William Blake on His Poetry and Painting: A Study of A Descriptive Catalogue, Other Prose Writings and Jerusalem
Hazard Adams
Language: English
Pages: 199
ISBN: 0786449861
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Blake was not only a poet, but also a prolific commentator on both his own art and art in general. This is the first text to discuss all of the writings except the annotations to Reynolds' Discourses, covered in a previous volume, Blake's Margins (McFarland, 2009). Topics include his opinions on his predecessors and his contemporaries, his reaction to critics, and his artistic intentions. This valuable addition to Blake scholarship includes reproductions of some of the drawings and paintings in Blake's one exhibition of 1809, plus reproductions of other prose texts by Blake.
Painting Indiana III: Heritage of Place
Dreamscapes: Creating Magical Angel, Faery & Mermaid Worlds In Watercolor
Composition: The Anatomy of Picture Making
Get Started Painting: Learn to Paint Step by Step in Watercolor, Acrylic, Oil, and Pastel
Watercolor: Paintings by Contemporary Artists
Watercolor Unleashed: New Directions for Traditional Painting Techniques
Academy and the British Institution. Thus he had little choice but to exhibit them himself. Further, he claimed that people “have been told that [his] Works are but an unscientific and irregular Eccentricity, a Madman’s Scrawls” (E527-8). He demanded that people “do [him] the justice to examine before they decide” (E528). This outburst was almost certainly the result of some of the critical responses to his illustrations to Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, especially that of Robert Hunt in The
in its entirety: Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece & Rome as Babylon & Egypt: so far from being parents of Arts & Sciences as they pretend: were destroyers of all Art. Homer Virgil & Ovid confirm this opinion & make us reverence The Word of God, the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by war. *“Republic,” tr. Benjamin Jowett, Critical Theory Since Plato, 36. 72 Part I Virgil in the Eneid Book VI. Line 848 says Let others study Art: Rome has somewhat better to do, namely War
two serpents, which are respectively in Blake’s reading “good” and “evil.” The line of thought here is that Adam and Satan were created in and as part of a false nature that is the abstract unreality of objectivity. This creation leads to ever more abstractions, signified by good and evil, one implying the necessity of the other, and Laocoön 77 one no better than the other. As history ravels out, caught in these abstractions, good becomes identified with riches and power, and evil with poverty.
The spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the Nations of the Earth” (tempera on canvas, c. 1805 –09). Pitt guiding Behemoth; he is the Angel who, pleased to perform the Almighty’s orders, rides on the whirlwind, directing the storms of war: He is ordering the Reaper to reap the Vine of the Earth, and the Plowman to plow up the Cities and Towers (E530). The depictions of Nelson and Pitt are not of their natural bodies but of what Blake saw their true
to represent imaginative energy. Later, however, he seems to enlarge his concept of contrariety and considers the oppositions soul/body, good/evil, and object/subject to be negations, that is, words standing for situations in which one side dominates at the other’s expense and would annihilate the other if it could. True contraries would be the production of oppositions to those opposites. This kind of contrary would not seek tyrannical victory and domination of its “cloven” opposite, but would