Abstract
William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood—the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world—with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet-philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, I am setting out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia.
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Notes
- 1.
In the early skit An Island in the Moon (1784–5), Blake drily remarks that ‘The three Philosophers’—Suction the Epicurean, Quid the Cynic, and Sipsop the Pythagorean—‘sat together thinking of nothing’, trying ‘to conceal his laughter […] at his own imagination’ (K 44). Suction then criticises ‘Sir Joshua’ as an inferior painter (K 51).
- 2.
Blake , perhaps rather incongruously, adds ‘True Christian philosophy’ to aphorism 366: ‘The purest religion is the most refined Epicurism. He, who in the smallest given time can enjoy most of what he never shall repent, and what furnishes enjoyments, still more unexhausted, still less changeable—is the most religious and the most voluptuous of men’ (K 75). Blake even underlined the text here copied in italics. The subsequent aphorism, however, remained unannotated: ‘He knows little of the Epicurism of reason and religion who examines the dinner in the kitchen’ (1788, 125). Crucially, aphorism 366 is concerned with ethical Epicureanism, rather than atomistic materialism; and, thus, stripped from its hedonism and debauchery, the contentedness of ataraxia may be read as a desirable (Christian) state. As Blake attempts to prove to ‘the Abstract Philosophers’ in a letter dated 6th December 1795, ‘Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect’ (K 790). Moreover, aphorism 366 sets out a ‘refined Epicurism’ as ‘The purest religion’, whereas aphorism 367 refers to Epicurean ‘reason and religion’ as articulated by the school itself. Thus, Blake is able to celebrate a ‘refined Epicurism’—in other words, a return to Christian truth—if not Epicureanism itself. In this sense, Blake’s annotations capture the fiery sensualism of The Marriage of the Heaven and Hell (1790–3) and Oothoon’s sexual rebellion in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Additionally, if we accept the common interpretation that Suction the Epicurean from An Island in the Moon caricatures Blake’s younger and much-loved brother, Robert—‘the exuberant Epicurean’ (Erdman [1954]1991, 140) who died in 1787—then Blake is likely expressing toleration, if not exoneration. David V. Erdman suggests that these annotations ‘reveal Blake in a mood in which he loves the obtuse’ and in which he exhibits a ‘Humanitarian theology’ (127–8).
- 3.
Bacon was one of the first English philosophers to undertake a thorough assessment of Lucretian atomism in Cogitationes De Natura Rerum ([1604/5]1624). However, by the latter part of the eighteenth century, it became increasingly common to associate Newtonianism with Epicureanism, as evidenced by Georges-Louis Le Sage’s The Newtonian Lucretius (1784). Blake himself writes, ‘I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by Newton’s Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom, a Thing that does not Exist’ (K 878). Philosophical links have been confirmed between ‘Greek rationalism’ and ‘the experimental method of Bacon’ (Fisher 1961 52) and Newton’s ‘true’ doctrine and ‘the philosophy of Epicurus and the atomists’ (Ault 1977, 287). Mary Domski finds ‘a quite natural connection’ between Baconian philosophy and Newtonian mathematics (2013, 146; cf. 146–67). Andrew Lincoln asserts that ‘Bacon actually leads to Newtonian physico-theology’ (1995, 90).
- 4.
The period commonly given for the sustained reception of Lucretian ideas (and Epicurean ideas more generally) in England is the middle of the seventeenth century. H. Jones (1989, 156) and Richard Kroll (1991, 3) settle for the 1640s, whilst T. F. Mayo sees no evidence for an engagement with Epicurus and his followers until at least the 1650s (1934, xi; see also Adam Rzepka 2012, 114). Reid Barbour adds ‘that early Stuart culture is diacritically obsessed with the Stoics and Epicureans’ (1998, 2). It has even been suggested that the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was inspired by Book One of De Rerum Natura (Gillespie 2010, 245), which would move the date back to the fourteenth century. It should be noted that this dating traces an Epicurean influence from before Poggio Bracciolini’s unearthing of a manuscript of DRN in 1417. It took another fifty years for DRN to be commissioned by English scholars such as John Tiptoft, the first Earl of Worcester, and—whilst passages and even whole books had been available in English since the beginning of the sixteenth century—it took another two centuries for a full-English translation to appear. Cf. Butterfield 2016, 51. Epicurean influences—the scientific principles as well as the aesthetic and poetic references of DRN—have been observed in the works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, which moves the date to the second half of the sixteenth century, coterminous with the writings of Francis Bacon. Cf. Harrison (1934, 14–5); and Rzepka (2012, 115–6; 124–7; 130–1).
- 5.
Due to his observance of the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, contemporary commentators often believed that Locke had based his own theoretical models on Epicurean epistemology. Gassendi’s De vita et moribus Epicuri (1647) and Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma (affixed to his 1649 commentary on Diogenes Laërtius) propagated Epicureanism across Europe. In England, Walter Charleton acted as a conduit for Gassendi’s brand of Epicureanism, producing both the compendium Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletonia (1654) and then the ethical tract Epicurus’ Morals (1656). In New Essays on Human Understanding ([1704]1765 2000), the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz declared that Locke was ‘pretty much in agreement with M. Gassendi’s system, which is fundamentally that of Democritus: he supports vacuum and atoms, he believes that matter could think, that there are no innate ideas, that our mind is a tabula rasa, and that we do not think all the time; and he seems inclined to agree with most of M. Gassendi’s objections against M. Descartes’ (2000, 5). Cf. Norton (1981, 331–4); Kroll (1984, 339–59); Michael and Michael (1990, 379–99); Lincoln (1995, 89–90); Sarasohn (1996, 168–97). The three are grouped together once more in the notebook poem ‘The Cripple every Step Drudges & labours’ (1808–11).
- 6.
Wakefield pointed out the poetic similitude of Lucretian passages in Thomas Gray and James Thomson, poets who heavily influenced Blake. Cf. The Poems of Mr. Gray (London, 1786).
- 7.
See Samuel Palmer’s letter dated 23rd August 1855 (Bentley Jr. 1975, 34).
- 8.
It is of particular interest that Good began translating Lucretius in the same year Wakefield published his Latin edition: ‘[i]n the choice of an edition, I found no difficulty: the intrinsic excellence, and pre-eminence of Mr. Wakefield’s own, precluding all hesitation upon the subject’ (Good 1805, xiii–iv).
- 9.
The most popular and frequently reprinted English translation of DRN throughout the eighteenth century remained Thomas Creech’s 1682 edition (an anonymous translation appeared in 1743). Although there are no records that Blake owned a copy, earlier translations continued to be reprinted throughout the eighteenth century: the last edition of Thomas Creech’s work was published in 1793. Moreover, whilst new editions were being produced by Good, Drummond, and Busby, ‘Dryden’s Lucretius was printed more often than all these nineteenth-century translations put together, and would have reached a far wider audience’ (Gillespie 2011, 158).
- 10.
Coleridge and Blake were following in the polemical seventeenth-century tradition exemplified by the Christian theologian Isaac Barrow (1630–77), who claimed that ‘of all the sects and factions which divide the world, that of Epicurean scorners and mockers is become the most formidable; with disdainful pride insulting and vapouring over the professors of Religion, persecuting all soberness of mind and stanchness of manners with a fierce rage and a kind of satanic zeal’ (1859, 232).
- 11.
The counter tradition of Christian refutations is perhaps best epitomised by Melchior Cardinal de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius (1745), translated into English by George Canning in 1766.
- 12.
The name ‘Suction’ evokes the emptiness of the Epicurean void. ‘Suction’ was also contemporary slang for ‘imbibing strong drink’ (OED). In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (10th ed. 1794), ‘suction’ is described as ‘The act of sucking’, derives from ‘suck’ which, amongst its various meanings, is defined as ‘To empty by sucking’ and ‘To draw or drain’. Blake likely conflated the suction of space with the suction of liquor. The related formulation ‘sucker’ may also be pertinent as ‘Any thing that draws’ and ‘A pipe through which any thing is sucked’. In 1787, for instance, ‘The Brain-Sucker: Or, the Distress of Authorship’ was published in The British Mercury: a satirical article on the literary merit of Grub Street. Clearly, Epicureanism ‘fills’ the head with nothingness.
- 13.
The scene in Jerusalem where the Daughters of Albion pass amongst themselves the ‘Knife of Flint’ (J 65.56–66.56) is reminiscent of Iphianassa’s sacrifice (DRN i.80–101).
- 14.
- 15.
Only a few years earlier (c. 1821), Blake had produced twenty-seven illustrations for the third edition of Thornton’s Pastorals of Virgil (printed in 1830), including one of Epicurus: ‘A Grecian Philosopher, Flourished 264 years before Christ, His philosophy was transfused into Latin, by the great Roman Poet Lucretius, who flourished 105 years before Christ, and wrote his “De Rerum Natura” on the Nature of Things’ (Object 13 (Bentley 504.27)).
- 16.
This is, in fact, a Ciceronian description of atomistic movement, which Bacon also adopted in The Advancement of Learning (1605). Blake had definitely read this text by 1799. See his letter to Dr Trusler, 23rd August 1799.
- 17.
This is a Democritean image which Lucretius also incorporates in DRN ii.113–22.
- 18.
- 19.
The epigraph functions incongruously as a positive model for Blake’s visionary experiences. Epicurean gnosis provides individuals with a god-like perspective to observe nature’s laws. When Epicurus passes beyond the walls of the world, he passes beyond the sight of men and attains that calm (ataraxia ) with which the spectator watches the turmoil of the world at the beginning of Book Two (DRN ii.1–15). A similar metaphorical flight takes place at the beginning of Book Three, where Lucretius passes over the Pierides (iv.1–7). In contradistinction, Samuel Palmer recalled how Blake, ‘[b]eing irritated by the exclusively scientific talk at a friend’s house, which talk had turned on the vastness of space, he cried out, “It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger”’ (qt. Bentley Jr. 1975, 264). For Blake, the spiritual is real.
- 20.
Many attempts to locate an atomistic presence in Blake’s work follow Ault by tracing a Newtonian source. This is an iteration of Frye’s assessment that the Democritean tradition was ‘developed by Epicurean philosophers’ and that ‘Newton’s corpuscular theory of light belongs to the same method of thought’ ([1947]1990, 24).
- 21.
Cf. Priestman (2010, 295).
- 22.
Jacobson (2002, 454–5).
- 23.
Green, who self-avowedly follows Edward Larrissy in considering Blake a bricoleur of various (often seemingly contradictory) traditions, proposes that Blake’s syncretic understanding of philosophy and mythology points towards a nuanced appreciation of ‘certain systemic or doctrinal affinities, however well-concealed by a rhetoric of mutual opposition’ (2). This builds on the understanding of Blake as a proto-Lévi-Straussian bricoleur in Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (1994, 1–13), a text which has informed other forays into Blake’s fragmentary model of reading such as a Deleuzean reappraisal in Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the impossible history of the 1790s (2007) and the theorisation of a radical meta-bricoleur in Jennifer Jesse’s William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness (2013, 117–8). It can be argued that by grafting diverse traditions and their associated symbols, Blake sees through canonical heterogeneity to a human homogeneity. Green acknowledges his critical debt to John Beer’s description of Blake as a ‘visionary-realist’, Michael Ferber’s ‘social materialism’, and Tristanne J. Connolly’s ‘mystical-empiricism’, though none of these terms were used by Blake.
- 24.
It has been claimed that Reid ‘serve[d] as Newton’s spokesman’ (Laudan 1981, 88).
- 25.
Hilton also notes that ‘[t]he close connection of “spectre” and imagination arises in part from the Latin term having been used to translate an aspect of the physical theories of perception and memory taught by Democritus and Epicurus’ (ibid.).
- 26.
Although Glausser makes a strong case for the presence of atomism in Blake’s thought, he concludes that far from owing a special debt to De Rerum Natura it is more likely that Blake knew the common eighteenth-century translation of simulacra as ‘spectre’ (79) and, whilst ‘interpretively useful’, ‘[t]he Epicurean layer of spectral meaning should be considered a plausible if not indisputable supplement to the more obvious layers’ (80).
- 27.
The beginning of Book Two of DRN would reappear in Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political (1597–1625), Book Three was incorporated by Voltaire in Entre Lucrèce et Posidonius (1756), whilst Book Five was the basis for Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Comet of 1680 (1682), the anthropological origin for Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705–14) and Denis Diderot’s Letter on the Blind (1749), and also provided the model for Richard Payne Knight’s The Progress of Civil Society (1796). Eric Baker adds that ‘[v]irtually every major figure of the period was in some way influenced by Lucretius’ and that late-eighteenth-century commentators often responded ‘to Lucretius whether pro or con’ (2010, 274, 287).
- 28.
W. J. T. Mitchell refers to Blake’s works as ‘a cosmic psychomachy’ where ‘time and space are not independent realities but modifications’ (1982, 129). Josephine McQuail, during an analysis of Milton (1804–10), writes that ‘[w]hat is depicted here is psychomachy, or an inner war’ (2000, 131). More broadly, Roy Porter notes that ‘[s]criptural Protestantism envisaged the drama of salvation as a literal psychomachy’ (1990, 65). David Bindman, in a general introduction to Blake’s poems, writes of ‘psychodramas […] taking place notionally within the mind of a single person’ (2009, 11). Robert N. Essick also opts for the term psychodrama whilst describing the fluidity in Jerusalem (1804–20) between ‘the real and the imaginary, between objective reality and its verbal or pictorial representations, and between thinking and being’ (2003, 256–7). He then adds that ‘[p]erceiving the physical universe as an ideological conspiracy authorizes the production of alternative ways of projecting mind into a world’ (257). John Beer has also read ‘A Poison Tree’ from Songs of Experience (1794) as ‘a little psychodrama’ (2005, 60) whilst Robert Rix reads Blake’s incorporation of Swedenborgianism in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3) ‘as an inner psychodrama’ (2007, 50). Jennifer Jesse comes to a similar conclusion: ‘the voices in his poems [can be read] as internal characters, the ego-states or “people” in our heads playing out complex personal psychodramas’ (2013, 32). It is Laura Quinney in William Blake on Self and Soul (2009) who adopts the term ‘psychotopography’ , predominantly within a Stoic tradition overlapping with Gnosticism and Neoplatonism: ‘[t]he transformation of the self necessitates a mapping of the self … anatomizing the self … usually in the form of schema or maps—the technical term is psychotopography’ (24–5).
- 29.
In ‘Book the Second’ of Milton , Blake repeats the maxim that ‘All that can be annihilated must be annihilated’ (603 ii.30). Blake then explains that ‘There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary / The Negation must be destroyed to redeem the Contraries / The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man / This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway’ (32–6).
- 30.
- 31.
Cyril Bailey (1948) splendiferously translates simulacra as the ‘idol of things’.
- 32.
The apparition of the absent ‘object of your love’ (iv.1060) evokes the Aristotelian tradition of phantasiae which emphasises visualisation. Cf. De Anima 3.3. As José M. González writes, phantasiae are ‘connected not only with sense perception but also with the mental faculties of memory and hope’ (2006, 106).
- 33.
Blake’s move to Felpham to work under the patronage of William Hayley ushered in a period of self-doubt and depression. At this time, Blake was also writing, and ultimately abandoned, The Four Zoas (1795–1804).
- 34.
I maintain that Blake was incorporating the ideological parameters of the Selfhood as early as The Book of Thel (1789) and therefore at least fifteen years prior to its naming in Milton (1804–11). Harold Pagliaro (1987) suggests that the Selfhood first appears in Songs of Innocence (1789). Laura Quinney (2009, 133) and John Jones (2010, 97–134) argue that the Selfhood first appears in The Book of Urizen (1794).
- 35.
There is an eerie morphological echo of the fallibility of prolepses ‘which intelligence reflects like a mirror, whether one perceives them in a dream […] can never resemble the objects that one calls real and true’ (LP 442).
- 36.
E. D. Hirsch’s assessment that Thel ‘remain[s] in the twilight zone of the trimmer, neither damned nor redeemed’ (1964, 192) is rearticulated in the analyses of Levinson (1980, 290), Linkin (1987, 70), and Norvig (2013, 150). Robert Waxler writes that ‘[i]n terms of Blake’s complete work, Thel’s problem can be defined as a problem of “selfhood”’ (1982, 46–7). Cf. Carr (1987, 86–7).
- 37.
In The Progress of Civil Society (1796), Richard Payne Knight describes the societal order as fitted together like cogs ‘in [a] mechanism’ where ‘springs of steel, / Or weights of lead, alike can turn the wheel’ (84 iv.233–8).
- 38.
Leibniz himself attacked Newton and his supporters for imagining a clockwork universe which was so imperfect that it required the regular maintenance of its God ‘to clean it now and then by extraordinary concourse’ ([1751]1956, 11–2). This theoretical reproof was not, in itself, unprecedented, for over a century earlier the Blackloist Kenelm Digby had warned his readers not to ‘irreuerently ingage the Almighty Architect his immediate handy worke’, since this would ‘argue him of want of skill and prouidence, in the first laying of the foundations of his designed machine’ (1644, 227).
- 39.
It is likely that Blake would also have known about, and may have seen, Adam Walker’s Eidouranion (a large-scale orrery) which was built in the 1780s. In a letter to William Hayley dated 27th January 1804, Blake writes that he has ‘been to Mr Walker’s who is not in town being at Birmingham where he will remain 6 weeks or 2 Months. I took my Portrait of Romney as you desired to shew him: his son was likewise not at home: but I will again call on Mr walker Junr’ (K 834). Less than a month later, Blake called once more but was ‘so unfortunate as not to find [Mr Walker] at home’ (836). In a letter dated 4th May, Blake was more successful: ‘I have seen the elder Mr. Walker. He knew and admired without any preface my print of Romney, and when his daughter came in he gave the print into her hand without a word, and she immediately said, “Ah! Romney! younger than I knew him, but very like indeed”’ (843). Blake adds that he was shown a painting by Romney ‘of Mr. Walker and family … Mr. W., three sons, and, I believe, two daughters, with maps, instruments, &c.’. Blake had seen ‘Mr Walker’ at least once more by 28th May (845). Walker delivered lectures on astronomy at the Royal Theatre and London Lyceum. One of the key aspects of the Eidouranion was that its machinery was invisible, and Blake can be seen to tap into this theatrical-astronomical context whilst describing the movement of Urizen and his sons and daughters in space: ‘Travelling in silent majesty along their orderd ways / In right lined paths outmeasurd by the proportions of number weight / And measure. mathematic motion wondrous. along the deep’ (FZ 314 ii.33.22–4).
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Schouten de Jel, J. (2021). Introduction. In: Blake and Lucretius. The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88888-6_1
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