The Devil as Muse: Blake, Byron, and the Adversary

2 The Devil and the Poet

21 s The Devil anD The PoeT 2 The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake’s comment on Paradise Lost has the sharpness and smartness of epigram. Its quick assertiveness may mislead us into supposing too easily that we have grasped the whole subtlety of Blake’s idea. Clearly, he is making a specific claim about Milton, framed in a way that suits his own purposes, which needs to be understood in the light of his own writing and his own complex and creative response to Milton’s Satan—or, if he is right, Satan’s Milton. But that claim can only be fully understood in relation to the implied larger proposition with which it is linked: the true poet is of the Devil’s party. How are we to understand the general significance of this—the idea of a necessary relation between the Devil and the poet? At one level, Blake is suggesting that Milton wrote well about Satan because he was himself a rebel, fundamentally in sympathy with libertarian, anti-authoritarian values which a certain kind of reader— conventionally pious, moralistic, politically reactionary—would think of as wicked. Come the revolution—or the Last Judgment, or a moment of clear prophetic vision—these libertarian values and attitudes will be 22 The Devil as Muse s revealed in their true radiance; until then, they must appear to the orthodox as devilish, as satanic. At this level, when Blake speaks of the Devil he is being provocative or ironic, and transparently speaking in code: it is only the repressed or reactionary consciousness that will find these values threatening or evil. The true poet is on the side of the angels, when rightly understood. But although that is part of what Blake means, and perhaps all of what he sometimes means, his proposition cannot be altogether rewritten in those ultimately reassuring terms. It also speaks of some more elemental affinity between the power of poetry—of art more generally—and energies that are irredeemably transgressive and forbidden , energies that know no moral law: the powers of darkness. These energies stand in relation to the conscious rational self rather as, according to some traditions of Christian thought, the Tempter stands in relation to the individual soul: both intimate and other, insinuating and desirable, but dangerous. The notion that such energies are closely linked with poetic creativity is, in one way, as old as Plato, who suggests in the Ion that the poet speaks not from knowledge but out of a state of daemonic possession; but it acquired a special currency at the time of Romanticism. It is epitomized in the figure of Byron, whose thrillingly wicked reputation was felt to be intertwined with his genius, as if his powers had been acquired by some Faustian pact that exiled him from the human convention. Or, a little more ambiguously, there is the poet at the end of “Kubla Khan,” the poet that Coleridge dares to imagine himself almost becoming, who would sing from “such a deep delight” that all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread: For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.1 These powers would come into being if the poet could revive within himself the music he once heard in a vision: “To such a deep delight ’twould win me.” The phrasing hints at a temptation, a transgression. Can such deep delight be lawful? Can it be good to have drunk the s The Devil and the Poet 23 milk of paradise? “Beware! Beware!” The crowd is filled with “holy dread”; they dare not meet the poet’s eyes; yet still they circle round, fascinated despite themselves, drawn by an irresistible power of attraction . The idea of the artist in liaison with forbidden powers is, in fact, immediately attractive, like all stories that bring the Devil into human affairs; and in that fact, that immediacy of appeal to something in our nature, there already lies a kind of vindication of Blake’s idea. Oppositions If we take Blake’s suggestion seriously, as something more than a mischievous provocation...