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Words of Eternity
Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime
By Vincent Arthur De Luca PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06874-9
CHAPTER 1
BLAKE'S CONCEPT OF THE SUBLIME
Sublime Wonder: The Moment of Astonishment
Terrified at the sublime Wonder, Los stood before his Furnaces. And they stood around, terrified with admiration at Erins Spaces For the Spaces reachd from the starry heighth, to the starry depth.
(J 12.21–23)
It is not consistently easy to know what Blake means when he speaks of the sublime. The term appears often enough in his work (as either adjective or noun), although not always in clarifying contexts. Yet it turns up prominently on those occasions when he seems most profoundly stirred to define and explain the principles of his own craft—such as the passage in the Descriptive Catalogue in which he declares himself to be a "sublime Artist" (E 544); or when, writing to Butts about his newly finished "Grand Poem," he offers his "Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry" (E 730); or in his annotations to Reynolds's Discourses, where he specifies the conditions that establish the "Foundation of the Sublime" (E 647); or when he begins an early version of the first plate of Jerusalem with comments on the separation of the sublime and the pathetic. Although Blake offers no systematic theory of the sublime such as we find in Burke or Kant or even in the incipiently theoretical writings of, say, Addison or John Dennis, we should not therefore assume that he lacks a cogent and complex idea of the subject. Like any developed body of thought, Blake's concept of the sublime arises out of a historical context of competing concepts—which, in an ongoing dialogic process, it assimilates, contests, modifies, or completes. We are certain that Blake read Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into ... the Sublime and Beautiful, and there is a strong likelihood that he was familiar with contributions to the developing theory of the sublime made by such writers as Dennis, Addison, Hugh Blair, and Robert Lowth. Even where influence is not specifically demonstrable, it remains a simple matter to observe how thoroughly suppositions about sublimity general to his age pervade his own ideas and creative work.
The passage in Jerusalem quoted above is a case in point. It encapsulates a Burkean scenario, and in it several crucial terms in eighteenth-century discussions of sublimity gel. Los and other observers catch sight of something exceedingly vast, perceiving it less as an object than as an affect (a "Wonder"). The sight is both uplifting (sublime) and terrifying, and part of the terror is directed toward the observers' own powerful response of awe ("admiration," the Latinate cognate of "wonder"). The outer vastness somehow modulates into an inner power, mediated by a feeling labeled "terror" (but mixed up with awed surprise and uplift) that attaches itself to both the outer and the inner state. Here is an exemplary instance of what Thomas Weiskel, codifying a scheme out of the speculations of Burke, Kant, and Wordsworth, has termed "the sublime moment," a threefold episode of consciousness, in which a state of radical disequilibrium intervenes between a prior state of ordinary awareness and a final state of transcendent exaltation.
In eighteenth-century parlance, the favorite technical term for this state of disequilibrium is "astonishment." Burke begins the second part of his Philosophical Enquiry, an analysis of the sublime proper, with a definition of this term:
The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible force.
Writers throughout the century refer to astonishment in similar terms. But however much these formulas are repeated, perplexities abound. The psychological state itself seems curiously resistant to straightforward discursive explanation, as Burke's own highly figurative language demonstrates. There is a marked ambiguity in the play of these figures. At the moment of astonishment, when the power of the sublime manifests itself, the mind becomes utterly open to the influx of what it beholds ("filled with its object"), and yet this flood of power into the mind produces no kinetic transfer of energy to the mind's faculties, but rather the reverse—a suspension of internal motion, a total arrest. At first appearing entirely permeable, the mind instantly becomes impenetrable, like a container packed to the choking point ("so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other"). The mind is quite stopped ("suspended"), only to be "hurried"; its internal density becomes crushing, and yet finally it is easily carried along. "Astonishment," then, cannot be described so much as circumscribed by a ring of mutually canceling figures such as motion/arrest, penetration/resistance, heaviness/lightness. The figures are drawn from physical mechanics, but they compose no mechanics that Newton would recognize. Here the continuum of cause and effect breaks down; outward forces have unpredictable inward consequences. As Burke presents it, "astonishment" marks the intervention of sharp discontinuities in the spheres of both nature and mind: nature suddenly manifests itself in so overwhelming a fashion that normal relations of subject and object are abolished; at the same time, the mind loses its consistency of operation and becomes a thing of paradox, of self-contradictory extremes.
The "terror" that Los feels at the "sublime Wonder" of Erin's Spaces is probably not any sort of conventional fear, but rather a form of astonishment. Blake displays a surprisingly persistent allegiance to Burkean conceptions and diction, revealed in his willingness to link sublime wonder with terror, and in his attachment to the term astonishment and its variant forms. Terror and astonishment are kindred states, as Burke makes clear in an etymological aside: 'The Romans used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, or of astonishment; the word attonitus, (thunderstruck) is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do not the french étonnement and the english astonishment and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions which attend fear and wonder?" Being struck by lightning is literally a form of astonishment, for etymologically the word means "thunderstruck." Perhaps the prestige of the term "astonishment" in eighteenth-century aesthetics derives ultimately from Longinus, who tells us that "the Sublime, when seasonably addressed, with the rapid force of Lightning has born down all before it, and shewn at one stroke the compacted Might of Genius." The two metaphors that Longinus employs here for the onset of the sublime, the stroke of natural lightning and the blow of intellectual power, imply a hidden and prior third, one that connects the forces of nature to the forces of mind. This mediating figure is of course that of a divine being, like the Jove and Jehovah of myth and scripture, at once the author of both natural thunder and human inspiration. Hence, the word astonishment encompasses two contradictory aspects of the sublime that shall remain with us throughout this study; it immobilizes or releases, destroys or raises up. One is either struck by the divine power and "hurried" on to participate in its glories, or one is struck dead as a stone.
Blake uses the term astonishment more frequently than any other major poet in the period from 1660 to 1830, but always with careful discrimination. Extraordinarily sensitive to the possibilities of wordplay, he is quick to see the "stone" in astonishment, a word that could thus easily encompass the whole program of Urizen, armed with "his ten thousands of thunders" (BU 3.28), to bring about a "solid without fluctuation," "a wide world of solid obstruction" (BU 4.11, 23). Hence to experience astonishment means, in one sense, to turn to stone, to be "filled," as Burke would say, with the inducing power—and filled solid. Thus in Urizen, "Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment, / Petrify the eternal myriads" (BU 18.13–14). Since it is the fate of overweening deities in Blake to be struck by their own thunder, as soon as Urizen manifests himself in all his pride, he is struck down and stunned (from étonnement) into "a stony sleep" (BU 6.7) or, elsewhere, into "a stoned stupor" (FZ 52.20). The moment of astonishment is, then, the moment par excellence when, in Blake's famous formula, one becomes what one beholds. Beholding Urizen's stony sleep, mentioned previously, Los is "smitten with astonishment" (BU 8.1). But whose astonishment is alluded to here? Los's own or that of Urizen, whom he beholds lying stunned? There is no meaningful way of sorting out distinctions of this nature. Astonishment astonishes, and the petrified petrifies. Thus in Jerusalem, seeking the Minute Particulars, Los is again "astonishd he beheld only the petrified surfaces" (J 46.5); two lines earlier, we read that "Los was all astonishment & terror: he trembled sitting on the Stone." Los is now filled with his stony object and is all astonishment; we see all as stone in these regions. From becoming all astonishment it is easy to become a thing that causes astonishment, as in Los's statement, "I now am what I am: a horror and an astonishment" (J 8.18). The abstract noun becomes a stony particular, substituting itself for an individuality now petrified and soon to petrify others.
But as there is a thunder that immobilizes and petrifies, there is also a thunder that cracks open the stones, releasing our buried powers to freedom, a "crack of doom" for a sullen old dispensation. In contrast to the "inarticulate thunder" that Urizen booms at his misshapen children in Vala (FZ 70.39), we have the articulate thunder of that true God who "To Man the wond'rous art of writing gave," and who "speaks in thunder and in fire! / Thunder of Thought, & flames of fierce desire" (J 3.4–6). There is also the awakened Albion, "Loud thundring, with broad flashes of flaming lightning & pillars / Of fire, speaking the Words of Eternity in Human Forms" (J 95.8–9). And there are the Zoas, fraternal at last, who "conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright / Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty" (J 98.28–29). In contrast to the obliterating power of the Urizenic thunder, the power of this thunder resides in its incisive capacity to clarify and reveal. It does not stun with an avalanche of sound, but rather cleaves through darkness and obstruction, employing as its cutting tools those instruments that inscribe the definite lines of Blake's "writing," 'Words", and "Forms."
It follows that the "astonishment" produced by this clarifying thunder encompasses the moment when surfaces and opacities are burst to reveal an infinite potential within. Thus, when Eno in The Four Zoas "took an atom of space & opend its center / Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art / Astonishd sat her Sisters of Beulah to see her soft affections" (FZ 9.12–14). A similar response to visionary revelation appears in Blake's ecstatic report of his first days at Felpham:
In particles bright
The jewels of Light
Distinct shone & clear—
Amazd & in fear
I each particle gazed
Astonishd Amazed
For each was a Man
Human formd.
(Letter to Butts, 2 October 1800, lines 15–22, E 712)
If visions of nature humanized bring astonishment, then so too do the recognition and recovery of unfallen portions of humanity within the self: "Los embracd the Spectre first as a brother / Then as another Self; astonishd humanizing & in tears" (FZ 85.29–30).
Images of barriers broken, of visions glimpsed through sudden openings, of obdurate forms melting down and flowing together, attend this form of astonishment: "Then Los said I behold the Divine Vision thro the broken Gates / Of thy poor broken heart astonishd melted into Compassion & Love" (FZ 99.15–16). Finally, in the single instance in Blake's poetry where astonishment is modified by the adjective sublime, Jerusalem recalls ancient days before Albion's dreadful separation: "I taught the ships of the sea to sing the songs of Zion. / Italy saw me, in sublime astonishment: France was wholly mine" (J 79.38–39). The response of the nations embraces the full paradox of the sublime moment; arrest is freedom here, for to be filled with the object, is, in this case to be filled with a being who is "called Liberty among the Children of Albion" (J 54.5).
Blake's wide-ranging use of the term astonishment provides a good index of his understanding of the problematic dynamics of the eighteenth-century sublime. Not only does astonishment occupy a gap between polarized states of experience, but it also unfolds within itself alternate destinies of the sublime moment. Two possible sublimes quiver in the indeterminacy of the moment of astonishment: one, the sublime of terror and deprivation most closely associated with Burke, and the other, a sublime of desire and plenitude. Blake's imagination is repeatedly drawn to the Burkean sublime, but he appears skeptical that it can serve as a mode of genuine elevation and access to a liberating power. Burke would have us believe that the moment of disequilibrium, suspension of faculties, and immobilization of will arises from the access of an overwhelming external power or magnitude. Blake reads such scenes otherwise: encountering "terrific" objects, his protagonists reel not at a magnitude of power made present, but rather at the magnitude of power lost, at the degree of petrifaction revealed in so-called powers by the time they present themselves as natural "terrors."
Blake seeks a less melancholy sublime, and if as a poet he is to gratify desire and recover plenitude, he must attempt some sort of redemption of astonishment. As his own usage of the term clearly indicates, he has no intention of abandoning the drama, the clash of oppositions, and the suspense inherent in Burke's account. Blake is willing to exploit Burke's evocations of giddiness and irresistible rush since they so easily consort with his own imagery of centers opening up, gates broken down, and forms melting. There is a need, however, to relocate the scene of this drama, away from a point of humiliating encounter between the experiencing mind and some thunderous externality. As Blake's own notions of the sublime become more fully articulated, the encounter is seen to take place between a lesser and a greater faculty of the mind, made manifest through the mediation of the poetic text. Blake not only represents scenes of astonishment in his work, but also seeks to create fresh moments of astonishment in the encounter of poem and reader, offering a petrific text to stony understandings and a field of openings for the receptive. The space of the poem itself becomes the site of sublime wonder.
"The Most Sublime Poetry": Corporeal Limits And Mental Infinities
Blake uses the phrase sublime poetry only once in his writings, but it is on a momentous occasion. In the famous letter to Thomas Butts of 6 July 1803, he defines his idea of "the Most Sublime Poetry," asserts his highest literary aspirations, and announces the completion of "the Grandest Poem that This World Contains." The letter is, by any standard, the locus classicus for any extended consideration of Blake's idea of the sublime. Its central passage is justly familiar:
Thus I hope that all our three years trouble Ends in Good Luck at last & shall be forgot by my affections & only rememberd by my Understanding to be a Memento in time to come & to speak to future generations by a Sublime Allegory which is now perfectly completed into a Grand Poem. I may praise it since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity I consider it as the Grandest Poem that This World Contains. Allegory addressd to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry, it is also somewhat in the same manner defind by Plato. (E 730)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Words of Eternity by Vincent Arthur De Luca. Copyright © 1991 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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