The Poet 199
“will come to pass,” Blake says, “by an improvement of sensual en-
joyment” (39).
Blake is a prophet of the redemptive power of heterosexual love.
Men and women coming together, matching their strengths, in equal
and loving and heated conjunction, can remake the world, or at least
their own corner of it. We are equal, we men and women, equal in
our desires and in our erotic aspirations. “What is it men in women
do require?” Blake knows the answer to the question with certainty:
“The lineaments of Gratifi ed Desire” (474). But what does a woman
want? Freud indicates that he spent years pursuing this question.
Women are a mystery to him. They are, he says, the “dark conti-
nent.” But to Blake it is not so hard. He strikes to the center of the
issue: “What is it women do in men require?” The refl ection is per-
fect: “The lineaments of Gratifi ed Desire” (475).
An improvement of sensual enjoyment, the lineaments of grati-
fi ed desire— one touches here on what makes Blake one among the
High Romantics. Sensual enjoyment is for Blake a part of the cen-
trally redeeming human experience, which is love. A High Ro-
mantic is someone who seeks through love and the imagination to
burst through the bounds of Self. As Blake’s poetry becomes more
expansive and more complex, he ramifi es his sense of love. He af-
fi rms it as a spiritual pursuit, not simply one that relies on sensual
enjoyment— though such enjoyment must never be sacrifi ced. He
comes to the conclusion that love can save us; through love, we can
be reborn into joy.
This belief is at the core of the Romantic faith. One encounters
it not only in Blake, but also in Shelley and Keats, Coleridge, and
(very indirectly) in Words worth. It is there in Walt Whitman (though
not in Thoreau or Emerson). It’s readily found in Yeats and in D. H.
Lawrence and strongly pre sent in Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg,
where the love desired is homosexual love. Closer to the pre sent,
the Romantic faith in rebirth through interfusion of love and