Abstract
‘Did you ever see a ghost?’ a friend once asked Blake. ‘Never but once’, Gilchrist records Blake’s reply. The occasion was one evening at Lambeth; looking up, Blake saw ‘a horrible grim figure, “scaly, speckled, very awful”, stalking downstairs towards him’ at which ‘more frightened than ever before or after [he] took to his heels, and ran out of the house’.1
Lawful Bread Bought with Lawful Money & a Lawful Heaven seen thro a Lawful Telescope by means of a Lawful Window Light The Holy Ghost [who] <& whatever> cannot be Taxed is Unlawful & Witchcraft.
Spirits are Lawful but not Ghosts especially Royal Gin is Lawful Spirit [real] No Smuggling British Spirit & Truth
(Blake, Annotations to Thornton)
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Notes and References
A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, vol. I, 2nd ed. (London, 1880), p. 128.
D. V. Erdman (ed.), The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile (Oxford, 1973) p. 61.
Letter to John Flaxman, 12 September 1800, CPP, pp. 707–8.
See Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1977) p. 153.
R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution (Yale, 1983) p. 26.
T. Paine, Rights of Man (1792), edited by Eric Foner (New York, 1984) p. 159.
E. Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), Works, vol. V (Bohn’s Standard Library, 5th ed., 1883–90) p. 155.
Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. VI (edited by Cobban and Smith), gen. ed. Thomas W. Copeland (Cambridge, 1958–78) p. 29.
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), edited by J.T. Boulton (London, 1958) p. 39.
T. Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore, 1976) p. 79.
H. Bloom, Poetry and Repression (Yale, 1976) p. 47.
Maud Ellmann sees another suggestion of divine failure in Michelangelo’s painting, commenting: ‘Adam’s navel, in mute blasphemy, foreswears the fatherhood of God. The umbilicus … belies the firstness of the father, the originality of His creation’ (‘Disremembering Dedalus’, in Untying the Text, Robert Young (ed.) (London, 1981) p. 204.
Graham Pechey, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Text and its Conjuncture’, The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (Spring 1979) p. 67. Subsequent references to this essay are included in brackets.
Graham Pechey, ‘1789 and After: Mutations of “Romantic” Discourse’, in 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, Barker et al. (eds) (Colchester, 1982) p. 60.
For a deconstructive analysis of performative language in Nietzsche, see Paul de Man, ‘Rhetoric of Persuasion’ in Allegories of Reading (Yale, 1979) pp. 119–31.
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© 1993 Steven Vine
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Vine, S. (1993). The ‘Cloud and Vision’: Vision, Revolution and the Sublime. In: Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22619-1_2
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