This essay argues that Blake rejected John Wesley’s teaching of “Christian perfection” and examines the implications of this rejection for Blake’s ideas of morality, conduct, and social and sexual freedom. More specifically, it intervenes in discussions of Blake’s relation to eighteenth-century evangelicalism by proposing, at least on the issue of perfectionism as opposed to the persistence of sin, his greater affinity with the Methodism of George Whitefield than with Wesley’s. I maintain that Blake’s sense of sin was close to Whitefield’s, though distinct, and also that he rejected claims of perfectibility, such as Wesley’s, on the basis of this sense and because they provided justification for self-appointed elites. These concerns first become prominent in Milton and Jerusalem, despite some earlier foreshadowing. They exist in a productive tension with Blake’s belief in the holiness of the body, one correlating with his sense of the redeemed world as a cooperative society of imperfect beings.
{"title":"Blake, Methodism, and “Christian Perfection”","authors":"Christopher Z. Hobson","doi":"10.47761/biq.290","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.290","url":null,"abstract":"This essay argues that Blake rejected John Wesley’s teaching of “Christian perfection” and examines the implications of this rejection for Blake’s ideas of morality, conduct, and social and sexual freedom. More specifically, it intervenes in discussions of Blake’s relation to eighteenth-century evangelicalism by proposing, at least on the issue of perfectionism as opposed to the persistence of sin, his greater affinity with the Methodism of George Whitefield than with Wesley’s. I maintain that Blake’s sense of sin was close to Whitefield’s, though distinct, and also that he rejected claims of perfectibility, such as Wesley’s, on the basis of this sense and because they provided justification for self-appointed elites. These concerns first become prominent in Milton and Jerusalem, despite some earlier foreshadowing. They exist in a productive tension with Blake’s belief in the holiness of the body, one correlating with his sense of the redeemed world as a cooperative society of imperfect beings.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78807884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dante’s journey in the otherworld has introduced generations of readers to the consequences of the divine judgment, the architecture of sin and salvation, the moral condemnation of materialism, and the pilgrim’s encounter with God. God is the “somma luce” (Par. 33.67) (“eternal beam,” Cary 3: 293), which cannot be grasped by means of human understanding. The blinding light of redemption thus remains a mystery untold in the Commedia. Toward the end of his life, the sixty-seven-year-old William Blake approached Dante’s incommunicable experience by revisiting his poetics of line versus color. For his illustrations to the poem, he worked back and forth on 102 designs, leaving them in various stages of development. From Inferno to Paradiso through Purgatorio, Blake captured the condition of the fallen against the purity of the redeemed. Though the two are treated with the same medium, there is ambiguity in the conception of the human frame. Are the density and articulation of colors and contours in the Dante designs accidental modifications of form, or do they spell out the artist’s own judgment upon the souls?
{"title":"The Body in the Line: “Trasumanar” in Blake’s Dante","authors":"Silvia Riccardi","doi":"10.47761/biq.291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.291","url":null,"abstract":"Dante’s journey in the otherworld has introduced generations of readers to the consequences of the divine judgment, the architecture of sin and salvation, the moral condemnation of materialism, and the pilgrim’s encounter with God. God is the “somma luce” (Par. 33.67) (“eternal beam,” Cary 3: 293), which cannot be grasped by means of human understanding. The blinding light of redemption thus remains a mystery untold in the Commedia. Toward the end of his life, the sixty-seven-year-old William Blake approached Dante’s incommunicable experience by revisiting his poetics of line versus color. For his illustrations to the poem, he worked back and forth on 102 designs, leaving them in various stages of development. From Inferno to Paradiso through Purgatorio, Blake captured the condition of the fallen against the purity of the redeemed. Though the two are treated with the same medium, there is ambiguity in the conception of the human frame. Are the density and articulation of colors and contours in the Dante designs accidental modifications of form, or do they spell out the artist’s own judgment upon the souls?","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82870049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“All his neighbourhood bewail his loss”: Bo Ossian Lindberg, 1937–2021","authors":"Morton D. Paley","doi":"10.47761/biq.289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.289","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"75 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78966028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Displays of Blake in 2021 were still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many institutions closed, staff working from home, and moratoria on loans. Some institutions had their own Blakes on view, such as God Judging Adam at the Metropolitan Museum from October 2020 to mid-January 2021 and a plate from America a Prophecy at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. William Blake: Visionary, building on the Tate retrospective of 2019–20 and planned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 2020, is now scheduled for late 2023.
{"title":"Blake and Exhibitions, 2021","authors":"Luisa Calé","doi":"10.47761/biq.319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.319","url":null,"abstract":"Displays of Blake in 2021 were still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many institutions closed, staff working from home, and moratoria on loans. Some institutions had their own Blakes on view, such as God Judging Adam at the Metropolitan Museum from October 2020 to mid-January 2021 and a plate from America a Prophecy at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. William Blake: Visionary, building on the Tate retrospective of 2019–20 and planned by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 2020, is now scheduled for late 2023.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89038761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This year, Vera Serdechnaia, who has collected and compiled sources in Russian and other Cyrillic languages, has kindly agreed to join the checklist team. As is evident below, there is much work being done on Blake in languages other than English, so I thank all my collaborators in helping make the annual checklist as comprehensive as possible. As always, the annotations to entries from their respective areas are theirs. If any reader is interested in covering scholarship in languages not detailed above, please contact me. While it may be a lagging indicator, Blake scholarship continued at a steady clip in 2020, despite the global pandemic. Exhibitions were, of course, the major exception, as discussed in this issue by Luisa Calè. William Blake at Tate Britain had the good fortune to wrap up just under the wire in February 2020, and I have recorded a substantial number of new reviews and notices to complement the hundred that appeared in 2019. (As was my practice last year, I have cross-listed only those reviews by established Blake scholars.)
{"title":"William Blake and His Circle: A Checklist of Scholarship in 2020","authors":"Wayne C. Ripley","doi":"10.47761/biq.286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.286","url":null,"abstract":"This year, Vera Serdechnaia, who has collected and compiled sources in Russian and other Cyrillic languages, has kindly agreed to join the checklist team. As is evident below, there is much work being done on Blake in languages other than English, so I thank all my collaborators in helping make the annual checklist as comprehensive as possible. As always, the annotations to entries from their respective areas are theirs. If any reader is interested in covering scholarship in languages not detailed above, please contact me. While it may be a lagging indicator, Blake scholarship continued at a steady clip in 2020, despite the global pandemic. Exhibitions were, of course, the major exception, as discussed in this issue by Luisa Calè. William Blake at Tate Britain had the good fortune to wrap up just under the wire in February 2020, and I have recorded a substantial number of new reviews and notices to complement the hundred that appeared in 2019. (As was my practice last year, I have cross-listed only those reviews by established Blake scholars.)","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78756891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While 2019 had been an incredibly productive year for settings of Blake to music and original pieces inspired by his poetry, my initial assumption was that, with all the difficulties caused by COVID, 2020 would be a much leaner year musically. Somewhat surprisingly, the past twelve months were incredibly rich in terms of musical adaptations, not only in the number of new releases, which surpassed 2019, but also because several took the form of whole albums dedicated to Blake’s work. It is clear that some releases—those requiring full orchestras, for example—were the products of months of preparation prior to the pandemic, and thus it may be that 2021 is the point at which we see an interruption in the flow of new recordings. In other instances, it is evident that artists used the time during lockdown to make recordings that were released via streaming, and the trend toward this means of distribution was only accelerated during 2020.
{"title":"Blake and Music, 2020","authors":"Jason Whittaker","doi":"10.47761/biq.284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.284","url":null,"abstract":"While 2019 had been an incredibly productive year for settings of Blake to music and original pieces inspired by his poetry, my initial assumption was that, with all the difficulties caused by COVID, 2020 would be a much leaner year musically. Somewhat surprisingly, the past twelve months were incredibly rich in terms of musical adaptations, not only in the number of new releases, which surpassed 2019, but also because several took the form of whole albums dedicated to Blake’s work. It is clear that some releases—those requiring full orchestras, for example—were the products of months of preparation prior to the pandemic, and thus it may be that 2021 is the point at which we see an interruption in the flow of new recordings. In other instances, it is evident that artists used the time during lockdown to make recordings that were released via streaming, and the trend toward this means of distribution was only accelerated during 2020.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74650282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A figure seen from the back kneels at an altar before the glaring, darkened form of a numinous planet. As a frontispiece this image marks the entrance to The Song of Los, and now it also leads us into William Blake: Visionary, the stunning catalogue of the Getty exhibition that was due to open from 21 July to 11 October 2020, but has been postponed to fall 2023 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
{"title":"Edina Adam with Julian Brooks, William Blake: Visionary; Lives of William Blake: Henry Crabb Robinson, John Thomas Smith, Alexander Gilchrist, introduced by Martin Myrone","authors":"Luisa Calé","doi":"10.47761/biq.283","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.283","url":null,"abstract":"A figure seen from the back kneels at an altar before the glaring, darkened form of a numinous planet. As a frontispiece this image marks the entrance to The Song of Los, and now it also leads us into William Blake: Visionary, the stunning catalogue of the Getty exhibition that was due to open from 21 July to 11 October 2020, but has been postponed to fall 2023 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73077382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I am certainly not the first to point out the difficulty of interpreting “The Mental Traveller.” Although the earliest commentator, William Michael Rossetti (in Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 Life of William Blake), confessed no immediate qualms about the challenges, numerous scholars from William Butler Yeats onwards have readily declared their perplexity and, on occasion, have even dismissed the poem as an object of interest altogether. For many scholars, however, an acknowledgement of the poem’s sheer opacity features chiefly as the precursor to a claim to have found a unifying meaning of some kind or other—a way of making it make sense, of pointing to something outside the poem as if to say, this is what Blake really meant. In an astonishingly large number of cases, that meaning is presented in the form of a diagram.
{"title":"Diagrammatic Blake: Tracing the Critical Reception of “The Mental Traveller”","authors":"Caroline Ritchie","doi":"10.47761/biq.281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.281","url":null,"abstract":"I am certainly not the first to point out the difficulty of interpreting “The Mental Traveller.” Although the earliest commentator, William Michael Rossetti (in Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 Life of William Blake), confessed no immediate qualms about the challenges, numerous scholars from William Butler Yeats onwards have readily declared their perplexity and, on occasion, have even dismissed the poem as an object of interest altogether. For many scholars, however, an acknowledgement of the poem’s sheer opacity features chiefly as the precursor to a claim to have found a unifying meaning of some kind or other—a way of making it make sense, of pointing to something outside the poem as if to say, this is what Blake really meant. In an astonishingly large number of cases, that meaning is presented in the form of a diagram.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91119568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The 2020 Blake market, like much of the world’s commercial activity, was hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic. None of his drawings or paintings came fresh to market, nor any illuminated books or leaves therefrom, nor any rare separate plates. “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence copy W and Poetical Sketches copy E changed hands, but both had been on offer for at least two years and both sold before America and Europe began to shut down nonessential businesses. The two watercolors listed below under Drawings and Paintings, Cumea and Whilst Surfeited upon Thy Damask Cheek, had been available for purchase sporadically since 2002 and 2006 respectively.
{"title":"Blake in the Marketplace, 2020","authors":"R. Essick","doi":"10.47761/biq.280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.280","url":null,"abstract":"The 2020 Blake market, like much of the world’s commercial activity, was hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic. None of his drawings or paintings came fresh to market, nor any illuminated books or leaves therefrom, nor any rare separate plates. “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence copy W and Poetical Sketches copy E changed hands, but both had been on offer for at least two years and both sold before America and Europe began to shut down nonessential businesses. The two watercolors listed below under Drawings and Paintings, Cumea and Whilst Surfeited upon Thy Damask Cheek, had been available for purchase sporadically since 2002 and 2006 respectively.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75323834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1986 William W. Heath announced a most exciting acquisition for the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the gift of Dr. and Mrs. K. Frank Austen (class of 1950): a copy of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826) that had been known earlier in the twentieth century but whose location had proved elusive for a number of years. It is readily identifiable by its inscription: “This work remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance, is the gift of Amelia Opie to her friend David, whose own genius will make him prize the former, while his excellent Taste makes it impossible for him to imitate the latter—Paris—4me Mo 22me 1831”.
1986年，威廉·w·希斯宣布为阿默斯特学院的米德艺术博物馆获得了一件最令人兴奋的藏品，这是k·弗兰克·奥斯汀博士和夫人(1950届毕业生)的礼物:布莱克的《约伯记插图》(1826年)的副本，这本书早在20世纪就为人所知，但多年来一直下落不明。它的铭文很容易辨认:“这件作品既天才又奢侈，是阿米莉亚·奥佩送给她的朋友大卫的礼物，他自己的天才将使他珍视前者，而他出色的品味使他无法模仿后者-巴黎- 4me Mo 22me 1831”。
{"title":"“Remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance”: Amelia Opie and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job","authors":"S. King, J. Pierce","doi":"10.47761/biq.279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.279","url":null,"abstract":"In 1986 William W. Heath announced a most exciting acquisition for the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the gift of Dr. and Mrs. K. Frank Austen (class of 1950): a copy of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826) that had been known earlier in the twentieth century but whose location had proved elusive for a number of years. It is readily identifiable by its inscription: “This work remarkable both for Genius, & Extravagance, is the gift of Amelia Opie to her friend David, whose own genius will make him prize the former, while his excellent Taste makes it impossible for him to imitate the latter—Paris—4me Mo 22me 1831”.","PeriodicalId":39620,"journal":{"name":"Blake - An Illustrated Quarterly","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73285823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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