Proleptic Prophet of the Imagination ---or Madman? William Blake's art and writing display a creative genius that is stunning -- but many modern critics contend that Blake was schizophrenic, subject to hallucinations. Does this common analysis of Blake's psychological disorders reduce/distort the impact and significance of Blake's message and brilliance from fresh consideration and appreciation by later generations of readers and scholars who rely on science and ignore the Muse? Is Blake's vision a legitimate product of his culture, or does his work merely reflect the ravings of a madman? A compilaton and analysis of some contemporary and current observations by scholars, critics, psychologists -- and the author.
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William Blake: Proleptic Prophet of the Imagination ---or Madman? “For as to have no desire is to be dead; so to have weak passions is dullness; and to have passions indifferently for everything, giddiness and distraction; and to have stronger and more vehement passions for anything than is ordinarily seen in others is that which men call madness.” Hobbes (The Leviathan Ch. VIII.) Warren Stevenson, in an illuminating contribution to a monograph series (Romantic Reassessment), provides an exegesis (considering the theological orientation of these thoughts) of William Blake’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theories in their interpretation of the nature of “poetic imagination.” Blake, influenced by the great thinkers of his day, was well aware of the conflicts that were arising between science and the arts in his milieu. He takes care to define reason, and to distinguish it from the passions, even assigning personalities to represent the conflicts and characteristics of these definitions in his poetry and art.
Transcript
William Blake: Proleptic Prophet of the Imagination ---or Madman?
“For as to have no desire is to be dead; so to have weak passions is dullness;
and to have passions indifferently for everything, giddiness and distraction;
and to have stronger and more vehement passions for anything than is ordinarily
seen in others is that which men call madness.”
Hobbes (The Leviathan Ch. VIII.)
Warren Stevenson, in an illuminating contribution to a monograph series (Romantic
Reassessment), provides an exegesis (considering the theological orientation of these thoughts)
of William Blake’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theories in their interpretation of the nature of
“poetic imagination.” Blake, influenced by the great thinkers of his day, was well aware of the
conflicts that were arising between science and the arts in his milieu. He takes care to define
reason, and to distinguish it from the passions, even assigning personalities to represent the
conflicts and characteristics of these definitions in his poetry and art.
Hence, Blake’s false God, Urizen, stretches out the golden compasses that Milton first described
as in the hand of Messiah in Paradise Lost. “Urizen,” according to Stevenson, is “sometimes
taken to signify your reason”[Greek derivation], and he [Blake] saw Milton’s “account of
creation as ‘The history of....[the subjection of Desire to Reason]...written in Paradise Lost...”
(90). He adds that “[h]ere reason is clearly conceived as the limit of Energy, and the term
horizon is similarly used in the Introduction to Locke’s Essay Concerning the Human
Understanding, which Blake first read “when very Young.” (91)
Blake and Coleridge wrote extensively about both reason and “Imagination.” The definition for
“Imagination” was gleaned by Stevenson from one of Blake’s essays:
“Imagination is the Divine Vision not of the World, or of Man,
nor from Man as he is a Natural Man, but only as he is a Spiritual Man.
Imagination has nothing to do with Memory.”
(249)
Stevenson immediately adds:
“As for the poetic imagination, Blake approvingly quoted his favorite
poet in the margin of a volume of Reynold’s Discourses that had
aroused his indignation: “A Work of Genius is... ‘Not to be obtain’d
by the Invocation of Memory & her Syren Daughters, but by Devout
prayer to that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich all utterance & knowledge
& sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his Altar to touch &
purify the lips of whom he pleases.’ (Milton)
And finally, Stevenson makes it clear that the poet, in Blake’s mind, is not only “a mere passive
instrument subject to the whims of supernatural visitation,” but (and Blake seems to emphasize
it) Plato errs when he makes Socrates “say that Poets & Prophets do not know or understand
what they write or Utter; this is a most pernicious falsehood....” (25).
Blake mentions “Poets & Prophets” together here. For him, these roles are often simultaneously
fulfilled by the same person. He states that “Imagination has nothing to do with memory” --- and
Coleridge agrees:
“The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent
of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM....The secondary imagination....(differs)
Only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates, in order to recreate...at all events it struggles to idealize and to
unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially
fixed and dead” (Hill etext).
Coleridge distinguishes, too, between Fancy and Imagination:
“FANCY, on the contrary...is indeed no other than a mode of Memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with,
and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express
by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy
must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association” (4/6).
These fine distinctions between Fancy and Imagination seem lost on some critics who purport to
have the acuity to analyze the poetry and prose of Blake and who feel qualified (because of their
medical training and/or their current, science-shaped definitions of Imagination) to decide for us
whether Blake was, in fact, raving mad, or perhaps simply a bit off-kilter, notwithstanding his
standing as an Inspired Bard.
I would like to avoid the question of Blake’s sanity altogether. We appropriate what good
or evil we seek, it seems to me, from the treasures and trash around us. Because Blake’s work is
difficult to handle, if a student hears it noised that Blake was “mad,” he/she might avoid trying to
comprehend his work, or may dismiss his harder sayings or creations because the passage or
piece might be a concoction traceable to Blake’s psychosis. The tendency today is to accept the
pronouncements of critics who consider themselves apt judges of Blake’s works based not on the
merit of the works themselves, but on what they think is awry in Blake’s brain.
For years, I thought of Blake’s work as that of a creative genius overwhelmed by religious
orientations, to the point of obsession, and so eschewed any closer studies.
Having been trained in the hard sciences, as well as in anthropology, I learned to appreciate how
practitioners of western psychiatry can misinterpret the behavior of persons hailing from cultures
unfamiliar to their own. I recall being assigned in a hospital to observe a woman who was
suspected of being schizophrenic. She was from a primitive culture in South America, and had
recently given birth. Not only had this woman become violent when her baby was taken from her
and placed with other babies in the neonatal section of the hospital, but she also refused to allow
certain persons to touch her, nor would she eat certain common foods. Her bizarre behavior
included smearing herself and her baby with a mixture of salt and water. She was about to be
hauled off to an institution (nobody could understand her language, either, and she kept chanting
odd rhymes over and over).
Of course the poor mother only wanted her baby at her side, had desired to anoint it with the
traditional salt to cleanse and bless it and her, and was avoiding taboo foods --- and persons who
were menstruating-- so that her milk would come in strongly and would be sweet, rather than
sour, for her baby. She’d been taught these things and wasn’t in the least “mad.” I was
enlightened by my professor of anthropology, the eminent Margarita Melville, who had lived
with the Yanomama tribes in the rain forests of Brazil. She and her husband, Tom, understood
the situation, and soothed the psychiatrists, doctors and nurses--and, incidentally—comforted the
misunderstood and perfectly sane (at least, until then) mother.
I here make a simple understatement: Blake did not live in the same culture as modern
psychiatrists. True, we have inherited a culture largely founded upon Blake’s, but when one fully
considers the reduced stature of religion, of Kings and magistrates, and the elevation of the
sciences as our modern masters, dictating what shall be--and what shall not be --tolerated as
expressions of the individual human spirit and personality in today’s western society—lest one
be considered psychotic-- one might conclude that Blake lived almost in a different universe.
We might more fairly judge Blake as to his sanity by seeking the opinions of his
contemporaries, because--- perhaps--- we might err to accept only the assessments of moderns as
to Blake’s mental condition, We are obliged to consider the cultural differences that separate his
world from ours.
In the matter of Imagination, for example, I can intellectually agree with Coleridge that
“it is not lawful to enquire from whence it sprang, as if it were a thing
subject to place and motion...(for) it either appears to us or it does not
appear...we ought not to pursue it with a view of detecting its secret source,
but to watch in quiet till it suddenly shines upon us” (etext 2 of 10)
But in our present age, where dissections of butterflies and of eagles are conducted without
emotion, Blake, stretched out, pinned down, and examined for his “symptoms” by the curious
doctor or psychiatrist, can scarcely escape a classification that sees that measures flesh, blood
and sweat foremost, with little regard to the spirit. In our world, it is “lawful to enquire from
whence it sprang...” Coleridge sensed what power science was accruing unto itself: he wished to
help us see that there were realms existing beyond the physical. Said he:
“..all the organs of the sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense;
and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world
of spirit: though the later organs are not developed in all alike. But they exist in
all, and their first appearance discloses itself in the moral being” (etext 2 of 10).
We don’t even have a place to ensconce the ‘moral being’ in the schematics of
sane/neurotic/insane that we presently tend to automatically apply to artists, poets, and others
who are creative. We readily label most of them manic-depressive or schizophrenic, and even
trace their acts of creativity as mere responses to merntal problems inherited from their mothers,
or to character deficits. How arrogant that is!
I’d like to share an observation with you: I was trained by the State of Florida to counsel
family members of all ages, and to decide whether or not such families had dysfunctional
members. I had the power to take children from their parents, to decide who should appear
before a judge or be investigated for child abuse (physical or emotional). I soon learned that
anyone remanded to a treatment center faced these responses upon presentation:
(1) If the client did not seem upset or disturbed and remained calm, a common diagnosis
offered repressed hostility, repressed feelings, and possible depression. The client should have
shown more responses, considering the situation in which client finds self. Client is likely
depressed, should be confined and observed, and all items such as lamps with cords, etc.
removed in case client tries to commit suicide.
(2) If the client seemed upset and disturbed and does not remain calm, a common
diagnosis was mania, in a cycle of manic-depression, including possible hysteria. Client should
therefore be confined, and possibly restrained if the client becomes hostile, as aggression is
possible. The client should display more calmness, showing the ability to cope with situation in a
more reasonable manner upon presentation.
It was a Catch-22 situation. I did not see the chart of a single client whom I referred for
temporary observation to a treatment center, mental hospital or facility who was evaluated upon
initial presentation as “normal.” Whether calm or agitated, both poles were ‘extremes.’ And very
few of my clients were allowed to return home after the mandatory 48 hours of observation, to
my own private shock and horror. All of the dozens of clients I sent for preliminary evaluations
were “diagnosed” (until further --expensive--testing could verify or dispute) as “abnormal.” The
few clients who were released after expiration of the (no relation) “Baker Act” had but one thing
in common-- none of them had adequate medical insurance that would pay for those expensive
tests.
Insensitivity, too, of the psychiatrist to the client’s physical condition, or unfamiliar surroundings
— which can affect mental condition or performance of tasks-- often develops because
psychiatrists are required to assess even those patients in severe pain. They must assign tasks in
order to adjudge the sanity, or proper psychosocial functions, of any patient at the request of a
physician. In my case, before an MRI disclosed two multi-fractured lumbar vertebrae, which
resulted in an immediate operation involving laminectomies and the fusing of my lower spine,
one doctor wondered if I was merely a premenopausal woman seeking attention, since the
hairline fractures and semi-severed nerves did not show up on the initial conventional x-rays.
After my operation, the villain returned, to ask me if the massive amount of pain-killers I was
prescribed for pain were causing any hallucinations. His question was based on the fact that a
nurse had told him I wrote poetry. “I asked if you were having hallucinations,” the doctor
gushed on, “because creative people, under stress, can cross over the line into neurosis.”
I refrained from slugging both rows of his shiny white teeth from his flabby jaws with one great
sweep of the stainless steel traction weights that still hung near my bed. Nor would I have ever
shared with him the sensation (from the influence of so much morphine) that the walls of my
room were ever-so-slowly undulating. Or, perhaps, I restrained myself because my culture would
not allow me to say what I would have liked to say. Blake wouldn’t have had a chance of leaving
a hospital in Houston, Texas, 1983, without a lobotomy, I’m afraid.
The Examination of a Doomsday Prophet
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....
And all this Vegetable World appeard on my left Foot,
As a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold:
I stooped down & bound it on to walk forward thro’ Eternity.”
--Milton 21:4-14
It strikes me that Blake is using a number of qualifiers, for a delusional man: “the nether regions
of the Imagination,” “…I know not that it was Milton....” And “man cannot know/What passes
(etc.).....” He seems to have both feet on the ground, however shod, and wherever his
metaphysical verbiage might be taking them. But Friedlander, if showing weakness here in his
diagnosis of Blake as schizoid, also argues
(5) that “Blake insisted that the poem itself was not his own work at all, but had been
“dictated” to him by beings from another world.” (4)
This places William Blake among the company of those who have been abducted by aliens,
although it should be remembered that world-class religious leaders sometimes related the same
circumstances when they began to write sacred materials. Mohammed, the venerated founder of
Islam, reported that angelic beings dictated messages to him, as did Mormonism’s founder,
Joseph Smith. Of course, one may always argue that religious leaders who report spiritual events
such as visions are probably insane, but not everyone would agree, nor, in my opinion, do we
understand enough about realms spiritual or imaginary to summarily dismiss all reports
involving these areas of human experience as proof positive of mental illness.
The time may come when any deviance outside the first parameter, from expected norms, will be
labeled suspect. As it is, western artists, especially--- our poets, prophets, priests, music-
makers---are often labeled crackpots, even if their genius is acknowledged, and their functions as
innovators or re-definers of our culture or of our human-ness are tolerated, recognized, or
absorbed (to become standardized instead of stigmatized, as Van Gogh’s “insane” works are
lionized today.).
Friedlander does give us a better idea of what he thinks was Blake’s mental condition when he
succinctly describes the origin of Milton, and then adds some supplementary information, much
of it fascinating:
“One day William Blake saw a little girl named Ololon coming
down from heaven into his garden. A moment later, he fainted
at the climax of a complicated vision. He had seen John Milton
renounce Satan, and he had glimpsed the return of Jesus Christ.
Blake described this experience, together with many interesting
things that had led up to it, in the shortest of his three major poems,
Milton” (4).
Friedlander cites a passage that “has been ignored by people who see a Platonic allegory in
Blake’s vision of the sandal” — Blake’s letter of complaint to his “patron, Thomas Butts dated
Sept. 11 1801:
I labour incessantly & accomplish not one half of what I
intend, because my abstract Folly hurries me often away while
I am at work, carrying me over Mountains and Valleys which
are not Real in a Land of Abstraction where Spectres of the
Dead wander. This I endeavor to prevent....but in vain! The faster
` I bind the better is the Ballast for I so far from being bound down
take the world with me in my flights & often it seems lighter than
a ball of wool rolled by the wind...who shall deliver me from the
Spirit of Abstraction & Improvidence. Such my dear Sir is the truth
of my state....”(7)
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.’”
“I have had much intercourse with Voltaire and he said to me, “I
blasphemed the Son of Man and it shall be forgiven me. But they (the
enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me and it shall
not be forgiven them.”
“I inquired about his writings. ...”I write when commanded by the
Spirits and the moment I have written I see the words fly about
the room in all directions. It is then published and the Spirits can
read. My manuscripts are of no further use. I have been tempted
to burn my manuscripts but my wife won’t let me” (73).
Friedlander concludes, “The several distinct reality-distorting syndromes, or “psychoses,”
from which [Gilchrist’s contemporaries, e.g. Blake] one of them might be suffering were not
distinguished until late in the century.” In fact, says Friedlander, a case such as Blake’s would no
doubt evoke the comment that “he was eccentric.” “Many lay people share this view today,”
Friendlander asserts,
“...(b)ut it is much more enlightening and scientific to speak instead of clinical
entities, in which varying signs reflect a common disorder.” I thought the choice
of the words ‘enlightening and scientific’ more obdurate than it first appears: does
a ‘scientific’ term make it superior to a subjective one, such as ‘eccentric’? Dr.
Friedlander assures us that “(t)here really are distinct entities in clinical
psychology, and William Blake easily meets today’s criteria for schizophrenia”
(73).
Is there any escape from this conclusion?
Marsanne Brammer compares James Joyce’s responses to the stress he felt oppressing the soul as
caused by “classical scientific biases” and the “post-Newtonian atomism, mechanistic
determinism, Cartesian dualism, and oppositional logic”. The response of the artist/poet/priest is
the pursuit of “a dynamic, polyvalent, and interconnected universe incommensurable”:to the
“scientific models of the nineteenth and early twentieth century” with which the “enactive
aesthetics” of Joyce and “Blake’s universe of multiple epistemological” semantics brings them
into a “performance of mystery ritual” and “a dynamic multiplicity of epistemologies and
worlds” that defy “demystification.” (353) This is a complicated way of saying that both Joyce
and Blake rejected the modern interpretation of the world around them and substituted for it a
world wherein they could function at a more meaningful and fulfilling level. This world
demanded recognition in semantic and aesthetic constructs that were as complex, even if
unexplored, as the scientifically-laid-out universe which they repulsed and rejected.
Jennifer Randonis looks beyond mere response, however, to the appropriation of genre as a
webwork upon which to weave one’s alternate universe. She identifies the overt “Gothic-ness of
William Blake’s illuminations and illustrations,” recognizing their essential congruence
(uncommon in schizophrenically-directed productions of art-with-poetry) with all of Blake’s
other work, and all of it of a patently “Gothic quality...whether verbal or visual. “ (1)
Could it be that what might be dismissed as the creative acts of a clever schizophrenic by Dr.
Friedlander is actually Blake’s answer to man’s capitulation in accepting an inferior universe,
insufficiently spiritually ordered, insufficiently flexible or fantastic or sublime, in the face of
mysteries science cannot confront? Blake creates through an “artistic alignment with the Gothic”
which can help to expose evil, life, death, and other mysteries in ways a mechanistic science-
view cannot. (1) “There is evidence,” Randonis writes,
‘that William Blake was influenced....by Gothic art during his apprenticeship to
Basire from 1772 to 1779, most notably the tomb effigies in Westminster Abbey”
and we have Blake declaring that “Gothic is Living Form....”.
That is a sublime statement in itself. Randonis also quotes G. R. Thompson’s identification of the
“three most common archetypal Gothic motifs” and “high Gothic...[as] the embodiment of
demonic-quest-romance, in which a lonely, self-divided hero embarks on insane pursuit of the
Absolute...[which] is mythical, mythic, and religious, defining the hero’s dark or equivocal
relationship to the universe.” (1).
This reminds me a great deal of Blake’s general viewpoint. There is the uncomfortable idea,
though, still lurking, of that unhappy term, “insane pursuit” which is included in Thompson’s
definition of “high Gothic,” though we must then admit that it is only one of the more noticeable
of a number of additional Gothic-typic elements that Dr. Friedlander might label as useful tools
for appropriation in the art or poetry of a “schizophrenic” personality: these could include
“narcissism, self-isolation, and the Doppelganger (the personification of the doubled or divided
self— an idealized schizophrenic state”) (Randonis 1).
Randonis believes that Blake also attempted to escape from “a masculine-coded perspective,’
and that, though (h)e remains trapped in patriarchal discourse,” nevertheless,
“his heroic gesture as an artist lies in his attempt to destroy the patriarchal tyranny alive
and well in Blake’s time. Specifically, in The (First) Book of Urizen, Blake incorporates
the gothic features of a confining narcissism in an estranged self, a quest for identity
marked by violence and chaos, and the Doppelganger motif” (2).
Randonis also says that Blake’s “Urizen, at first glance, does not seem “Gothic” at all,” but then
she uses Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of the “fantastic” (to provide) a way of seeing Blake’s
poetry as Gothic.” She reminds us that the fantastic “is specifically a genre which, in fiction
alone, never resolves that uncertainty existing in a world viewed as a nightmare. This break
between illusion and reality ends either with a reinstatement of reality (the genre of the uncanny)
or a suggestion that the supernatural does exist (the genre of the marvelous)” (2).
These genres are found, as Todorov reminds us, and Randonis reminds us, “in the Gothic
tradition” where “the notion of anxiety underlies them both. In Gothic, this anxiety revolves
around boundaries of existence in a genre” which, according to DeLamotte, “offers a symbolic
language congenial to the expression of...a concern about the boundaries of the self.” (2)
Randonis clamps down on the point with the observation that “Urizen’s journey through Chaos
marks him as a self-isolated character...” (whose) name “indicates his tendency to self-limitation
and introspection, his urge to impose boundaries, and to reduce in order to define”(3).
The Gothic Priest image arises, according to Harald A. Kittel, in Urizen himself, a being “not a
creator but a ‘primeval Priest’ who retires from eternity...” and then pursues a role as “a demonic
creator (who) parodies and reverses both Biblical and Miltonic creation myths”(3). Since Blake
tells us that Urizen is also “the creator of language” (Cantor 38).
Randonis says Urizen associates himself, through the naming of things, “with the Biblical figure
of Adam.” It is Urizen, says Cantor., who “articulate[s] consciousness into words” and
“interpose[s] a set of symbols between himself and reality, thus...giving him a sense of himself
as a separate being, and freeing him to gain control over his environment” (Cantor 38-39).
How ironic that it may be in the attempt to provide the world with a map of hitherto uncharted
hinterlands -- a guidebook of relevant words and symbols-- that Blake might thus be pinpointing
his domicile in a schizophrenic universe. Stuart Bartow (1995) has written a dissertation about
“contemporary visionary poetics” and credits William Blake for “its theoretical and artistic
roots” and “the forms [contemporary visionary poetics] is taking in present-day expression. “The
central feature of the poems is their imagery,” Bartow writes. “..I attempt to fuse images of the
‘outer” world of external reality with those of the “inner” world of the imagination and
unconscious so that the boundaries between these dimensions is destabilized.”
Bartow goes on to describe the legacy of poets who owe so much to Blake, in his description of
his work, as influenced by the ‘schizophrenic” master:
“Ideally the weaving of imagery should take the reader-listener-poet
...between the boundaries of inner and outer, to a place of wild energy
and transformation. The Little Vortex describes the poem as a field of
Energy (language energy-mind energy). Ideally, when a “successful”
poem is crafted, envisioned, the poet and reader enter into another space
(The vortex of the poem) that upon returning to their usual fields of
consciousness, they are not quite the same.”
Bartow brings up an important point in the matter of Blake’s “schizophrenic” compositions.
Unlike the typical schizophrenic that Dr. Friedlander describes, who sees “the familiar world as
unreal” and who assumes Blake sees the world that way, too, so that “Milton may have been
written with little interference by the rational faculties” (83), he admits that “...much of Blake’s
system as a direct result of his schizophrenia is an open question, but it helps us understand most
of his metaphysics”(83). Oh, really?
Returning to Bartow’s introduction to his dissertation:
“In The Poem As Map, I describe the role of the visionary poet as
that of shaman, of one who guides us on a journey to the other worlds
of the unconscious mind and to the ‘places’ between the domains of
inner and outer, giving us visions of the shapes of the mind....[including]
the intuitive ‘order’ underlying poems of vision” (111).
Dr. Friedlander does not comprehend either the role of the shaman as guide, nor the fact that the
unconscious mind is truly, as Blake revealed, “a hinterland” and is composed of “other” worlds. I
knew a man presumed to be utterly sane in every way. He was, technically speaking. But he had
no way to get in touch with his inner mind, his unexplored self. He was astonished, one night, to
have a nightmare, and blamed it all on undigested pizza, which in his case might indeed have
been the only cause for his discomfort. Thereafter, our plodding gentleman never consented to
eat anything after precisely six p.m., in order to forever avoid nightmares.
In contrast, Harold Bloom (63) describes Blake as a visionary who, in the poem The Tyger,
displays “affrighted awe” and becomes “prostrate before a mystery entirely of his own creation.”
Robert Graves used the same poem to support his observation that “Blake was certainly...in a
state of schizophrenia at the time” (133-139). To choose to create The Tyger as a means to deal
with one’s psychosis seems to me to be a more effective strategy than to henceforth avoid eating
anything after six p.m. so that one might not experience any nightmares. Blake described a wide
range of visions, from the nightmare to the delightful (Blake said he “saw” the funeral of a
Fairy!).
Is there a legitimate place for visions, perhaps as prophesy? Prophecy is a spiritual tool to use to
‘articulate’ that which otherwise could not be said or comprehended, and without which
comparisons between possible outcomes that are unutterable in the economy of our ‘real’ world
could not occur.
“There is one last way of defending Blake’s sanity,” Dr. Friedlander tells us.
“This is simply to reiterate Blake’s own claim of supernatural knowledge. Blake saw and
heard spirits because they were really there....It is as impossible to disprove this claim as
it is for its proponents to produce any evidence to support it. Technically, schizophrenia
is a clinical entity, recognized by its symptoms rather than by its unknown causes. Maybe
it is caused by spirits” (82).
Friedlander praises Blake’s works as ‘the best, most beautiful, and most meaningful”
schizophrenically-derivated materials “ever created” (82). But the good doctor gives Blake no
recognition as shaman, or as a warrior-artist exploring frontiers of the unconscious . Indeed,
Blake wrote of Urizen --and it could apply to Friedlander--- that
“Of the primeval Priest’s assum’d power,
When the Eternals spurn’d back his religion
And gave him a place in the north,
Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.”
(Opening lines, the preludium)
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
