I would like to take this opportunity to say something about how this book came to be written. Its nature is in many ways unorthodox, and it may seem to lie rather confusingly in the area between formal scholarly criticism and a more creative form of writing, something like a biographical novel about how the troubles of Blake’s life affected his strange poems known as the prophetic books.
Although entirely sympathetic to what they praise as exciting and original insight into the meaning of Blake’s prophecies, my publishers are a little worried because I have refused to back up my interpretation with the usual heavy machinery of scholarship—the extensive references to other critics, the digressions on possible esoteric sources and parallels, the lengthy footnotes on changes in the values of Blake’s never static symbols—all, in fact, that I have deliberately left out or pruned away in order to reveal something that I hope is far more simple and human than any such display of erudition would convey.
The long poems known as the prophetic books tell, like all epics and myths, a very wonderful story about universal human events of the spirit. I believe that the primary value of the poems lies in this story, and that I would be foolish to let even ‘scholarship’ in any way obscure the fine thread of Blake’s tale as I attempt to unwind it. It is a thread that has many twists and knots of its own to untangle without adding further pedantic snarls.
I feel very strongly that such an explication as I am attempting should be kept as simple as possible and as free from all that is extraneous as can be managed. To my way of thinking, rather than erring on the side of too little formality and scholarly pretentiousness, my study is not nearly simple or colloquial enough.
There is no doubt at all in my mind that Blake meant The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem to form one long narrative, coherent only as a dynamic whole, and not simply, as Robert Hillyer put it, ‘as a trove for lyric selection’. It is the story of these three poems taken together that Blake must be talking about in the following much quoted passage from a letter to his friend, Butts, written in April of 1803. The story of Milton alone is much too short and slight to be compared to Homer’s epics or Paradise Lost.
‘None can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years’ Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the Spirit, or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of these Acts; for I have in these three years composed an immense number of verses on One Grand Theme, Similar to Homer’s Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost.’
Blake’s earlier shorter prophecies, although often of great loveliness and significance, are only hints and forerunners of the last three poems, the prophetic books proper, with their One Grand Theme. It is this single Grand Theme and narrative that I am trying to follow through in this study.
The impetus for my interpretation of these poems came from an altogether different direction than the reading of Blake criticism, with the single exception of Middleton Murry’s book on Blake. This is why I thought it unnecessary and even misleading to add a formal bibliography or list of books about Blake that I have learned from in the past, but did not once consult during the writing of my own book.
Blake’s narrative or story, although rarely in itself lucid or simple, is a tale much more readily understandable to our psyche-conscious age than it would have been to Blake’s own contemporaries. That this story of the prophetic books is Blake’s own psychological drama I firmly believe, and have tried to point out the evidence for believing. However, I do not wish to labour overmuch this secondary point in my book, namely, the identification of Albion and Jerusalem with William and Catherine Blake, but rather simply to tell the story as it unfolds in the prophetic books, after briefly indicating in the first chapter why I believe the experience to be Blake’s own. It would be a mistake to try to press an identification too hard, for always Blake widens out what is personal to universal significance if he succeeds, and simply to cosmic proportions when he fails, as in the equation of Hayley with Satan, and the soldier, Scofield, with a devil. Even Blake’s removal from London to Felpham suffered a sea-change towards the eternal, although in this instance with great lyric charm. It may be a self-evident comment on the artistic process in general to underscore the idea that the experiences of Albion and Jerusalem may well be based on the experience of their creator, and it is not my primary point.
My awareness that a moving story of turbulent and disturbed emotion was the mainspring of the prophetic books, came long after I had first ‘read’ them and set them aside with a rather smug sigh of relief that I had ‘got through’ them at all. At that time their significance had not dawned upon me, and I agreed with most critics that one could have only the dimmest notion of what was going on in their turgid pages, and that the few passages of fine poetry should by all means be lifted out of their context in order to be understood.
It was some years after I had put the prophetic books back on the shelf that my efforts to understand a troubled human situation in real life threw a white blaze on to the pages of my neglected Blake, illuminating something of such significance that I could not look away. ‘So that is what Blake is talking about,’ became my daily conversation with myself, and it became more and more imperative to write this book. After the initial decision it was comparatively easy. Everything fell into place. Everything confirmed my hunch and I had only to follow it through the pages of the text, pointing out what now seemed so obvious, although far from simple in its nature.
To bring into focus the story of the prophetic books is all that I have tried to do or wanted to do in this study. It is something that has not been done before and it seemed worth doing. Many aspects of Blake’s work I am content to leave to other critics, and a large part of this preface consists in listing the things that I have not done and my reasons for not doing them.
I am very much aware that there are biblical and platonic overtones in Blake’s poems that I have not discussed at all. That Blake read widely in cabbalistic writings is established, and it seems likely that he knew the work of the antiquarians Stukeley and Davies, as well as of Bryant. It seems fairly safe to deduce that there are gnostic and occult parallels if not sources for Blake’s more esoteric ideas, and others are working on this aspect of his work, while much has already been said on the startling similarity of many of his ideas not only to Freudian and Jungian psychology, but also to some of Marx’s beliefs. An impressive study like Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry is almost frightening when we see the hypnotic way in which any given symbol of Blake’s, dropped into the pool of the critic’s mind like a stone, stirs up ever-widening circles of learned association. All such fascinating and valid minor aspects of Blake’s work I have left regretfully to one side, but not too regretfully, for Blake’s main trouble is that he did not know when to stop piling diverse meanings on to his basic structure, which, of course, soon became lost to sight. It is this almost hidden skeleton of plot and meaning that I have set out to reveal in the prophetic books, and to achieve this I must eschew in them much that is rich and interesting.
I have not even allowed myself to make use of any of the illustrations to the prophetic books that have not a significant bearing on the text of the poems, for often Blake tells two quite different stories in his illustrations, and although those that go with the text are very important, those that do not are merely confusing. Some of the most interesting of the latter group, however, I have described without comment in footnotes, especially in the case of the drawings that accompany Vala, or The Four Zoas, a poem that exists only in the form of a single manuscript which is in the British Museum and whose illustrations are rarely reproduced. The text of the poem has, of course, been reproduced many times, but in varying versions, for it is almost impossible to place passages and even to read them, since every available corner of the MS. is filled up with scribbled afterthoughts. I might add what most Blake scholars know, that there is no generally agreed upon system for numbering the lines of Blake’s long poems, since not only lines but whole plates were switched around, omitted, or inserted. This makes it very difficult for the reader to check my quotations, but I am afraid that there is nothing I could do but to use a readily available and inexpensive edition (the Modern Library, since the Nonesuch text had not appeared when I started work on this book) and to follow the poems straight through in order, scrupulously noting the divisions into chapters, books, and ‘Nights’. I hope that this will make it fairly easy for the reader to turn the pages with me if he cares to do so. The only alternative would have been to use the page numbers of such a grand edition as that of Geoffrey Keynes, published in 1925, but since this is now fast becoming a rare book, it did not seem a practicable solution. For Jerusalem I used the fine new facsimile in black and white issued recently by the Trianon Press.
I believe that my most original contribution to Blake interpretation is in the chapter on Vala, or, the Four Zoas. As late as December 26, 1889, Yeats could write to Katherine Tynan that he and Edwin Ellis were the first ever to have read the poem. And even today critics sedulously avoid this poem, which is considered Blake’s most difficult, but is to me the most interesting, being as it is the closest to the cause of Blake’s spiritual upheaval. What the youthful Yeats wrote is interesting and worth quoting here:
‘… Did I tell you that we have found a new long poem of Blake’s? Rossetti mentioned its name, no more. We are the only people who ever read it. It is two thousand lines long or so and belongs to three old men and their sisters who live away at Red Hill in Surrey. Ellis and myself go from time to time and do a day’s copying at it. The old men are very hospitable and bring out thirty-year-old port-wine for us, and, when I am copying, the oldest of the old men sits beside me with a pen-knife in his hand to point my pencil when it blunts. Their house is a great typical bare country house. It is full of Blake matters. The old men and their sisters are like “a family of pew-openers”, Ellis says. Blake is their Church; at the same time they are no little troubled at the thought that maybe he was heretical … (September 7, 1890) … “Vala”, a poem of great length and beauty, never having been printed or even read before.’1
I mentioned that my one debt of gratitude to a critic is to J. Middleton Murry for suggesting that Albion and Jerusalem are probably William and Catherine Blake. My gratitude, however, seems to have expressed itself in the rather odd way of roundly scolding Mr. Murry in the first chapter because he could so well have written this book in 1933 had he cared to follow through on his excellent suspicion with a careful investigation of the facts and the text rather than with a few careless and unfounded conjectures. I am, all the same, rather glad that Mr. Murry did not write this book, for I have had fun doing it, and have felt it worth while, for, as someone said of Ibsen, ‘it takes two people to tell the truth, one to speak it and one to understand what is spoken, the last lesson to be learned by all prophets.’