning to night at his engraving, for a period of two years, in london, without ever stepping into the open air except to fetch his meat and drink, is to be congratulated no doubt upon his fund of steady enthusiasm, but he is not cast in the mould of other men, still less is he the prey of the temptations which, if they sometimes also degrade, are at least needed to develop in the artist the intimate sympathy with human passion which must be the basis of his work.

—a.C. Benson, “William Blake,”

Essays, 1896, pp. 150–162

Henry Justin Smith “The Poetry