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Thoughts on Blake

The following was written for a university assignment, hence its short volume and loose formality despite which I think of it as a decent and modest contribution to the blog.
I believe a student should entertain a slight suspicion so as not to have his thoughts lured by the exuberant display of seemingly acute arguments which, try as they might to conceal it, serve to assert the marketing of a “right” way to read. It has been widely assumed that through his visionary poems Blake establishes a kind of social system of beliefs, a collective mode for experiencing the world through which the individual embraces his past and makes sense of his present; that he establishes a mythology. But what impresses me, and consequently intrigues me, is the role Blake as an author holds within his visionary work. It is a somewhat unsettling business to point to something which is obvious: what we have in Blake is no more than mythopoeia – “the conscious creation of a myth. The approbation and reworking of mythical material”[1] The difference between myth and mythopoeia is one of authorship – in the former, the individual can not claim ownership of what he knows, of what he has been thought as the prevailing means of coming to terms with his environment, he is not the author of the mental attitudes that work to identify him with his surroundings[2] ; whereas in mythopoeia, the man-author is the creative force that breathes life into his gods unconsciously displacing divine authority onto himself.
  Although, there is one parallel between mythology and mythopoeia. The author, just as the gods, looms over his creation in a state of hinted, unarticulated presence. And since we all know who the author of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and the creator of Albion is, we can, and this is my tentative suggestion, think of Blake as following, despite his efforts, a kind of anthropocentrism. Bloom talks of a bonding undercurrent of a “prophetic fury”[3] in the Marriage and as far as we know Blake thought of himself more of a prophet rather than a poet, the human medium for the gods’ message. But Blake’s gods are his own gods; he is being his own prophet. And, afterall, Albion is a “Universal Man”, a “True Man", and Jesus is “the greatest man”. Blake’s borrowings from Biblical images may be presenting a desire to mold human historical thought, use it as a material to restructure that thought through a “vision of the human psyche [which] places the mythmaker at the heart of his myth”[4]
  I think that Blake’s visions are in line with an inclination which is apparent throughout myths themselves – to serve as a model through which man realizes his surroundings. And as such, bear resemblance to probably every myth on Earth because they embody the desire of man to return to that long lost state of edenic heaven, of divine perfection. But myth as a social construct is only viable within a body of people who experience it and Blake alone does not constitute a society. He is, despite his best intentions, an artist at work.     



[1] Penguin’s Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory; 1999
[2] Nortrop Frye introduces two modes of dealing with our immediate territory, a place inherently hostile towards us: one which seeks to identify man with his environment and the other which separates man from it. From the first come the arts and from the second the sciences. Myth is neither art nor science but  I think it still holds the urge for identification as means to structure experience and knowledge. See  Frye,"The Educated Imagination"  
[3] Bloom, Harold “Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” PMLA, Vol.73, Part 5,1958 
[4] Ryan, Mark “ William Blake: The Arch Myth-Maker” in MHRA, the Open Journal Systems; italics mine

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