Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creative Motif in Blake and Coleridge by Warren Stevenson, and: William Blake: The Critical Heritage ed. by G.E. Bentley, Jr (review)

HUMANITIES 397 Julius Caesar was stabbed by Brutus; at the foot of that statue he fell ...' Spence perceived 'the mutual light' given to one another by descriptive poetry and the plastic arts; his perception, and much careful research, bore fruit in Polymetis (1747). Throughout his five-and-a-halfyears abroad Spence wrote faithfully to his widowed mother at home in Winchester, and these letters, of which 142 survive, make up four-fifths of Professor Klima's collection. They are not without charm, as when Spence imagines the old lady turning traveller, but they are sometimes a little embarrassing in their filial intimacy (which Spence largely censored when he later went over the letters with intent to publish). As literature they fall well short of the best eighteenth-century correspondence, partly because the writer, while justly claiming'a knack of enlarging stories a little,' does lack real dramatic sense, and partly because the author ofPolymetis can hardly explain to Mirabella Spence the intellectual excitement of Europe, as he can to Henry Rolle or in his Notebooks, from which Professor Klima prints a generous selection. Yet when the Notebook doubts at Virgil's tomb, the correspondent, who kisses the ground twice and gathers laurels, may be closer to the heart of the age. As to the text of the edition: notwithstanding the precedents for 'normalization,' one may wonder whether the reader from whom Professor Klima expects fluent Latin, Italian, French, and German would be unduly distressed by eighteenth-century capitals and points. That is, however, the only possible objection to the presentation; for the generous and lucid commentary is immensely impressive in its range and detail and the physical layout of the book is excellent. (A.H. DE QUEHEN) Warren Stevenson, Divine Analogy: A Study of the Creative Motif in Blake and Coleridge. Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Romantic Reassessment. Salzburg : Institut fUr Englische Sprache und Literatur 1972, vii, 403; G.E. Bentley, }r, editor, William Blake: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1975, xix, 294, 20 plates, $25.45 'Scholarship and twaddle about Blake have multiplied ... in the post-war years' (p 20) Professor Bentley declares in his lively Introduction, and on the'exceedingly problematic theme, the influence on Blake of Plato and the neo-Platonists via his contemporary, Thomas Taylor,' he returns 'a Scottish verdict of Not Proven' (p 22). The verdict will not satisfy Warren Stevenson, for whom 'the creation motif' provides 'mythic and philosophic accounts of the creation of the world, and attempts to explain the phenomenon of human creativity' (p 1). In his 'synoptic surveys of some of the more important literary and philosophic developments which constitute the cultural background of Blake and Coleridge' (p 2), 398 LETTERS IN CANADA the connections Bentley finds unproven become part of that 'cultural background' and are made without hesitation. Stevenson's study, however, is unsatisfactory, not simply because it ducks this particular issue but for other reasons. The title itself misleads, since Coleridge is given short shrift, while the book's organization is ponderous and repetitive. Stevenson's 'synoptic surveys' of Part I - the Book of Genesis, Plato's Timaeus, Christianity and neo-Platonism, the Hexaemeral tradition from Plato to the Renaissance, Paracelsus, Milton, and Boehme, all in the first fifty passages - are largely repeated in Part II, where Plato, Plotinus, Renaissance poetics, the opposing New Philosophy of Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, and Locke, the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury, Dennis, among others, are seen contributing to a 'poetics of Los' (p 3). The surveys are brief and unsatisfying, as are Stevenson's plot summaries of the Prophetic Books. Sometimes he relies upon guesswork ('If Blake were alive today he would probably regard Asiatic communism and nationalism as a partial but imperfect fulfillment' of his prophecy in 'Asia,' Song of Los (p 84)); risks facetiousness to achieve liveliness (Hobbes is 'that bull in the china-shop of seventeenth-century metaphysics' (p 204)); and draws some curious conclusions ('It is true that Urizen means well' (p 93)). He supplies interesting incidental details - Blake's pulsation of the artery juxtaposed to a reform proposed by the Convention in the French Revolution; further information on the etymology of Orc - but the worth of his...