William Blake’s Poetry A Reader’s Guide (review)

The strengths of Jonathan Roberts’s William Blake’s Poetry largely depend upon the uses to which it is put. The volume is Roberts’s contribution to Continuum’s Reader’s Guides Series, which Continuum promotes as “clear, concise and accessible introductions . . . ideal for undergraduate students.” With this goal in mind Roberts’s book is an almost ideal introductory guide for undergraduate students first coming to Blake: clearly and concisely written, short and accessible, inexpensive in its paperback issue, and effective in orienting newcomers to Blake’s work to pertinent background knowledge as well as different critical approaches to Blake. Roberts also provides one or two study questions at the end of every chapter. However, Blake scholars seeking original, groundbreaking, or even challenging readings of Blake will be disappointed in what appears to be his simple overview of historical and interpretive issues relevant to the interpretation of Blake.

Roberts accomplishes his task in five short chapters. The first, “Contexts,” provides historical and biographical background to Blake’s poetry, placing him in relationship to English Romanticism, religion, the British state, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Millenarianism. Those following Blake criticism will find what they expect from this list—coverage of Blake scholarship from David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954) to Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) and Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003). Roberts maintains his focus on Blake’s work within these otherwise generic discussions, emphasizing Blake’s individual engagement with these currents in late eighteenth-century London in sections about Blake’s early life and education, his “early encounters with state violence” (6), his marriage and business life, and his trial for sedition and time at Felpham. He concludes this chapter with a description of the last twenty or so years of Blake’s life in London, drawing largely from G.E. Bentley The Stranger from Paradise (2001) for details about Blake’s life. Keep in mind that Roberts covers all this ground in twenty-one pages, devoting about a page to a page and a half to each of these topics, a pattern consistent with every chapter in his book.

Chapter two, “Language, Style and Form,” shifts from historical to literary contextualizations of Blake’s work, setting Blake’s work in relationship to chapbooks and pamphlets, John Milton, pastoral poetry, the sublime, gothic, and classicism and its relationship to social order. In this chapter Roberts relies less directly upon widely recognized Blake criticism, providing instead his own associations of figures such as More, Wollstonecraft, and Watts with Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and suggesting Paine’s Common Sense as context for There is No Natural Religion, All Religions are One, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Roberts uses Pope, Dryden, and Ruskin as his examples of classicism, but when discussing classicism in relationship to the social order he unexpectedly draws from Blake’s amusing and biting parody of Thornton’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer, rather than, say, a more difficult explication of the Urizen myth, which he addresses in chapter three. Blake’s critique of Thornton proves to be an effective and direct route to Roberts’s goal of situating Blake in relationship to classicism in Romantic era Britain.

Roberts presents his own explication of Blake’s myth in chapter three, “Reading Blake,” his longest chapter at thirty-five pages. He divides his subject into four sections: “Contraries,” “The Role of Narrative,” “Jesus,” and “Blake’s Fourfold Myth.” He makes no reference in this chapter to any scholarship, but while there is little in Roberts’s presentation that Northrop Frye would disagree with, I do get the impression this is Roberts’s own reading of Blake. At times he seems to soften Blake’s own radicalism. For example, in his reading of Blake’s claim that Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it,” Roberts asserts that “Blake is being playful here...