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We’ve seen caricatures of those hairy prophets in sackcloth with signs hoisted high that read
“Prepare to meet thy doom!”
It’s easy to dismiss their message. Look how it’s packaged.
How shall a different culture judge the prophet-poet hailing from a culture radically different
from our own, of which we can only glimpse fragments today? What drives a human being to
try to communicate a special message to anyone, by such ephemeral, even flimsy means as a
poem, or a work of art? Such efforts are almost certainly destined to be misunderstood by some,
and, as years pass, perhaps by all who follow. If all the books ever written ‘interpreting’ William
Blake’s art and poetry were lined up, they wouldn’t girdle the earth at the equator like McDonald
hamburgers do, but the number would still be considerable.
We might begin our observations about Blake with a word from a moderate critical source,
before we present a typical psychiatric take of Blake through the jaundiced eye of a medical
doctor trained in Jungian psychoanalytic analysis. Again, Warren Stevenson’s balanced view of
Blake as a poet is refreshing:
“[Blake] strives to create a verbal imitation, not of ‘nature,” but of some phase or
aspect of the archetypal drama of fall, creation and redemption, (so) it follows
that artistic creation is symbolic, not of the creation of the material world, but of its
recreation into the world of imaginative form. This is why the poetic process must
involve the whole of the artist’s personality brought into harmony with the “universal
Poetic Genius” (Los) in which...being and creativity are one” (250-1).
There are less charitable interpretations of what, exactly, Blake was trying to do in his
(frequently flamboyant) expressions through verse and art. His work was not intended to soothe
so much as to disturb, nor to reassure so much as to warn, or to reveal. Even in his own time, he
had his detractors:
“Robert Hunt, who reviewed Blake’s exhibition in the Examiner,
won negative immortality as Blake’s character “Hand” for describing
Blake as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness
secures him from confinement” (Extext 63 of 91).
Because much of Blake’s work obviously revolves around religious motifs, he is often
represented as a somewhat wild man, who, having prayed, meditated, or otherwise made himself
available to influences that he believed would cause him to be inspired, somehow used his talents
to produce the strange and possibly demented images and verbiage that crowded his surely
fevered brain. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote about Blake in 1811, after observing him in his last
illness, and on his deathbed:
“Of all the conditions which...interest the psychologist, none
assuredly is more attractive than the union of genius and madness in single minds,
which...compel our admiration by their great mental powers, yet...move our pity
by their claims to supernatural gifts. Of such are the whole race of ecstatics,
mystics, seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams, and to their list we have now to
add another name, that of William Blake...” (Friedlander etext 63 of 91).
.Nevertheless, Blake was considered less mad than ‘eccentric” by many of his contemporaries.
Charles Lamb recalls some of Blake’s poetry and even more of his artwork, for Bernard Barton
in a letter, worth quoting at length:
(15 May, 1824) Dear B.B......Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most
extraordinary man, if he be still living.[note: Blake died in 1827]...He paints in
water colours, marvellous strange pictures, visions of his brain which he asserts
that he has seen They have great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards of
Snowdon....the massacre of the Britons by the Romans, & has painted them from
memory (I have seen his paintings)...His pictures...have great merit but hard, dry,
yet with grace. He has written a catalogue of them, with a most spirited criticism
on Chaucer, but mystical and full of Vision....”
Lamb complains that he “has never read” most of Blake’s poems, though he mentions “The
Tiger”(sic) (which he describes as “glorious” and, incidentally, misquotes), and “The Chimney-
Sweeper.’. But he adds
“...alas! I have not the Book, for the man is flown, whither I know not, to hades,
or a mad House--but I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons
of the age” (Woodring 273).
Lamb’s impression was accurate. Blake seems to enjoy an established niche in the second
Millennium as one of the great English poets. In fact, Blake’s poem--- that same “glorious” The
Tyger mentioned by Lamb, is featured in many anthologies and surveys of literature, including
Roberts & Jacobs’ Literature, 5th edition (a freshman English textbook from which I have
taught), as the “most anthologized” poem in the English language.
But to return to our question, to what extent does Blake’s mental condition mar the truth of his
messages or the power of his creative imagination as a function of the truth that needs
explication, that Blake himself sees as all-important?
In studying Blake’s works, I was struck by his four-dimensional manner of handling space and
time, reminding me of a cruder, but colorful modern counterpart who delights in the exploration
of the suspension of our natural processes of reason: Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s meshwork of
science fiction novels, beginning somewhere with Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano and The Sirens of
Titan and extending-declining to Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos,
consist of some of the same kind of striking anomalies and creative digressions from reason --
including the turning upside-down of conventional moral values and the outrageous re-
interpretations of current religious and political beliefs— as did Blake’s.
In short, had Blake been able to keep his mouth shut about ‘visions” and simply wrote his
materials for modern audiences, no doubt his work would --like Vonnegut’s — be made into
movies, too. It probably cannot be denied that Blake approaches, delineates, and subsumes his
characters, situations, and events in an outpouring of classic “schizoid” responses to
hallucinations over which he seemingly had little control, despite his protests that he was not a
“mere passive instrument...” as mentioned above.
Our resident literary psychiatrist, Dr. Friedlander, has amassed his scientifically trained
witnesses from the past and present to range against our deluded visionary. Only the brilliant
intellect of the artist, Friedlander implies, seems to be holding the whole network of Blake’s
brains (and the output of those brains) together— and this in a most tenuous manner, so that
today--the artist long dead---to pretend to understand his divine ravings requires mental
calisthenics which ultimately will contain fallacies, senseless paradigms, and inconsistencies.
In opposition to the psychologists and psychiatrists, ardent followers of Blake do exist, who
seem to worship the more brilliant flashes of Blake’s verbal lightning, that with rare fluency and
imagery illumine sudden shining stretches of his (normally dim) landscapes of inspired, if
esoteric, imagery— or ravings. His supporters insist that Blake’s oeuvre --- and the universe this
convoluted and arcane collection of poetry and art represents ---is ultimately comprehensible
---and even reasonable, in view of the semantic limitations of language and of the visions Blake
attempts to share with us.
Indeed, for his most ardent admirers, sufficient study of Blake transforms what is for Sunday
readers merely the arcane. Blake’s unioverse, it seems, can be transformed by the devout reader
from the arcane into a lustrous arcanum. His works can make sense, if given the time and respect
the constructs of his universe demand, validating that universe for those of us who enter it as
legitimate supplicants. Coleridge supports this notion when he writes:
“‘Doubtless,’ as Sir John Davies observes of the soul (and his words may with
slight alteration be applied ...even more appropriately to the poetic
IMAGINATION.)
Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change....(and) (f)inally,
GOOD SENSE is the body of poetic genius, FANCY is its DRAPERY, motion its
LIFE, and IMAGINATION the SOUL that is every where, and in each; and forms
all into one graceful and intelligent whole” (Woodring 103-4).
But-- at best-- Blake is not for everyone. In fact, Edward Robert Friedlander, M.D. the
psychiatrist whom I have already quoted for us, wrote a thesis in 1973 (revised in 1986) where
he rather stiffly concludes that “Blake’s visions of the end of the world and the transformation of
all people’s perceptions were figments of his sick brain.” (84) “Let no one misunderstand me,”
the good doctor is quick to say,
“Blake’s writings and pictures are extremely interesting and valuable. Blake has
opened worlds of marvel and great beauty to us....(b)ut I believe that William
Blake was wrong about his visions and voices. They are not guides to
metaphysical truths for all of us....Like the sons of Los, I believe it is better to live
and work for good in the world as it really is.” (84)
Dr. Friedlander, of course, thinks of himself as mentally sound, and capable of making this
judgment on Blake’s mental condition. Further, he bases his qualifications for making the
diagnosis on his training as a psychiatrist. The man is qualified to diagnose Blake’s condition as
schizophrenic, insofar as the present scientific community, trained in the medical arts, with
emphasis on psychiatry, is concerned. I was especially interested in Friedlander’s statement that
Blake’s “writings and pictures are extremely interesting and valuable,” and that “Blake has
opened worlds of marvel and great beauty to us.”
And yet, Friedlander tells us that these “writings and pictures, that open...worlds of marvel and
beauty” are ‘figments of his sick brain,” though it is almost wonderful that “figments” of a “sick
brain” can evoke such words of admiration from the damning doctor.
Friedlander doesn’t like Blake to go into ecstasies, or to report visions of having seen Romans
and Britons in combat ages past, nor should Blake dare to claim to hear voices and to be a scribe
for angels. In our solid, practical, dull world, these things do not exist for 99% of the population
(Friedlander says that one percent of the population is as sick as Blake was, and that they are also
suffering from schizophrenia.). Friedlander then goes to great pains to describe the permutations
of Blake’s illness in all its (usually dramatic) forms. And in fact, when he has finished his litany,
the evidence fairly overwhelms the reader. There seems to be no doubt at all that William Blake
indeed suffered from schizophrenia, but I wish to add comments as this list is laid before our
eyes. For convenience, I’ve selected the “symptoms” that seem most closely aligned with
Blake’s thought and creative actions (emphases in every case, below, are mine).
(1) “The cosmic experience is characteristic of schizophrenic experience. The end of the
world is here, the “twilight of the gods”. A mighty revolution is at hand in which the
patient plays the major role. He is the centre of all that is coming to pass. He has
immense tasks to perform, vast powers...”Everything” is always involved....The instant is
an eternity to him. He sweeps through space with immense speed, to conduct mighty
battles; he walks safely by the abyss” (79).
Comment: Blake more often describes heroes and villains in these situations rather than
himself.
(2)"When the cosmic experience gets associated with delusions of grandeur, as it usually
does, patients imagine themselves as saviors of the world. Apocalyptic content is typical
and follows a well-defined pattern...(e.g.) Despairing agony and blissful revelation occur
in one and the same patient. At first everything seems queer, uncanny, and significant.
Catastrophe is impending; the deluge is here...the last Judgment, the breaking of the
seven seals of the Book of revelation. God comes into the world...Time wheels
back....Patients are exposed to all these terrifying and magnificent experiences without
showing it to anyone. The feeling of being quite alone is unspeakably frightening” (79).
Comment: Once more, how many of these perceptions and events were created by the artist/poet
and communicated to us, with the artist/poet as spectator, rather than participant? Granted, Blake
participates, especially when a vision “opens” to him, but how much of what Blake gives to us is
descriptive, and how much does he actually participates in, himself? It’s an essential difference ,
in my opinion, useful in judging how much of this work was created, and how much was
actually experienced, by Blake.
(3) “Blake’s...admirers point out that, as an adult, he did not find it difficult to distinguish
between the visions and everyday reality....Lay people have believed this means Blake
was not hallucinating at all, but this is an error of fact. Intelligent schizophrenics can
usually distinguish between a hallucinated voice or figure or a real one. This is
especially easy when the hallucinations are recognized as seen in some other way than
with the physical senses. Nonetheless, schizophrenics usually believe the hallucinations
are more, not less, real than other perceptions. This was...true in Blake’s case” (78).
Comment: I do not pretend to know all things, but it occurs to me that Joan of Arc “hallucinated”
voices, and it did France good. It is impossible, it seems to me, to completely close the door on
all paranormal experiences, calling all of them hallucinations. I contend that --until we are able
to decide that time never warps, that parallel universes or wormholes cannot lead to other worlds,
and all the other clever and strange speculations which humans keep bringing up to explain or
deal with what might otherwise be called mere “madness” or “illness,’ that the visions or voices
---or whatever else the shaman, the visionary, the artist/poet, or prophet might experience--
should not be summarily dismissed as mere and unconditional madness. Not because the
informants are not mad--they likely are!---but because we might miss something--we might
regret---closing off these experiences, sealing them off, as leading nowhere. They might lead
somewhere: I believe we should not label these doors as taboo, and never open them again for
inspection. Dare we--and can we afford-- such arrogance before a nature we think so wholly
subdued, strait-jacketed, and catalogued? Isn’t that the attitude that greeted Columbus’ “mad”
proposition that we should sail west, in order to reach the east?
(4) “Schizophrenics may find themselves thrust into their own mental spaces...(“[a]
separate “time” and “space”). Usually this happens for brief periods during attacks, and
recalls the strange experience of transformed perspective which Blake records in Milton.
I do not know whether...anyone else has seen the whole world as a sandal, although it has
been swallowed. (77).”
Comment: Julian of Norwich, in one of her near-deathbed visions, described seeing Christ
holding the whole world in the palm of his hand, as if it were but a hazelnut. In Milton, Blake
describes, through verse and illustrations, a falling star or meteor that was “Milton entering my
Foot...”
Blake goes on to say that
“I saw in the nether
regions of the imagination; also all men on Earth,
And all in heaven, saw in the nether regions of the Imagination
In Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Miltons descent.
But I know not that it was Milton, for man cannot know
What passes in his members till periods of Space and Time
Reveal the secrets of eternity....
Comment: I interject here that such ‘spirits” were often described to represent moods and
feelings in a manner we no longer use. Religious jargon involving words such as “spirits” did not
literally mean that some beings from heaven or hell were thought by Blake to be employed, say,
in the task of making him improvident, or to always be found dealing with abstractions. To me,
the passage is relatively innocuous: Blake would rather create what he wishes, than what his
patrons want (Blake often resisted completing hack work and other assignments requested of him
by his patrons in lieu of ‘doing his own thing.’).
(6) Friedlander notes that
“...According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in Blake’s era the word “abstraction”
covered a range of meanings which evoke psychotic experience: the act of
withdrawing...something visionary, a state of withdrawal or seclusion from worldly
things or things of sense, inattention to things present, absence of mind...”
He decides that Blake struggles against “external forces (that) may interfere with the patient’s
thinking. The spirits steal their thoughts away, or force fantasy on them, dragging them from
their earthly affairs.” He cements this viewpoint with the observation that
“While Blake was working on the pictures described in the descriptive catalogue, he was
harassed by “Titian” and the “blotting and blurring demons”. The chief interfering spirit
changed into a helper when Blake’s mood suddenly changed— and such unexplainable,
sudden mood swings are themselves a hallmark of schizophrenia” (76).
Everyone has mood swings. Some are more intense or drastic than others. I cannot judge Blake
by the spare description of the “mood swing” Dr. Friedlander described above. In fact, though an
inspection of “abstraction” enhances his argument proving Blake’s dysfunctional mind, mood
swings are also symptomatic of manic-depression, which is not the same kind of mental problem
as schizophrenia.
We have no time or space to delve into Milton to look at all of the characters presented there who
fuel Dr. Friedlander’s observations that Blake is schizoid in his manner of mingling or even
‘becoming” these characters, but most of his comments seem to focus on lines where Blake’s use
of “I” in first-person encounters with other-world personalities, such as Los, Ololon, Satan,
Rahab, Milton, and many others seem to constitute some kind of proof that Blake steps over the
line into insanity.
Friedlander doggedly plows on, and with his next point overcomes most objections that might be
raised about whether or not Blake suffered from schizophrenia. He again brings up voices — and
these examples display the characteristics that schizophrenics who hallucinate have reported. I
once worked at Manatee Palms Treatment Center in Bradenton, Florida, counseling
schizophrenic teenagers. I’ve encountered accounts of some of the same kinds of auditory
hallucinations experienced by the young clients kept there as are reported below, and which
Friedlander will next tell us emanated, too, from the lips of William Blake.
(7) “Even more characteristic of schizophrenia,” Friedlander begins, “ are the auditory
hallucinations — the ‘voices’”. Almost every diagnosed schizophrenic is bothered to
some extent by the invisible speakers...often they disturb the patient with threats and
abuse. At other times they can be friendly....in Blake’s “spiritual communications” ...
(t)he voices predicted damnation if he did not keep writing, and his wife’s death if he
should leave Hayley....Another voice threatened to desert Blake if he continued to think it
might only be a hallucination. The angels told Blake that he was kept alive by Flaxman’s
understanding of his “nervous fear”. They said he had a divine commission....” (75)
Friedlander does mention a few classic defenses of Blake’s sanity, such as “Northrop Frye who
den(ied) that Blake had hallucinations... [because of ] the complete control that Blake supposedly
exercised over his visions”(75). Friedlander confronts us with Blake’s own words as recorded by
Crabb Robinson who, says our good Doctor, was ‘duly impressed by Blake’s descriptions of his
visions” (71). He does not mention until later that Robinson considered himself qualified to
judge Blake as sane or insane according to the modern tenets of psychology (as Robinson
understood that discipline in his own day). But Blake told everyone who would listen that he saw
visions and heard voices. Among the spiritual encounters Blake experienced are the following:
“I have conversed with the Spiritual Sun. I saw him on Primrose
Hill. He said, ‘Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?’ ‘No,’ I said,
‘That’ (and Blake pointed to the sky) ‘is the Greek Apollo. He is
Satan.’”
The almighty scientist has himself become as Urizen, assuming the ultimate position of power,
and of authority. He has become our spirit-eschewing shaman, explaining all the hard things in a
strictly materialistically-defined universe, and making the laws, especially those regarding good
and evil, sane or insane. And all of them are technical, orderly, well-marshaled, well-defined.
Thus the Doctor provides his well-ordered world full of his rules, replete with “harmonious
unity”--including the “characteristics of oppressive priestcraft.. pos[ing] himself as the enemy of
sin” as well as “of disorder, chaos, insanity.” He is the explicator of our current mostr popular
religion -- science. “But what Urizen lost sight of was that before he wrote his Law there was no
sin” (Stevenson 93).
Northrup Frye nicely summarizes Blake’s work as not atypical of his age:
“... where metaphor is conceived as part of an oracular and half-ecstatic process, there is
a direct identification [in Blake’s age] in which the poet himself is involved. To use (a)
phrase of Rimbaud’s, the poet feels not ‘je pense’ but ‘on me pense.’ In the age of
sensibility some of the identifications of the poet seem manic, like Blake’s with Druidic
bards or Smart’s with Hebrew prophets, or depressive, like Cowper’s with a scapegoat
figure, a stricken deer or castaway, or merely bizarre, like Macpherson’s with Ossian or
Chatterton’s with Rowley. But it is in this psychological self-identification that the
central ‘primitive’ quality of this age really emerges” (emphasis mine). (318)
Frye also notes that the ‘primitive quality’ of these works reaches epitome in “...Collins’ Ode on
the Poetical Character, in Smart’s Jubilate Agno, and in Blake’s Four Zoas...(where) it attains
its greatest intensity and completeness” (318).
What? Blake was not the only madman scribbling away in eighteenth century English literature?
Could it be possible that Blake’s era allowed him a range of freedom of expression which, had he
written his works today, might have resulted in prescriptions for Prozac and Thorazine, thus to
confine his ravings to passages written in blood, or excrement, or on padded walls? And if Dr.
Freidlander can be identified as a type of Urizen in Blake’s system, what verdict would come
forth regarding him in the Day of Judgment, should he have found himself written about in
Blake’s world?
--------------------------------------------------------
WORKS CITED
Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Doubleday & Co.,
Inc., 1963. 136-138.
Cantor, Paul A. Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1984.
Frye, Northrup. “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility.” Eighteenth Century Literature:
Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. James L. Clifford. New York: Oxford UP, 1959. 317-18.
Graves, Robert. The Crane Bag and Other Disputed Subjects. London: Cassell, 1969. 133-139.
Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake. Ed. Ruthven Todd, Rev. ed. London: J.M. Dent,
1945.
Erdman, David V., with John E. Thiesmeyer, Richard J. Wolfe, et al. A Concordance to the
Writings of William Blake. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967.
Friedlander, Robert Edward, M.D. William Blake’s Milton: Meaning and Madness. Dissertation.
Dept. of English, Brown University, 1973. Rev. 1986. Pp. 1-88/1-91.
Etext:< http://worldmall.com/erf/blake/blakemil.txt> 09/17/99 7:31 AM.
Hill, John Spencer. Imagination in Coleridge. London: MacMillan Press, 1978. Etext:
<http://www.uottawa.ca/~phoenix/imagin.htm> 09/22/99 1:00 AM.
Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan. Chapter VIII “Of the Virtues Commonly Called Intellectual
and Their Contrary Defects.” pp. 3-4/32
Etext: <http://osu.orst.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-b.html> 09/22/99
2 AM.
Works Cited, Continued
Randonis, Janet. “Blake’s Transformation of the Gothic Tradition.” Emory University Panel
Series.Etext:< http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/IC/Randonis.html> 09/17/99 1Pm.
Stevenson, Warren. “The Tyger as Artefact,” Blake Studies. Fall 1969, 2, 1:5-19.
------------ “Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creation Motif in Blake and Coleridge.” Ed. James
Hogg. Romantic Assessment. Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Vol. 25. Salzburg:
University of Salzburg, 1972.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structured Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard
Howard. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1975. (Etext LINK from Randonis, Janet).
Woodring, Carl R., Editor. “Charles Lamb: Letter to Bernard Barton, 15 May, 1824.” Prose of
the Romantic Period. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1961. 272-73.
William Blake: Proleptic Prophet of the Imagination ---or Madman?