Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

magical, a poem that exists above and beyond reason and against reason through the magic of fable, the magic of music.

CLASS 15

    THE LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. THE POEM "THE TYGER." BLAKE AND SWEDENBORG'S PHILOSOPHY, COMPARED. A POEM BY RUPERT BROOKE. BLAKE'S POEMS.

    MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1966.
    We are now going to go back in time, for today we are going to talk about William Blake, who was born in London in 1757 and died in that city in 1827. 1
    The reasons I have postponed the study of Blake are easily explained, because my goal was to explain the romantic movement based on certain representative figures: Macpherson, the precursor; and then the two great poets,Wordsworth and Coleridge. William Blake, on the contrary, remains not only outside the pseudo-classic school (to use the most elevated term), and that is the school represented by Pope, but he also remains outside the romantic movement. He is an individual poet, and if there is anything we can connect him to—for, as RubénDarío said, there is no literary Adam—we would have to connect him to much more ancient traditions: to the Cathar heretics in the south of France, the Gnostics in Asia Minor and Alexandria in the first century after Christ, and of course to the great and visionary Swedish thinker, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Because Blake was an isolated individual, his contemporaries considered him a bit mad, and perhaps he was. He was a visionary—as Swedenborg had been, of course—and his works circulated very little during his lifetime. Moreover, he was better known as an engraver and a draftsman than as a writer.
    Blake was personally a quite unpleasant man, an aggressive man. He managed to make enemies out of his contemporaries, whom he attacked with ferocious epigrams. The events of his life are less important than what he dreamed and saw. However, we will make note of certain circumstances. Blake studied engraving, and he illustrated some important works. He illustrated, for example, the works ofChaucer, Dante, and also his own work. He married, and likeMilton, he believed in polygamy, although he did not practice it so as not to offend his wife. He lived alone, isolated, and is one of the many fathers of free verse, inspired a little—like Macpherson before him and WaltWhitman after him—on Bible verses. But he comes long before Whitman, for
Leaves of Grass
appeared in 1855, and William Blake, as I have said, died in 1827.
    Blake’s work is extraordinarily difficult to read because he created a theological system. In order to express it, he had the idea of inventing a mythology, and critics don’t agree on what it means. We have Urizen, for example, which is time. We have Orc, which is a kind of redeemer. And then we have goddesses with strange names like Oothoon. There is a divinity named Golgonooza, as well. There is an otherworldly geography of his invention, and there are characters namedMilton—Blake came to believe that Milton’s soul had been reincarnated in him to recant the errors Milton committed in
Paradise Lost
. Moreover, these same divinities in Blake’s private pantheon change meaning, but not name; they keep evolving along with hisphilosophy. For example, there are four Zoas. There is also a character named Albion, Albion of England. The daughters of Albion appear, and so does Christ, but this Christ is not at all the Christ of the New Testament.
    Now, there is a quite extensive bibliography of works on Blake. I have not read all of it, I don’t think anybody has. But I think the most lucid book about Blake is by the French critic Denis Saurat. 2 Saurat has also written about the philosophy ofHugo and Milton, considering all of them in the same tradition as the Jewish Kabbalah, and before that, the Gnostics of Alexandria and Asia Minor (Saurat actually speaks little about the Gnostics and prefers to discuss the Cathars and the Kabbalists, who are closer to Blake). He says almost nothing aboutSwedenborg, who was Blake’s most direct mentor. Quite characteristically, Blake rebelled against Swedenborg and speaks of him with disdain. 3 What we can say is that all through Blake’s oeuvre, all through his nebulous mythologies, there is one problem that has always worried philosophical thinkers, and that is the idea of evil—the difficulty of reconciling the idea of a benevolent and omnipotent God with the presence of evil in the world. Naturally, when I speak about evil, I am thinking not only about betrayal or cruelty, but also