William Blake: the Creation of the Songs: from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. - book review

Criticism, Fall, 2001 by Michael Ferber

Despite the way they intrude into the commentary, and despite my disagreements with some of them, I am glad to have these digressions into Blake's situation. A haunting photograph of Fore Street, Lambeth Riverside, may or may not be from the neighborhood Blake had in mind as the setting for "London"--after all, its speaker wanders through "each charter'd street," not just those nearby--but it conveys something of the London we too easily forget and Blake knew all too well. Phillips is at work on a biography of Blake in Lambeth during the anti-Jacobin reaction, on which he has published interesting articles. I hope he will enrich it with as many pictures as he can find, not so much to nail down a source or allusion as to present the world (or one of the worlds) Blake dwelled in, a world almost entirely lost.

I also found many of the details about Blake's notebook sessions interesting, though it is not clear what implications, if any, they have for how we interpret the final works. Phillips points out that the "Introduction" to Experience is not found in the notebook. "Earth's Answer" is, but it is tied at the outset to "Thou hast a lap full of seed," with which it shares some imagery. That poem was abandoned. In its new context, following an "Introduction" almost certainly composed after it, "Earth's Answer" is "profoundly altered." Indeed one is tempted to say that its history explains why "Earth's Answer" seems not quite an answer to the voice of the bard, or seems an answer to someone else. Still, even if he did not have the bard in mind when he wrote the "Answer," Blake must have had the "Answer" in mind when he wrote the "Introduction," and in any case he engraved them both and placed them in succession in all copies. So we must take them together as a single work, or a pair of works in dialogue, however they came to be. It then becomes part of its meaning, its literary effect, that Earth seems half deaf.

One more detail worth relishing: Blake seems to have worked on "London" and "The Tyger" on the same occasion. Two of the greatest poems in English on the same day!

I shall be brief about the chapters on Blake's printing methods. Much of it is uncontroversial and clearly explained, along with good reproductions of contemporary printing equipment. Phillips disagrees with Essick and Viscomi, on whose work he builds, on such details as the speed with which Blake could print his pages, whether he printed the Songs plates in pairs or separately, and whether he normally printed his plates once or twice--that is, passed them through the press only once or, as Phillips believes, passed them through a second time with different colored inks. I will leave it to those better qualified than I am to assess his claims. These disputes notwithstanding, I find it remarkable how much we do know about this obscure London engraver: where he got his copper plate and the sizes he cut it down to, when and where he got his paper and how he treated it before printing on it, what pigments he used for hand watercoloring, what acids for the bath, and so on. His characteristic method, relief etching, is pretty well understood now; Phillips contrasts it clearly with intaglio, and offers the suggestive analogy--intaglio is to relief etching as Locke's blank slate is to innate ideas--which ties his method to his core beliefs about the soul and nature.