shared Milton’s hope that paradise might be restored by politics, he came to regard the
political radicals, his allies, as blind rational materialists: ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire,
Rousseau; / Mock on, mock on, ‘tis all in vain. / You throw the sand against the wind,
/ And the wind throws it back again.’ For Blake, human reality was political, spiritual
and divine. A material ideal of advancement showed ‘Single vision, and Newton’s sleep’
(Isaac Newton’s prophetic writings were then unknown). A religious visionary driven
by Deism to unorthodox extremes, Blake was also, unlike most mystics, a satirical
ironist and a master of savage aphorisms, as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) contain what have become his most celebrated
poems, such as ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’, which begins:I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.Blake uses the rhythmical quatrains of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs for Children
(1715), repeating and twisting words and sounds to make a discord with the child-
hood vision of his earlier Songs of Innocence. Concentration lends his images a
surreal intensity: ‘the hapless Soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls’ and
‘the youthful Harlot’s curse ... blasts with plagues the Marriage hearse’.
When read, he was not understood. Wordsworth said later: ‘There was no doubt
that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man
which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.’ In the time
of the French Revolution there were many who saw signs that the Last Judgement of
the Apocalypse was at hand, but Blake was isolated and his thought was esoteric. He
drew on unfamiliar theological traditions of biblical prophecy. Blake’s thought
ev olved in his later prophetic books, often inverting conventional religious values in
a way deriving from 18th-century satirical traditions of reversed perspective. Thus,
Milton’s God the Father is parodied as ‘Old Nobodaddy aloft’ who ‘farted and
belched and coughed’. He invented new and complex myths with allegorical strands
of meaning, as in the Vision of the Daughters of Albion, featuring Oothoon,
Theotor mon and Bromion. Scholarship has made the later Blake less obscure, but it
will never communicate as other Romantic poetry does. If keys can never fully
unlock these prophetic myths of political and sexual liberation, yet lightning can
strike from their most impenetrable clouds. A brief History cannot do justice to
Blake’s later work, which is a study in itself.
Blake illustrated a book by Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), the indomitable
author ofA Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), who married the radical
social philosopher William Godwin (1756–1836), author of an Inquiry concerning
Political Injustice (1793) and a pro grammatic Gothic novel,Caleb Williams (1794).
She died after giving birth to a daughter, later to become Mary Shelley. Godwin’s
belief that humanity, since it was reasonable, could be made perfect by rational
persuasion persuaded many in the early 1790s.Subjectivity
The ingre dients of Romantic sensibility had existed before 1798, but the new poets
found for it an authentic voice, touch and intensity. The novel elements in the Lyrical
Ballads were defined and given impetus by the Preface added by Wordsworth in 1800228 7 · THE ROMANTICS: 1790–1837
The Romantic poets
First Romantics
William Blake (1757–1827);
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850); Samuel
Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834).
Younger Romantics
George Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788–1824); Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792–1822); John
Keats (1795–1821).