The Sublime of the Bible

The reason why Blake removed the preface to Milton, which includes his most famous lyric, commonly known as "Jerusalem," is unclear. But beyond whatever reservations Blake may have had about the "Preface" after he'd finished and sold the first two copes of Milton, it offers a useful insight into the Blakean sublime. Milton is the work where Blake presents the experience of the infinite within the finite through its embedded concentric narratives which reveal the apparently linear proceedings—as one's experience of a poem must proceed, page-by-page in time—as a single visionary instant for Blake as narrator of the poem in his Felpham garden. For Blake this experience is the instantaneous apprehension of the Divine Vision as a presence generated by the imagination by means of a textual model of aesthetic experience. With the Divine Vision as the realization of this aesthetic experience, Blake's reading of the Bible becomes a critical component in identifying his construction of sublimity. My specific concern here is to determine what Blake means by the phrase "the Sublime of the Bible" in Milton . The polemical preface begins by making the claim that "The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato & Cicero. which all Men ought to contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible". As a writer in the early nineteenth century Blake's view the Bible as an exemplar of the sublime is hardly unusual. However, as Vincent De Luca observes, it is unusual that Blake's idea of a literary tradition of sublimity excludes the "mighty poetic names both classical and modern, including Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton". Blake scholars have tried to account for this unusual view of the sublime in terms of potential sources from which he might have drawn to formulate his idea. The most persuasive argument about potential influences on Blake's concept of sublimity is advanced by Morton Paley and further developed by De Luca concerning Robert Lowth's Lectures on The Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. Lowth's Lectures were published by Blake's sometimes friend and employer Joseph Johnson in 1787; thus, it is possible that Blake was aware of Lowth's work. Lowth argues that Hebrew poetry produces the sublime feeling by means of its use of parallel syntax and a highly formal organization in the structuring of its lines. While there are numerous instances of this kind of arrangement in Blake's major prophecies, there is no concrete evidence that he actually read or took any significant interest in Lowth's work. A second possible source for Blake's idea of biblical sublimity is offered by Joseph Wittreich, Jr. He suggests that the Renaissance tradition of reading the Book of Revelations as a "picture prophecy" may have influenced Blake's reading of the Bible. Wittreich's suggestion is plausible in view of the great love Blake had for Renaissance prints, but again there is no concrete connection to indicate that this tradition of biblical interpretation did influence Blake. Finally, De Luca speculates that Blake may have been influenced in his thinking about biblical sublimity by Cabbalistic doctrines of "the creative power inherent in the Hebrew letters of...the unutterable Tetragrammaton". As is the case in Jerusalem plate 25, Blake does employ visual imagery that could be construed as depicting Cabbalistic concepts. While all of these sources do provide possible avenues for understanding Blake's idea of biblical sublimity, there is no evidence of any one of these sources having a significant or direct influence on Blake. What Blake means by the Sublime of the Bible is sufficiently outlined within his own work. Blake's sense of the Sublime of …