Blake and the Two Sublimes

B la k e a n d th e T w o S u b lim e s V . A . D E L U C A ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA When one contemplates the many versions of the sublime prevalent in eighteenth-century theory, to speak, as I propose to do, of two sublimes— indeed of TSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA t h e two sublimes —may prove to be something of an embarrass­ ment. Blake himself frequently uses the word "sublime" in contexts that fail to endow it with very much specificity of meaning.1 But in his annota­ tions to Reynolds' D is co u r s e s , Blake is more definitive: "Everything in Art," he says, "is Definite and Determinate, . . . because Vision is Deter­ minate and Perfect" (E 635); "Without Minute Neatness of Execution. The Sublime cannot Exist! Grandeur of Ideas is founded on Precision of Ideas" (E 636); "All sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination" (E 632); and more bluntly, "Obscurity is Neither the Source of the Sublime nor of any Thing Else" (E 647). These remarks use Reynolds as an occasion for an at­ tack directed specifically against Burke —the Burke who found in obscu­ rity an essential source of the sublime and for whom a "clear idea" was but "another name for a little idea."2 Burke is in some ways the baleful shadow behind Reynolds' own aberrations.3 Here then we have two notions of the sublime in confrontation —a cloudy sublime of Burke, founding grandeur on obscurity, and a determi­ nate sublime of Blake, founding grandeur on minute precision. The re­ marks that follow are speculative and by the necessity of the occasion chiefly an outline of this complex issue. I want to examine these two no­ tions of the sublime in ways that are relevant to Blake's sensibility and de­ velopment as a poet; for the debate with Burke is, I think, also an internal debate within Blake's own poetry, a debate of contrasting though related styles, eventually shaping together the distinctive form of his late pro­ phetic art. 93 94 / DELUCAZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA There is of course not much point in talking about differing versions of the sublime unless these versions share at least some common ground. In his challenging book TSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA T h e R o m a n t ic S u b lim e , the late Thomas Weiskel ar­ gued that Blake uses the term simply as a general honorific, that he is in­ different, even hostile, to the underlying concepts of the whole tradition of the sublime that develops through Burke—from the physiological cru­ dities of Burkes E n q u ir y itself to the later philosophical and poetical re­ finements of Kant and Wordsworth.4 But the Blake who writes in 1803 to his patron Butts of completing a “Sublime Allegory" is not one who mis­ understands or repudiates the mental dynamics of the sublime experience, as the main line of eighteenth-century and Romantic enquiry analyzed it. "Allegory address'd to the Intellectual powers," he tells Butts, "while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry."5 Here a text rather than an external object oc­ casions the experience of sublimity, but the notion that the sublime object divides mental faculties into powers higher and lower, that what thwarts and baffles the lower power, or the understanding based on the senses, freely discloses itself to the higher power of intellect —these notions would be familiar to Burke or Kant, who substitute other terms for the powers but preserve the relations between them.6 In the familiar tripartite unfolding of the sublime moment, implicit in Burke, developed by Kant, and recently elaborated again by Weiskel, the perceiver encounters the awesome object, recoils from and is reduced by it, and finally rebounds with it to participate in its own power.7 The affec­ tive states that compose Burke's doleful catalogue of sublime stimuli — obscurity, terror, privation, pain, difficulty, suddenness, apparent infin­ ity, and so forth —all represent the middle term in the process, the point where, as Burke says of our contemplation of the power of the Deity, "we shrink into...