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 »
No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part ...of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look There he is now, look:... There is no interrogation in his eyes Or in the hands, quiet over the horse's neck, And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving indifferent. O hidden under the dover's wing, hidden in the turtle's breast....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses' heels Over the paving.... And the flags. And the trumpets. And so many eagles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »