The Cambridge Companion to William Blake

Abstract

The Cambridge Companion to William Blake edited by Morris Eaves is reviewed.

Edited by Morris Eaves Cambridge University Press Cambridge 2003 xix + 302 pp. ISBN 0-521-78147-7 (hardback);

ISBN 0-521-78677-0 (paperback)

L45 (hardback);

L15.95, $22.00 (paperback)

Cambridge Companions to Literature Keywords English literature, Poetry

Review DOI 10.1108/09504120310490688

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the most enigmatic, mysterious and interesting figures in English literature: prophet, poet, visionary and engraver, whom few even today would dare fully to understand. He was quite unlike the Augustans who came before him or the Romantics who came after him. His loneliness has to be discerned in terms of symbolism, imagery and simplicity, rare among poets, and proclaiming essentially an elemental mysticism that must in the end defy alike rationalism and intellectualism.

Writings about him and his various works are necessarily innumerable and unfinished. So, at any rate, there is still ample room for yet another discerning and well-researched book about him, published within the comprehensive and prestigious series of the Cambridge Companions to Literature. As one must expect, the present volume is uniformly excellent: embracing as it must the diversity of William Blake's versatile and mysterious genius. Thus, there are separate chapters about him as a visionary, a painter, a master of language, a religious thinker and an interpreter of history. Altogether, this admirable and reliable book provides us with a necessary re-interpretation of Blake, specifically for his bizarre blend of written and visual art. Blake must still challenge out utmost understanding - perhaps inevitably, in relation to the ultimate mysteries of human existence and experience - but we are nevertheless enlightened, even inspired, by the ample contents of these deeply illuminating and reflective pages. We are here provided with a refreshing new work, about an old and baffling subject: uniting religion and literature, the visual and the intellectual, the emotional and the rational. The text is well supplied with 36 well-chosen illustrations, each chapter has its own detailed bibliography and at the end is a copious index. There is also a brief chronology of Blake's life.

The path to paradise, such as Blake construed, is bound to be hard, perilous and visionary. Yet, in the end, even our own contemporary societies revive and recover as much as possible of the artistic and literary relics of the liberating genius of William Blake. He wrote from the heart with a totally disarming fusion of innocence and experience. He went beyond the boundaries of rationalism to hint about the intuitive and the dimly affirmed. So it had to be, in order to explore - perhaps to elucidate the ultimate frontiers of life and self-consciousness. This we should still do, despite the materialism of our own times: Blake sought through the extremes of candour to embrace and to discover the riddle of human feeling, aspiration, hope and expectation. Doubtless, he never completely solved that predicament - the fusion of feeling and reason - but at any rate he did valiantly serve to point the diligent and observant readers in the right direction.