Wow. In reading the briefest of brief summaries of the life of William Blake I can already say that I get it. I understand Sexson's insistence on the importance of this man to literary criticism. And that is just from the summary. I've yet to read this man's work (which goes beyond just poetry) and see what everybody's talking about. Additionally, a while back when I first wiki-ed Northrop Frye for information on "Anatomy of Criticism", I was linked to his biography (Frye) in which I discovered, in the first few sentences of the wiki-bio, that William Blake was one of Frye's primary influences. In fact, it was "The insights gained from his study of Blake" that "set Frye on his critical path,and shaped his contributions to literary criticism and theory" (wikipedia, Northrop Frye). Statements such as this suggest that in our thorough studies of the theories of Northrop Frye, we have been, effectively, studying William Blake all along. "Anatomy of Criticism" was inspired by Frye's works on Blake.
Blake's philosophy is in the vein of our favorite romantics: imagination above reason, exhuberance: "His poetic and artistic work is characterized by a unique commitment to imagination as opposed to reason, and the visionary, almost terrifying, and sometimes grotesque nature of his subject matter" (William Blake- poets.org) And I would go further as to say not only by exhuberant ideas, but also an exhuberant manner of presentation of these ideas: in "illuminated manunscripts"- text, engravings, illustrations all intertwined.
"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's" said Blake. Isn't this the cyclical thought behind the chapters in Frye we are studying now?
I've read a bit about Blake as a poet and painter thus far, but i've yet to look into his role as a critic. Although I suppose that these roles are really one in the same.
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