William Blake, the Bible and Western culture

I'm currently reading the poet and critic Kathleen Raine's great work on William Blake and Job. Blake was a poet and painter/engraver from the end of the 18th and early 19th century. Her book is on Blake's illustrations to the Old Testament book The Book of Job. Blake, like most western artists until relatively recently, drew inspiration from the Bible. This was seen as normal, and was sometimes even unconscious, so ingrained was Christianity in the collective mind and spirit, the "DNA" of even the most modest person socially and economically. So it is impossible to understand the West's artistic heritage on the deepest levels (often, even on the most basic levels) without a knowledge and appreciation of biblical text, particularly in the form of the stories, because the Judeo-Christian scriptures embody meaning essentially as story, "mythos". The meaning unfolds largely in narrative form. This is what is meant by "myth", which is not some invention to be opposed to "real historical fact". In any case, the deepest levels of meaning revealed to us when we hear a story are not on the historical level. They disclose themselves to us in the present encounter with the text, our experience of the text, as it were.

The Book of Job is the story of a wealthy and pious man who falls prey to a series of terrible events depriving him of all he had: family, material goods and pĥysical health. It is an archetypal story of Man's suffering, and transcending this suffering, thus prefiguring the Christ story itself. The Bible is made up of patterns of story in this way.

To be ignorant of these narratives (the Creation Myth, the Fall of Man, Noah and the Flood, exodus and exile in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, and the Christ narrative and the narratives within this narrative in the form of Jesus's parables, the list is endless) is to be alienated from one's own culture (and spiritual foundations, if one is open to such a thing as a spiritual nature). This on one level is nothing to do with "belief". We might begin more easily with "meaning". It is more than useful for example to have a Biblical knowledge when reading or watching Shakespeare. This takes its form mainly symbolically, including symbol in movement, as unfolding dramatic narrative. Even in King Lear, a play which takes place in pagan Britain, the blueprint is largely Christian.

Click below to access examples of Blake's illustrations (Job surrounded by his family at the beginning, Job suffering scorn, Job's final blessings), and the extract from Raine's work:  

Chaucer - The Knight's Tale

A while ago I published a brief post on Medieval literature, and have been meaning for a long time to put up texts from this wonderfully creative period. It is about time I did! So here is an example from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  This is regarded as the greatest work of the period, and Chaucer as the father of English poetry. The English language had been growing in status during the Middle Ages, both as a scholarly and literary medium. Since the Norman invasion, French had become the language of the court, and Latin had maintained its position as the medium for the highest levels of thinking and creativity. But the winds were changing in the fifteenth century. The Canterbury Tales contain a series of stories related by individuals from varied strata of society: the Wife of Bath, the Knight, the Miller, the Franklin etc. Each character entertains his or her companions with a tale during the famous pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II on 29th December 1120. As a consequence, he became a martyr and a saint. 

Each tale is wonderfully rich and entertaining, full of action, love stories, philosophical reflections, and sometimes bawdy humour! They are written in the classic iambic pentametre of English verse, more precisely in 'Herioc Verse' (ten syllable rhyming couplets). 

Below is an extract from The Knight's Tale, the point at which the young Theban lover Arcite, banished from Athens, and pining for his belovéd Emyle, decides to pull himself together and out of his hopelessly languishing lover state, dress up as  a pauper and return in disguise to the Greek city. Do not be put off by Middle English. This is not Old English (which would be incomprehensible, and needs to be learned as another language), but the English language gradually blossoming into what we know today. There are lexical difficulties (well explained by the notes from the Norton Edition), and syntactical intricacies which come from a naturally poetic style, and convention, and a more germanic word order: 'Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was...' - nothing too obscure! I have a particular fondness for this tale, because it is the one I studied at school when I was seveneen/eighteen. Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

Aldous Huxley recording: The Ultimate Revolution

 The great twentieth century literary figure and thinker Aldous Huxley should need no introduction. He is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), in which he imagines a society, prophetically when we consider the contemporary world and where it is going, under a form of 'soft' dictatorship, in which suffering has been 'banished' through medication, and types of people are conceived and brought up artificially to fulfull ideologically defined roles. It is a 'comfortable' world, in which individual freedom has been confiscated, and responsibility abdicated. Sound familiar?

In this recording, made in front of an audience on March 20th 1962 at Berkeley Language Center in the United States, he goes back over his dystopian work, comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which he admires greatly. However, he feels that the future forms of dictatorship will not be Orwell's 'terroristic' ones, a vision influenced by the recent context of its composition, world war, Nazism, and Stalinism, but a 'soft' one something in line with his own prediction. This will be enabled by the advances of technology combined with the modern media, biotechnology and pharmacological methods, making people, as he says, 'love their servitude':

 “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

Click on the link below to acces the 44 minute recording. He also considers the future influence of automation, and transhumanism. All in 1960! 

Poet Laureate's verse for HRH the Duke of Edinburgh

 This afternoon the funeral of HRH Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh took place at Windsor in the presence of thirty guests. Our thoughts go out to all the Royal Family, particularly Queen Elizabeth II, his wife for seventy-three years.  As is befitting for such a moment, the country's Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, has composed the following poem:

The Patriarchs – An Elegy

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

Charles Williams on Poetry

 One of my all-time favourite figures in the literary world of the last century is Charles Williams. For some, for very few, he needs no introduction, but he has been obscured by his more famous friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Together, with other extraordinary people, notably Owen Barfield who died relatively recently, they formed a group called The Inklings in Oxford during the nineteen thirties and forties. These men met in each others' homes to discuss literary and philosophical matters, and read out their own work before publication. C.S. Lewis would read from his novels and religious and philosophical writings, Tolkien from the later-to-be-published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. They would also meet up in an Oxford pub 'The Eagle and Child' (a wonderful place I recommend) over a few pints of the best English ale.

As for Charles Williams, the least formally 'educated' of the group, and from the most modest background, he worked for the Oxford University Press (at the time they would place the definite article in front of OUP) as editor, writer and critic. He was a singular and remarkable poet himself, and wrote a series of extraordinary novels, seven in total, which bring the supernatural into the everyday world of England. I would strongly recommend them, they were popular in their day, T.S. Eliot encouraged his writing, and they stand as a monument to a remarkable mind. They are: War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, Descent into Hell, and All Hallow's Eve. 

He wrote plays too, and books of literary criticism (for want of a better term; I prefer 'reflection'), and I recently found a first edition from 1932 which I am thoroughly enjoying. As with most of Williams' prose, it is curious in style, dense and challenging in its insights. This one is called The English Poetic Mind, in which he attempts to define, or at least touch upon, what characterises this phenomenon, looking in particular at Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. I have scanned below a section from the opening, "What makes great poetry', in which he quotes Wordsworth's insights into poetic creation. For the Romantic poet, it needs 1) 'the vital soul' 2) 'general truths' 3) 'external things - Forms, images'. Williams expands upon this, by saying that the great poets 'arouse in us an actual sense of our own faculties' for such things as heroism, love, exile, although these things may be alien to or limited in us. This makes me think of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by the War Poet Wilfred Owen, which we have been looking at in class recently. We could not possibly understand the terrible experience of trench warfare ourselves, but the poem awakens in us a deep sympathy, and at least shades of understanding, however distant, and in some sense we are connected to the young men who suffered and died during this conflict. 

Below you will find the link to the extract from Williams' book:

New poem by John F. Deane

 A while ago I was asked by the Temenos Academy Review to write a review of a collection of poems by the Irish poet John F. Deane, called Achill Island, which I strongly recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Achill-Island-John-F-Deane/dp/1782188991/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2WYKPRIKS377E&dchild=1&keywords=john+f+deane&qid=1615188704&sprefix=john+f+deane%2Caps%2C381&sr=8-2

 It was a wonderful time, because I got to discover this extraordinary poet. He has just released this new poem, which I would like to share on the blog. It finds great resonance with our times, of health crisis, lockdowns, curfews, and restricted freedoms - a time unique in human history, all the more for it being a planetary event. Deane has responded beautifully to the sense of release brought by openness to the natural world, the sense of "emergence" at last. Here it is:

William Blake: In the Beginning (Peter Ackroyd)

Following on from our class discussion today, here are the opening pages to Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, which I mentioned. It answers the question asked today about his social background; modest middle class. His father was a hosier (un bonnetier), and they lived in a London house Ackroyd describes as "solid if not exactly prosperous". I will leave you to savour the writing of this remarkable biographer and novelist; how he can make us relive moments in the past with vivid detail. Note the reference to 'the piping infant' recalling our study of Songs of Innocence and Experience. His account is never purely factual, but imbued with a sense of the times, and the meaning held in the smallest details of life. I also strongly recommend his biography of Charles Dickens.

Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

HS2 Rail link and a 250 year old pear tree

What would Gerard Manley Hopkins feel about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/17/tree-of-the-week-the-beloved-250-year-old-wild-pear-being-cut-down-for-hs2

Hopkins' Binsey Poplars: 'O if we but knew what we do...'

More about trees...Below you can read one of my favourite poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is about the brutal felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey near Oxford.  It was written in 1879, and resonates strongly with us in this time of ecological crisis. 

Hopkins' highly original, even revolutionary, style is in sharp contrast to his retiring life as a Jesuit priest. The striking images and vigorous unconventional rhythms express a love of and feeling for the vitality of nature, and an existential grappling with the questions of life. 

Le Chêne de Flagey (Gustave Courbet)

Following on from yesterday's post on tradition, the symbol and the tree, thank you Cécile for your very interesting comments about the painter Courbet. Here is the painting you mention, Le Chêne de Flagey of 1864 (The Oak at Flagey) that you mentioned. I can't add anything better than your comments below, and the extraordinary painting itself: "Quand je lis ce texte superbe sur le symbolisme de l'arbre, je pense immédiatement au Chêne de Flagey de Gustave Courbet. Un chêne tellement grand qu'il sort du cadre. Sa cime, ses frondaisons, ses racines échappent à l'emprise du cadre qui pourtant le magnifie. Et ce chêne, c'est Courbet lui-même, fort, résistant, déterminé, enraciné dans sa terre du Jura, et s'épanouissant à Paris."

Click below for the painting:

Tradition - The symbol of the Tree

In class we often, necessarily, talk of tradition. The knee-jerk reaction might be rejection of tradition because, throughout history, those embodying forms of tradition have often abused positions of power in its name. But we are talking about something quite different here. It is not dusty and fuddy-duddy, blocking the way for us to the newness and freshness we all long for. Quite the opposite.

There are archetypal patterns, symbols, some of them shared by the whole of humanity. We are born into a world which is Nature itself, our own bodies firstly; and Nature, the rain, storms, cloudy skies, birdsong, sunrise, are among our very first impressions, and accompany us all throughout our lives, in joyful and harder times. They speak to us deeply, on deeper levels than we can really, fully articulate, and the artists naturally turn to this primordial language. So we might define tradition as the universal 'language' which speaks to us because it conforms to or reflects our unchanging inner natures as human beings. 

This language can take the form of story, legend, myth, such as the myths of Creation, the Fall of Man, Divine vengeance, the Flood, the great Quest of the Holy Grail, or the journeys across the seas, tales of exile and return to the kingdom. These narratives underpin many if not most of our great stories and dramas, because they are the eternal blueprint of what our lives actually are, unfolding in time as narrative, and encountering the storms and clear skies of all voyages. We all begin at home, leave, and in some way return. These stages, or phases, might be related to location, or not. Whatever they are, we all experience them as feeling, impression, sensation, intuition.

I don't think any great artists can be disconnected from tradition. They may react against it, as was the case of the Modernists, but that was in the knowledge of what they were reacting against.

Below is an extract from Northrop Frye's The Great Code, a brilliant study of biblical language, image and story, in relation to other traditions. This part concerns the networks of meaning related to the tree. They include of course the cross, as demonic image and image of salvation, Adam, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack.

What could be more primordial than the tree, symbolically, and literally? It gives shade to man and animal, it is a habitat for millions of creatures, its roots burrow deep into the earth as we need roots, it stands vertically as we stand, 'dressé vers le Ciel', as Rémi Brague describes mankind's unique stance on the Earth in his remarkable study of our place in the Cosmos: https://www.amazon.fr/Sagesse-monde-Histoire-lexp%C3%A9rience-lunivers/dp/2253943223/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_fr_FR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=remi+brague&qid=1603101585&sr=8-7

and its branches recall our hair, or can be the mirror image of the roots in the Earth but crisscrossing the sky.

Click on the link below to access the Frye document in pdf form:

Kathleen Raine: The Use of the Beautiful

In these challenging times, perhaps the most challenging nationally and globally since the last world war, it is important we turn to the great values of our cultures, and look for unity in all things. For millenia, Beauty has been central to philosophy and artistic creation, and in this essay, from her remarkable collection Defending Ancient Springs, the poetess Kathleen Raine affirms these eternal principles. 

This blog is a space for open enquiry and debate, so when you read the essay, add your comments in the comments section of the site, your thoughts, questions, anything that comes to mind. Do not hesitate. Say something, because these thoughts cannot leave us indifferent!

Click on the link below to download the essay in pdf format. 

For Hypokhâgne 811 - Extract from Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

For those absent from class yesterday, here is the extract from Melville's Moby-Dick. For Friday 6th November you need to come to class with questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 prepared in note form for oral presentation. Have a good break!

Click on the link below to download and print out the document:

Two translations (versions) for Hypokhâgne 811

 For those absent from class yesterday, here are the two short texts to translate. You need to prepare the first one, for presentation in class on Friday 13th November. Have a good holiday, keep well!

Click on the link below to access and print out the pdf document:

Middle English literature

Since the Norman invasion of 1066, Anglo-Saxon had been displaced as the language of the court and the ruling classes of England, and was mainly spoken by the peasant classes. The English kings and queens spoke French for going on three hundred years. And very few high-ranking members of society spoke English. But a big shift was underway in the 14th century and English was back with a vengeance, in new and exciting ways! Freed from imposed rules and customs, it had taken on a life of its own, evolving 'underground' at its own pace and integrating elements from French especially. This vastly increased its scope, its vocabulary and idiom, and it was rapidly regaining respectability among the learned and the elites of the country. The tendancy was encouraged by the highly nationalistic outlook of the king, Edward III (1312-1377), who spoke English, and expressed pride in the language. When Henry IV claimed the throne in 1399, he did so in front of Parliament, in English. Nothing could stop it now.

Ted Hughes: The Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-war British poets. He came from Yorkshire, and wrote mainly nature poetry, expressing the ruggedness and an often dark side to the animal world. He is also known for having been the husband of American poetess Sylvia Plath, until she took her life in 1963. Late on in life, and many years after his marriage to Plath, Hughes wrote a powerful set of poems addressed to her, published in 1998, and called Birthday Letters. This verse stands out starkly from his other work, and is deeply intimate and personal, expressing his love and pain, as he tries to come to terms with this difficult period of his life.

By following the link below, you will find the deeply symbolic poem, 'Sam', about an incident during which Sylvia Plath loses control of her horse:

"A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf - broadcast on BBC Radio 4

The HK class have been writing a commentary on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This morning while listening to BBC Radio 4 over breakfast, I heard they are going to be broadcasting a dramatisation of her major work, A Room of One's Own. Interestingly, it was recorded during lockdown with actors and production team all in rooms of their own. It should be very good.

Virginia Woolf's funny, provoking and insightful feminist text on female creativity dramatised for radio by Linda Marshall Griffiths.

Part of Electric Decade: classic titles that influenced and characterised the 1920's.

It is 1928, a woman is asked to talk of women and writing. In the university town of 'Oxbridge' she is refused entry to the gardens and library and discovers the poverty of the one female college there. She searches the British Museum library for proof that women even existed in history.

You will find the link below to click on and listen. It will be available shortly after broadcast tomorrow 31st May:

'Passage to Modernity' - evolution of the self, of language, and literary forms

In previous posts I have published thoughts on artistic creation from philosophers and poets. What interests me in particular is the evolution in our sense of selfhood over the centuries; because how we conceive of ourselves today is radically different from how our ancestors did, in the Classical world, in the Medieval Age, the Renaissance and the Early Modern period. It can be enriching to think of these things, because they allow us to see our own confused and difficult times perhaps at one remove, putting them in healthy perspective.

It is difficult to introduce such thinking without making inaccurate generalisations. Yet we could say that in ancient societies there existed a sense of the self not just in relation to itself, or the collective, but the cosmic; that the individual was not seen as a discete, atomistic entity with its private desires and concerns in isolation, but as a part of a cosmic whole, with its God or pantheon of gods, its mythologies, its cosmologies, cosmogonies, astronomy and astrology, and its ancestors. When we read poetry, epic or shorter poems, watch plays or read novels, rarely do we see these phenomena as quite unique and special, and lying within a long evolution of the human story. Shakespeare seen in this way is revolutionary, Hamlet, hugely modern, the novel, a recent invention inconceivable until relatively recent times. The question is, Why?

The modern period is characterised by the increased significance given to the individual, while the cosmic sense has withdrawn entirely, to leave mankind thrown back upon himself, with quite different existential and artistic questions from before. 

The extract below, from Louis Dupré's excellent work Passage to Modernity (1993, Yale University), traces, from this wide perspective, the ways in which our sense of self and the world have changed, and thereby changed the very literary forms we now take for granted. 

Dupré also, necessarily, considers how our conception of language itself has changed fundamentally with this shift towards the discrete individual.

Dupré's is dense thinking, but wonderful to grasp. I think that giving it time and staying carefully with it can reap very great rewards!

Click on the link below to download the pdf document:

'O sweet spontaneous...': e e cummings (HK)

e e cummings was a leading figure in the American Modernist movement. Like the manner of writing  his name, his poems are idiosyncratic; lower-case letters and an absence of punctuation. He nevertheless, like most Modernists, remains traditional on many levels along with being avant-garde; his themes of love, use of the sonnet form, and a shared affinity with the Romantics. 

You will find one of his most famous poems, 'O sweet spontaneous...' by clicking on the link below. We will be looking at this in class.

Poetry by Vernon Watkins - for HK and anyone who loves a good poet!

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was a Welsh poet, translator and painter. During his lifetime he was highly regarded, though never at the height of fashion. He has since been rather neglected, unlike his friend and fellow Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Watkins took poetry very seriously, from his ealiest years: "I was already writing poems when I was seven or eight, and between that age and twelve bought the English poets one by one". These early years were marked by great ambition and determination to become recognised, but he came to care little, if not at all, for fame or recognition, only for the vision and craftsmanship needed in all good poetry. This is grounded, in Watkins' verse, in an uncompromising modernity, at the same time as drawing on tradition. As he said: "The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh".

Here is a sonnet he wrote about poetry itself, from Fidelities (1967):

The prose purveyors of doubt, the dismantlers of

Ecstasy, who traffic without a god

In broken metre, would have their Pegasus shod

Wth discord, not strict numbers. At love they scoff,

And then, in the revolution of anti-love,

Unsheathe chaos, the death of the period,

While a new Sibyl, shrieking above her tripod,

Proclaims transformation, treachery, trough.

Yet even the disenchanted, disordered, fret

For lost order. Breakers recall rhyme,

Anchors weighed, and divine proportions set.

As hawk hovers, as compass needle in time

Flies unswerving, steadied, where the stars climb,

Fixed laws hallow what none can forget.