Enlightenment Mythology and the Politics of Romanticism: Blake's Archetypal Myth Revisited

david fallon's monograph, Blake, Myth, and Enlightenment: The Politics of Apotheosis, is the latest addition to the study of the Enlightenment legacy in eighteenth-century and Romanticism studies. Scholars across the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political theory are now keener than ever to question the rigid boundaries between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, studying the impact of such Enlightenment philosophers as Locke, Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau on the major figures of the Romantic period, especially Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake. What sets Blake apart from others, however, is his great investment in religion and myth. Recent publications have linked Blake's mythological poems to the revolutionary politics of the 1790s, while others have linked Blake's mythic poems and the Enlightenment history of religion, such as that in Hume's Natural History of Religion. Fallon's monograph addresses the question of the legacy of Enlightenment political philosophy in Romanticism by revisiting Blake's archetypal myth.

Blake's myth-making is of central importance to our understanding of the Romantic reaction to the Age of Reason. Blake figures prominently in landmark studies of Romanticism—Natural Supernaturalism, The Visionary Company, and Fearful Symmetry, to name just a few.¹ Northrop Frye put forward the thesis about the opposition between Blake and Enlightenment rationalism most succinctly: "One of the most obvious features of the reaction to the Age of Reason was the development of a poetry concerned with what we have called Blake's archetypal myth; that is, with the man in the religious perspective, surrounded by the huge conceptions of fall, redemption, judgment and immortality."² The thesis that Enlightenment rationalism conflicts with Blake's archetypal myth and Romantic conceptions of nature, genius, and imagination more generally is not groundless. Blake is well known for his in tolerance of the skeptical ideas of Enlightenment philosophers. "They mock inspiration & Vision," Blake remarks in his annotations to Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, "Inspiration & Vision was then & now is & I hope will always Remain my Element my Eternal Dwelling place. how can I then hear it Contemned without returning Scorn for Scorn."³

The revival of the Enlightenment legacy in studies of Romanticism in recent years, however, has enabled critics such as Matthew Green, Steve Clark, Andrew Lincoln, and Jon Mee to look afresh at Blake's place in the thesis about the Romantic reaction to the Age of Reason, asking what is concealed by his "excessive animosity towards, and repeated attacks on, the forefathers of the … Enlightenment?"⁴ After all, when one looks beyond Blake's antipathy to Enlightenment rationalism, one finds many surprising similarities between Blake and Enlightenment philosophers.⁵ This critical shift has also enabled scholars to revise the thesis about the great conflict between Enlightenment rationalism and Blake's archetypal myth. Mee has illustrated the ways in which the seemingly "contradictory currents of rationalism and enthusiasm are assimilated in Blake's works," for example, while Lincoln has traced the sources of Blake's mythical narrative of the spiritual world in The Four Zoas to the Enlightenment histories of natural religion by Hume and Voltaire.⁶

This revival of the Enlightenment legacy in Romanticism studies coincides with a broader reconstruction of the Enlightenment inheritance in eighteenth-century studies, both of them theoretically indebted to New Historicism. This approach challenges monolithic accounts of Enlightenment thought, such as that of Peter Gay.⁷ As Dorinda Outram puts it succinctly, the movement is best characterized by what Kant describes in his 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?" as "a series of interlocking, and sometimes warring problems and debates."⁸ S. J. Barnett and Dan Edelstein have respectively coined terms—"the myths of modernity" and "the Super-Enlightenment"—to refer to the diversity of Enlightenment inheritances, which demand critical attention.⁹ In much the same way, New Historicist scholars of Romanticism such as Green have asserted that we can no longer "assume that Blake's inheritance was homogeneous."¹⁰

Only a few New Historicists have noted...