Blake and Goethe were individualists par excellence, uncompromisingly protective of their single vision. In both Faust Part II and... The Four Zoas, emphasis on the universality of the poet's message contrasts with the resistant texture of a compressed style and the striking complexity of the mythological machinery. Blake likes to emphasize that he is not writing for the simple-minded; Goethe takes a teasing pleasure in keeping philologists busy. Faust and The Four Zoas are dramatic epics of Humanity, but embodied in a mythic language whose uniqueness and quirkiness are jealously guarded. Blake never published The Four Zoas, though it culminates his early prophecies and provides the indispensable key to the later ones. And Goethe refused to allow Faust Part II to be printed in its entirety until after his death. Both poets postponed the public's discovery of their central works; secrecy was enforced as long as it could be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...stare into the lake of sunset as it runs boiling, over the west past all control... rolling and swamps the heartbeat and repeats sea beyond sea after unbearable suns; think: poems fixed this landscape: Blake, Donne, Keats.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
William Blake cursed the flesh for a clod, Yet of some of his sayings we Moderns have heard tell:... 'The nakedness of woman is the work of God', Or that title--The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The roaring alongside he takes for granted, and that every so often the world is bound to shake.... He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His berd as any sowe or fox was reed, And therto brood, as though it were a spade.... Upon the cop right of his nose he hade A werte, and theron stood a toft of herys Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys. His nosethirles blake were and wyde.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is... intense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits--like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing b...eautiful women, flying thought the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits--involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding--inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitablility of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »