Blake’s Letters and Global Exchange

Much of my interest in William Blake’s prophetic works over the years has been in his use of sententia and proverbs as a signature poetic device. This interest originally resulted in the book, The Wisdom of Many, the Vision of One (1994), which examined Blake’s use of proverbs throughout the written text of his prophetic works. More recently, it has manifested itself in a second book, nearing completion, focused on Blake’s sustained use of proverbs involving the visual elements of his entire corpus, of which this essay is a part. Entitled Blake’s Visual Wisdom, the new book examines the visionary poet/painter’s sustained interest in wisdom, the proverb, and the performative in every aspect of his synaesthetic works, exploring how in many ways it is the very notion of the performative in Blake that specifically connects the visual and the verbal, in word made flesh fashion. Both these sets of studies, the completed one, and this current one, have shown a number of things: All Blake’s prophetic works manifest this radical connection, prototypically and significantly accompanied by proverbs, right up through Jerusalem. And not just the illuminated books, but Blake’s other writing and images as well, including (as I discuss elsewhere in Blake’s Visual Wisdom) his Illustrations of the Book of Job, his Laocoon design, his ADescriptive Catalogue, right up to his Illustrations to Dante, which he died while working on. But what about Blake’s personal letters? Though not crafted, drawn, or engraved with the same artistic intentions as his other creative output, can they nevertheless still be subjected to the types of scrutiny that I have been engaging in, examining them for a use of proverbs, sententia, and performatives, with visual manifestations? And if so, what might they additionally reveal about Blake’s preoccupation with visual wisdom? Further, given Blake’s constant rebellion against formal constraints, what might they reveal about Blake’s creative treatment of the genre of the personal business letter itself? And might they be used as a test case of my arguments about Blake’s proverb use in his other work? Thus, do Blake’s letters have characteristics similar to techniques employed in his illuminated works? And if so, to what end, as further manifestations of his art, or perhaps simply as habit of mind, and style, a communication method in general—even when outside the realm of his more polished, and more public art? Or, if not there, does this reveal, perhaps, that Blake preserved these techniques more intentionally as part of his conception of public art? Blake’s letters, and letters in general, are obviously an important aspect of eighteenth-century exchange, economic and otherwise. We all know how central personal letters are to many of the stories of the eighteenth century, real and fictional, which move from personal to public, across a number of fault lines of the period. And we know that Blake used his letters both to discuss his art and to do business. And yet we know that Blake was an early critic of markets and exchange and the consequences of incipient capitalism. And Blakeans also know, as Hazard Adams has long argued, that at the heart of Blake’s poetics is what can be called his synecdochic method (or to use one of the poet’s own terms, Blake’s Doctrine of Contraries, a modification to Swedenborg’s Doctrine of Correspondences), where everything can and is demonstrated to be connected to everything else, part for the whole, in the manner that we associate with Blake’s name as an adjective. What we mean by Blakean is necessarily an identification of his radically synecdochic poetics. …