While they were contemporaries (and later frequently grouped together under the term "Romantics"), William Blake and William Wordsworth lived vastly different lives. Blake grew up in the bustling city of London, while Wordsworth was raised in the beautifully scenic and tranquil Lake District. Blake worked as an apprentice to an engraver, while Wordsworth attended Cambridge and spent his leisure wandering in nature. The two poets would never meet one another during the course of their lives, though both had (through Coleridge and Crabb Robinson) been introduced to each other’s works. Blake felt that Wordsworth focused too much on the natural world and not enough on the spiritual, but still thought enough of his ability to pronounce him "the only poet of the age." When Crabb Robinson read him the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" it reportedly "threw Blake ‘almost into a hysterical rapture.’" For his part, Wordsworth had limited exposure to Blake, but had seen enough to write: "There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in [his madness] which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott!" Blake would live his life in relative obscurity and poverty, with very little recognition from his contemporaries, while Wordsworth would become the major poet and predominate literary influence of his time.
On the surface, then, here are two starkly different poets. Yet while their lives and methods may have, in many respects, been different, Blake and Wordsworth share far more in common than one might initially assume, especially in their perceived and actualized roles as poet-prophets for their generation. Indeed, both literally viewed themselves as prophets. Blake, recalling the words of Hebraic scripture, often referred to himself as "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," while Wordsworth considered his role, as poet, "the rock of defense for human nature." Both poets, in addition, frequently claimed to have mystic/supernatural experiences; both felt their work was divinely inspired and that their role as creator/revealer was of great importance. True to the manner prophets have traditionally been received, both were consistently mocked and devalued, and felt their work was largely unappreciated and misunderstood by their contemporaries; yet in spite of this, both remained sharp social critics, particularly of traditional religion and the growing trust put in science, reason, and industrialization; and finally, and perhaps most significantly, both believed absolutely in the reality and power of the imagination (a term they used with far greater dimensions of meaning than we do today) as the pathway to truth, revelation creation, and restoration. Through all of these characteristics, it will be seen that both Blake and Wordsworth viewed their respective roles in substantial terms, not as mere entertainers or even authors, but as messengers of a spiritual reality to which most were "out of tune."
Before continuing, it might be of benefit to ask a simple question: What is a prophet? In the Western mind, the term might typically conjure up images of the long-bearded leaders of the Old Testament: Moses, Abraham, Noah, and Isaiah. Others might think of someone like Nostradamus, the 16th century mystic who believed he could predict specific events in the future. According to one contemporary definition, a prophet is "a person who is believed to speak through divine inspiration...with the purpose of delivering a divinely inspired message." The term is derived from the Hebrew Navi, which according to different sources means "to bubble up," "to boil," or "to proclaim, to speak forth." Thomas Paine later argued that the definition of prophet among the Jews was closer to "poet" or "musician." He writes: "There is not, throughout the whole book called the Bible, any word that describes to us what we call a poet, nor any word that describes what we call poetry. The case is, that the word prophet, to which a later times have affixed a new idea, was the Bible word for poet, and the word ‘prophesying’ meant the art of making poetry. It also meant the art of playing poetry to a tune upon any instrument of music." Indeed, in the Psalms and Proverbs, as well as the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, and Job, the roles of prophet and poet are clearly blended. Though not canonized as scripture, this combined role continued in figures like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton—individuals with large and significant visions of humanity and its relationship with the divine. A prophet was more than just a religious leader— he was a truth-finder, a creator, a revelator. He was "in tune" with the spiritual, sometimes having mystical or transcendent experiences, and then communicating those experiences through language and art.
With this definition, then, it makes sense that both Blake and Wordsworth would consider themselves prophets as well as poets—in fact, they believed that the two terms were ultimately one and the same. Even Percy B. Shelley, the late-Romantic rebel, referred to poets as the "prophets"and "legislators" of the world. "A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one," he wrote in his famous essay, A Defence of Poetry. "[Poetry] awakens end enlarges the mind. . . [It] lifts the veil." In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth similarly sees the role of poet as a substantial one: "What is a Poet?" he asks, before answering, "He is a man...endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul." To Wordsworth, a poet is one who is pure enough to be "in tune" with the divine, so when the wind of inspiration comes (to use Coleridge’s metaphor of the Eolian Harp), the heavenly music plays. From a young age, as one sees in his autobiographical epic, The Prelude, Wordsworth feels he has a natural connection to both God and Nature, and, in the words of essayist Mary Ritter, "the purpose and culmination of the journey is reached when Wordsworth realizes that he is called by nature to be a poet and her prophet."
Blake’s realization of his special calling also began at a young age. He was raised on the prophets of the Old Testament—one early biographer remarked that "the scripture overawed his imagination"—and by the time he was eight years old he was already claiming to have visions and communicating with angels. While his parents scolded him for his claims, for Blake "they were real, and the child who returned from communion with angels or with Ezekiel knew that he had been blessed with a second sight." Blake’s visions continued consistently throughout his life. When his brother Robert passed away, Blake, who was waiting by his bedside, claimed to see his "released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling ‘clapping its hands for joy.’" Blake later wrote of his brother, "With his Spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & see him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination." These visionary experiences had a direct effect on his poetry and art. As biographer Peter Ackroyd observed: "Many of his works begin with a visitation, of a bard or muse or angel who inspires the poet and dictates the words of his song; it is, for Blake, a way of emphasizing the divine source of all art." Ackroyd continues: "[All] his poetry and painting are imbued with biblical motifs and images, the very curve and cadence of his sentences are derived from the Old Testament, while his passages of ritualistic description and denunciation come from the words of the great prophets." Certainly Blake identified to a great degree with these spiritual figures, and held them in high esteem. He was not, however, overawed. There was no doubt in Blake’s mind that he was, in fact, one of them, of the same line, with a similar gift and calling.
While Wordsworth’s source of inspiration was somewhat different than Blake’s (nature and memory as opposed to scripture), the result was essentially the same. Like Blake, Wordsworth’s transcendent experiences came early and often—"Gleams like the flashing of a shield," as he would later recall in The Prelude. "His visions, his moments of mysticism," observed biographer Hunter Davies, "were unusually deep and clear. He felt not just a communion with nature and the world of the spirits, but that he was a part of them, beyond normal life, and that he had left his human frame." Wordsworth himself acknowledged: "Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being...I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated in something of the same way, to Heaven. With a feeling congenial to this...I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality." For Wordsworth as with Blake, the spiritual, or the world of imagination was in fact more real than physical reality. Wordsworth spoke consistently of looking past the literal surface into the life of things. In this "blessed mood," as he writes in Tintern Abbey, "the burthen of the mystery...the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,/ Is lightened...we are laid asleep/ In body, and become a living soul." This second vision, this capacity to see beyond the physical and commune with and be one with the spiritual, was not only a shared trait of Blake and Wordsworth, but one of the major reasons they felt themselves prophets.
Because of this gift or calling, both poets naturally felt their writing was divinely inspired and therefore of great significance. "Hear the voice of the Bard!" Blake’s narrator boldly declares in the Introduction to Songs of Experience, "Who Present, Past, and Future sees/ Whose ears have heard,/ The Holy Word,/ That walk’d among the ancient trees." For Blake, the "poetic genius" and the "spirit of prophecy" were synonymous. The object of his poetry and art, in the words of Harold Bloom, was "nothing less than to teach us how to live, and to explain to us what has made it so hard to live as fully human rather than merely natural beings." Blake ultimately created his own art form and mythology to express his unique vision. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience he examines the "two contrary states of the human soul," and in his later prophetic works (Book of Urizen, Jerusalem, and Milton) he shows how one might transcend these two inadequate stages, reaching a higher level of being Blake called "organized innocence." In this state, according to Blake, one is no longer naive, ignorant or stagnant (as in Songs of Innocence); neither are they limited, blinded or corrupted by the experiences of the world (as in Songs of Experience). But by comprehending both conditions they are transcended—innocence is refined by experience and coupled with true wisdom and understanding, creating a "divine" or "eternal" man. As he wrote: "Thou art a Man/ God is no more; Thine own Humanity learn to adore." It was radical theology for the time, but then, most of Blake’s views were. While he was greatly influenced by the Bible and Milton, his intent wasn’t merely to mimic but "to create an autonomous myth for his own period." In this objective, he was largely successful. In the course of his life, he was able to develop an incredibly complex and vivid mythology through a combination of art and poetry, and when he died, many critics argue, so did the tradition of the great visionary poet. "He [was], as he insisted, a prophet" wrote Harold Bloom, "His poems are astonishingly ambitious. . .[his] visionary poems demonstrat[e] probably the greatest conceptual power ever to appear among poets."
Wordsworth likewise had great ambitions for his work. Like Blake, he was significantly influenced by the Bible, and to a larger degree by Milton, the creator of the epic masterpiece, Paradise Lost. It was his lifelong endeavor to create his own monumental epic, which would not only match but surpass Paradise Lost in scope and grandeur. His reverence for not only Milton as an artist, but his role as a poet-prophet, can be seen in his sonnet, "London, 1802,"in which he cries out:
Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee:
She is a fen of stagnant waters...
Oh raise us up, and return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. . .
These verses perfectly capture Wordsworth’s own ambitions as a poet. He had a message and he wanted to deliver it to the masses. He criticized "Poets, who think that they are conferring honor upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression." The object of poetry, according to Wordsworth, was truth, "not individual and local, but general and operative, not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion." The poet, therefore, according to Wordsworth, must be pure and open to inspiration so he might receive and express the "visionary gleam." In some of the most majestic lines in all of English poetry, Wordsworth describes this divine influence:
...And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
This is the "presence" Wordsworth felt he needed to create "true" poetry, and that he so often lamented when it was missing. "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" he famously asks in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality. "Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" Unlike Blake, Wordsworth’s visionary power was often more transient and fleeting, especially as he grew older. He believed there was a direct correlation between this inspiring presence and purity and innocence, which is why he returned to moments of youth so much in his poetry. As he writes in "Intimations of Immortality":
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
In poems like "The Little Black Boy," "The Chimney Sweeper," and "Holy Thursday," Blake likewise presents children as wise and prophetic characters who are at one with God, and fall in sharp contrast to the corrupt, selfish, and limited vision of adults. The key, then, for both Wordsworth and Blake is to somehow recapture or maintain the divine influence so strong in youth, and combine it with the wisdom of experience. This is the "gift" of "abundant recompense" that Wordsworth describes in "Tintern Abbey," and was one of the major themes of his prophetic message.
While Blake and Wordsworth’s message might have seemed clear and significant in their own minds, however, it wasn’t always so well-received by others. In typical tradition for those carrying the role of prophet, both Blake and Wordsworth were consistently mocked and devalued by their contemporaries. As mentioned earlier, Blake lived his entire life in relative obscurity and poverty and was referred to by many as "mad" because of his eccentric art and claim to visions. The Examiner once called him an "unfortunate lunatic," and described his work as "the wild ebullitions of a distempered brain." Blake, however, was not deterred: "The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to my art." In a letter to a man named Reverend John Trussler, a clergyman who commissioned Blake to complete four watercolors, and then canceled upon seeing what he felt wasn’t fit, Blake responded with fury: "You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. . .And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way." Still, while Blake believed in his art and his prophetic role, to most of his generation he would always retain the stigma of being a poor, deluded madman. Blake ultimately realized that "the charge of madness," as biographer Peter Ackroyd put it, "would be laid against [anyone] who refused to accept the mechanical world of late eighteenth-century science and philosophy," that "the more orthodox philosophers in this period tended to equate any form of religious enthusiasm with mental derangement; to claim divine inspiration, as Blake often did, was to be almost automatically labeled insane." The criticism and neglect was sometimes difficult to endure for even one as confident as Blake. In his later life in exasperation, he declared: "For these thirty years I am Mad or Else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses. Posterity will judge by our Works."
In contrast to Blake, Wordsworth was arguably the most influential poet of his day. Still, with this fame, came a constant barrage of stinging derision and criticism. His now famed Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration with friend Samuel Coleridge, was assumed when first published to "progress to oblivion," so poor were its sales and weak its reviews. "Most educated people," writes biographer Hunter Davies, "were put off by Wordsworth’s rustic topics." Upon release of his 1807 Poems, Wordsworth received a vicious round of attacks from almost all reviewers. The Critical Review said that "Wordsworth should be ashamed of himself, that even ridicule had failed to bring him to his senses, and that he was now beyond a laughing matter. . . [that] he should "stop driveling to a redbreast and pouring out nauseous and nauseating sensibilities to weeds and insects.’" Lord Byron similarly, and relentlessly, mocked Wordsworth’s gushing odes and sentimental sonnets. "I’ve seen bad reviews in my lifetime," commented biographer Hunter Davies, "but I don’t think I’ve ever read anywhere such vicious reviews as the ones Wordsworth received in 1807." Ironically, the poems contained in this volume, including "The World is Too Much With Us," "The Daffodils," "The Solitary Reaper," and "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," would later become regarded as not only some of Wordsworth’s best work, but some of the finest in all of English poetry. Wordsworth was naturally hurt by the terrible reaction his work received, but was comforted that it would reach the hearts of the right people in due time. "The London wits and witlings, he said, were too busy running around from rout to rout in the senseless hurry of their idle lives to have any time for love or reverence." Ultimately, in Wordsworth’s mind, as with Blake, he knew that the great prophets and artists of all generations weren’t received by the authorities of their time. As Jesus put it: "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country."
In spite of the ridicule Blake and Wordsworth received (or perhaps, in part, because of it), they remained steadfast in their respective visions for humanity, and in typical prophetic form, were sharp social critics. Both poets were largely skeptical of the near-absolute faith being put in science and reason. In one of his most famous paintings, Blake depicts renowned scientist Isaac Newton at the bottom of the ocean with a compass in hand. He is measuring, calculating, dissecting. For Blake, it was a symbol of the limited nature of science. As he put it: "He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only." He later wrote in a letter: "May God us keep/ From single vision, and Newton’s sleep." For Blake as well as Wordsworth, the spiritual, what one could see not with the natural eye, but the "inward eye" of imagination, was of far greater value than the material. While described as a pantheist by some, Wordsworth actually viewed nature as a means, as a stimulus to the spiritual world of the imagination. The tree was not most valuable merely as a physical object, but in its capacity to work on the mind until one could see into the life of it and feel a connection between God, nature, and humanity. Like Blake, he believed science and reason ultimately failed to reveal what mattered most; light and wisdom was ultimately to be apprehended not through cold calculation or scholarly speculation but intuition and imagination. As he writes in "The Tables Turned": "Our meddling intellect/ Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—/ We murder to dissect. . ."
Blake and Wordsworth were also very critical of traditional religion. In "The Garden of Love," Blake shows the church as an exclusive institution and destroyer of innocence, simplicity, and beauty. Where there used to be open fields of green grass, fresh flowers, and children, the narrator is surprised and sorry to see instead a chapel, gates, restrictive rules, priests, and tombstones. In another poem, he writes: "I saw a chapel all of gold/ That none did dare to enter in/ And many weeping stood without,/ Weeping, mourning, worshipping." Wordsworth likewise felt that nature and the spiritual connection and communion that took place outdoors was far purer than what one could experience in the rigid and dogmatic confines of the church. As he writes in "The Tables Turned": "And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!/ He, too, is no mean preacher:/ Come forth into the light of things,/ Let Nature be your teacher." The joy and restoration Wordsworth feels in nature is something near to spiritual ecstacy, as he describes in his "Ode on Intimations of Immortality": "Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call/ Ye to each other make; I see/ The heavens laugh with you in jubilee;/ My heart is at your festival,/ My head hath its coronal,/ The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all." This falls in sharp contrast to the priest and philosopher, who Wordsworth consistently shows to be "in darkness lost," no longer able to see past their ingrained traditions and prejudices. In their criticism of traditional practices of religion and their capacity to show a "new way," Blake and Wordsworth again fit the profile of prophet.
In addition to science and religion, Blake and Wordsworth were deeply concerned about the direction of their country in general. Wordsworth described England as a "fen of stagnant waters," where "selfish men" have "forfeited their ancient English dower of inward happiness." In his Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake reveals corruption, racism, exploitation, exclusion, poverty, materialism, and spiritual degradation. In his poem "London," he writes of the "mind-forg’d manacles" he hears in the "Chimney-sweeper’s cry," in the "hapless Soldier’s sigh, in the "youthful Harlot’s curse," and the "new born Infant’s tear." In "The World is Too Much With Us," Wordsworth decries that "we have given our hearts away," that "we are out of tune," while Blake blasts the trend towards mass uniformity and industrialization. For both artists, the external world was full of corruption, ignorance, and distraction; therefore, it was their objective to reveal a greater vision for humanity, a purer state of being that could only be attained by going inward, and seeing with the spiritual eyes of imagination.
When one thinks of the word imagination today, the typical connotation seems to be of merely "making something up" in the mind, of fantasy and make-believe. For Blake and Wordsworth, the term carried far greater dimensions of meaning, and therefore far greater implications of significance. Imagination was to them a combination of inner vision, revelation, and creation; it was a higher reality, a spiritual state of being in which one could see clearly—with greater depth, breadth, and richness. Blake sometimes described it as "translucence," "mental fire," or a "vision of eternity" in which "all the faculties of fallen man are enlarged so that he can ‘behold the depths of wondrous worlds.’" As he writes in some of his most famous verses: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour." While Blake knew some thought of the concept of vision and imagination as mere hallucination or illusion, he defended it ardently: "A Spirit and a Vision are not, as modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapor or a nothing," he once wrote. "They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see does not imagine at all." In other words, to Blake, the materialist is "trapped within the confines of his own calculations," he is limited by his physical senses, and therefore never has the capacity to expand to anything beyond.
For Wordsworth too, imagination was supreme. It is the v...
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