Review by Choice Review
Damrosch (Harvard) offers an extremely accessible and detailed summary of the life and work of William Blake. Thoroughly illustrated with nearly 100 images, 40 in full color, the volume combines biographical detail with an illuminating reading of Blake's work. Damrosch does not shy away from engaging with the complexities of Blake's composite art experiments, intricate symbolism, and esoteric mythology, but neither does he mythologize the poet. The author offers fresh, provocative interpretations of some of Blake's works and of his relationship to politics, religion, women, and science in a comprehensive, albeit in places exhausting, attempt to explore and explain Blake's difficulties. By the end of the volume, one has come to know Blake, his history, his time, his creative depth, and his endurance. The author's method is to involve readers with Blake's complexities but to do so with patience. Like a good film trailer, this book generates a desire to learn more. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Jon A. Saklofske, Acadia University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
WILLIAM BLAKE is for many people the author of a few famous poems and some often cited bits of provocative advice: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"; "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires." It's worth recalling, as Leo Damrosch does in his lucid and absorbing new book, "Eternity's Sunrise," that Blake grouped much of this advice under the heading "Proverbs of Hell." That's how they talk there. Similarly, it's worth recalling that the famous poems, dazzling in their genuine simplicity of tone and diction, allow all kinds of complicated thoughts to hover around them. When a chimney sweep tells us that a dream of another life and a kindly God allow the boys to get back to work in good spirits - "So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm" - we have to wonder whether this uplifting disciplinary moral is the end of the story. And when, in a related work, Blake describes the singing of thousands of children from charity schools gathered in St. Paul's Cathedral to give thanks to their benefactors as "like a mighty wind" and "like harmonious thunderings," the noise is perhaps a little too threatening. The critic and biographer Geoffrey Keynes said, "The poem sounds sentimental, but more probably it was ironic." More probably still, perhaps, it was both, but then we have to think about the dosages. As Damrosch astutely remarks about the chimney sweep poem, "the consolation that the boys feel is very real, and their lives would be even more miserable if it were taken away from them." Blake was born in 1757 and published his "Songs of Innocence" in 1789 and the combined "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" in 1794. His later "prophetic books," patiently engraved and colored, appeared in minimal editions, each print slightly different from the other: Only four copies of "Milton" were published in his lifetime and only five of "Jerusalem." He died in 1827, and one of his best epitaphs, though not intended as such, came from his wife and co-worker, Catherine. "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company," she said late in their life together; "he is always in Paradise." The comment is usually taken as a mark of humble admiration, but as Damrosch exclaims, "surely it is ironic!" Among the things Catherine Blake is not explicitly saying must be "It isn't easy to be married to a man who is always somewhere else" and "Think of all the other, worse places where husbands spend their time." Damrosch is the author of a highly regarded biography of Swift, and earlier works on Rousseau and Tocqueville. There is an attractive hint of a secret passion in his telling us that "after half a century of living with Blake," he remains "in awe of the depth and range" of the poet's genius. This awe is accompanied by an unusual sense of ease and intimacy with Blake's work. "Eternity's Sunrise" has a biographical shape, but as Damrosch says, "it is not a systematic biography." It describes Blake's early life, maps out his London and the intellectual and artistic culture of his time, tells us about his marriage, his friendships, his death. But the heart of the book is in its evocation of the complexities of the early poems, and the "kaleidoscopic dreams" of the vast later works, where Blake sought to display the secret history of creation and of humanity's submission to an alien, authoritarian God. The result was that some of his distinguished Romantic contemporaries thought he was mad, but then Blake himself sometimes regarded madness as a form of necessary dissent. In what Damrosch calls some of Blake's "most eloquent lines," the poet wrote: Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field; Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air; Let the enchanted soul shut up in darkness and in sighing, Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years, Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. Blake's name for this liberated condition, when he imagined it as a place, was Jerusalem, and his well-known lyric, set to music by Hubert Parry and sung in England now on every conceivable occasion, is much less consoling than it looks. The implied but unmistakable answer to the poem's questions about Christ ("And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England's mountains green:/ ... And did the Countenance Divine/Shine forth upon our clouded hills?") is "only in legend," and the more than implied answer to its question about the liberated world itself ("And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills?") is "certainly not." That's why we need to keep trying to build it, in Blake's time and ours. That's what the poem's "chariot of fire" is for, and its promise of unceasing "mental fight." The discreetly dramatic shift in speaking subject of the last stanza, from "I will not cease" to "Till we have built," is, as Damrosch says, "a call to collective commitment." Yet Blake deleted the poem from two of the four copies of "Milton," the longer text that contained it. Perhaps he saw all the hypocrisy that was coming. MICHAEL WOOD is the author, most recently, of "Yeats and Violence" and "Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 11, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Damrosch (Jonathan Swift) extends "an invitation to understanding and enjoyment" of poet William Blake (1757-1827) by bringing to life the inner logic and "imaginative reality" that governs his body of work. This exemplary study begins with a primer on reading Blake's verse, presented alongside his engravings, and goes on to explicate the artist's "dynamic, not iconic" recurrent symbols, revolutionary ideas, and "personal myth" that over his lifetime grew "challengingly complicated and increasingly strange." At ease with the complexities of the historical period as well as his subject's inward torments, Damrosch leads the reader through Blake's life and work with thoughtful clarity and frequent affection, exploring the well-studied poems and making accessible more abstruse works such as The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. Damrosch's readings are nuanced, sensitive, and deeply perceptive, touched with wonder at the poet's originality and alive to the ways that Blake's beliefs presented "a wide-ranging challenge to orthodox morality." With generous illustrations, including a gallery of breathtaking full-color plates, Damrosch's study will build an appreciation among scholars and general readers alike for Blake's "vast, complicated myth" and reinforce his place in the Western canon as a "profound thinker" and creative genius "not in a single art but in two." 40 color plates and 56 b&w illus. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Acclaimed scholar and biographer Damrosch (Literature/Harvard Univ.; Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, 2013, etc.) brings decades of study to this analysis of William Blake's art, poetry, religion, and philosophy.Those with little experience with the 18th-century poet will probably benefit the most from this fascinating work. As the author writes, Blake's poems are undeniably strange, and his genius has always challenged the focus of his readers (he was overlooked during his lifetime). Especially difficult is tracing the complications of the unpublished poem "The Four Zoas" and their feminine emanations. Blake's outlooks on the divine, which is contained in all nature, and institutional religion, which he loathed, show in his invented symbols and unique myths. He sought the incarnation of the divine spirit of the human in the everyday, and he looked at conventional marriage as institutionalized prostitution and conventional religion as theatrical performance. In "London," nothing is sacred as Blake indicts church, law, monarchy, property, and marriage. He produced his own engravings and writings, and those who bought them tended to ignore the text. The author's study of the man and clear style make this much easier to read and tempt readers to seek out more. Blake was a complicated man, given to visions and paranoia, and he often heard voices, and Damrosch guides us through the paths of Blake's mind to ease our journey. Blake's poems and art were used to challenge and inspire, never to preach, and his first works had a social message. His long prophecies were not epics, however; a better analogy is music, as they resembled oratorios with key changes and tempo contrasts. Damrosch expertly navigates Blake's "question imagination," which "has never ceased to startle and inspire." General readers looking for a challenge will love this book and will dive into Blake's work. Many will find him just too far off the beam, but they, too, will enjoy the many color illustrations included in the text. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
