Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake. - book review

Criticism, Summer, 2002 by Kathryn Freeman

Blake's roots in enthusiasm, or what Bentley calls "the language of radical religious Dissent" are at the heart of this biography that seeks to put Blake's spirituality at the center of his artistic development: Bentley traces Blake's evolution from "envying the successful, as he had done in his youth" to "perceiv[ing] that they had missed God's main chance" (xxiv, 363). Yet Bentley emphasizes that Blake was not "merely an enthusiast": Blake "transmuted" the dissenting Christianity on which he was reared into "the language of art," interfusing "the revolutionary Christian vision that was his birthright with the English literary vision in which he immersed himself during his adolescence and the neo-classical artistic vision into which he grew in manhood" (xxv). Bentley's description of Blake's enthusiastic late illustrations for The Book of Enoch elegantly conveys this transmutation: Blake "found an ancient prophecy which expressed his own ideas in Hebraic form," Bentley writes; "It was deep calling to deep, vision answering to vision" (429).

Blake's "shining serenity in poverty" during his later years inspired Dante Gabriel Rossetti to recollect a moment when Blake met a little girl "nursed in all the elegancies and luxury of wealth"; Blake said to her, "May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me" (364). Given the chronological distance the reader of this rich biography travels with G. E. Bentley as guide, the anecdote is remarkable testimony to Charles Lamb's declaration that Blake was "one of the most extraordinary personages of the age" (365).

Kathryn Freeman
University of Miami