A Blake Dictionary

[Pages:635]A BLAKE DICTIONARY

S. Foster Damon Courtesy of the John Hay Library, Brown University

A BLAKE DICTIONARY

The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake

S. Foster Damon

UPDATED EDITION with a new foreward and

annotated bibliography by Morris Eaves

Dartmouth College Press Hanover, New Hampshire

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PRESS An imprint of University Press of New England



? 1965, 1988, 2013 Trustees of Brown University foreword and annotated bibliography ? 2013 Dartmouth College Press

All rights reserved

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit

Cover illustration: The Lovers' Whirlwind, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hell, Canto V, 37?138, c. 1825 (detail).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Damon, S. Foster (Samuel Foster), 1893?1971.

A Blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of William Blake / S. Foster Damon; updated edition with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by Morris Eaves. -- Updated ed.

p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61168-443-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61168-341-7 (ebook) 1. Blake, William, 1757?1827--Dictionaries. 2. Symbolism in literature--Dictionaries. I. Eaves, Morris, 1944? II. Title. PR4146.A24 2013 821'.7--dc23

2012043195

FOR GEOFFREY KEYNES to whom all Blake lovers are indebted permanently

Forgive what you do not approve, & love me for this energetic exertion of my talent.

BLAKE ? JERUSALEM 3

Contents

Foreword Blake as Conceived: Lessons in Endurance by Morris Eaves

Acknowledgments Introduction

A Blake Dictionary Index by Morris Eaves Illustrations by Blake and Maps

Foreword

Blake as Conceived: Lessons in Endurance

The study of Blake inevitably leads to controversy; the reader of this dictionary might never guess that

there was anything but an agreed orthodoxy.

"Guides to a New Language," 3 October 1968

S Foster Damon was the young Turk of Blake studies when William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols was published in 1924. He was "the patriarch of Blake studies" (Bloom review, 24) when A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake was published in 1965. As I revise this foreword, Philosophy and Symbols is approaching its ninetieth birthday, A Blake Dictionary its fiftieth, and Damon has been dead since 1971. It's fair to ask what A Blake Dictionary is good for at this late hour. Though Damon loved to pore over patriarchal tomes himself, he would have understood that people entering strange territory want up-to-date guidebooks. When I started getting serious about Blake, my guides were Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947), David Erdman's Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954), and Damon's Dictionary. That was 1968, after all, and the Dictionary was nearly new. But today I'd still endorse my own experience: if Blake is where you're going, Frye, Erdman, and Damon should be your guides. As an introductory offer they remain unbeatable. To understand the power of the Dictionary in this durable trio, we start with the recognition that Damon's lifetime coincided with the incorporation of Blake into legitimate fields of study. The process began well before Damon arrived on the scene and may continue indefinitely, but the crucial decades were those bracketed by Damon's Blake books. From the 1920s through the 1960s, various factors cooperated to assign to the name William Blake a set of attributes and a location in history. The rough consensus achieved during Damon's lifetime is by and large the one we are still operating with today. It leads us to expect to find William Blake at home in one of the six slots allotted to the so-called major English Romantic poets in standard textbooks devoted to the standard subject of English Romantic poetry. To the extent that the Blake of Damon's Philosophy and Symbols is the same as the Blake of the Dictionary in most essentials, the Dictionary is an annotated index to its own predecessor. The sustained equilibrium in the meaning of "Blake" that made it possible for a book published in 1965 to represent a book published in 1924 has less to do with the consistency of the author than with the consistency of the scholarly institutions appraising him. Not that he or they never changed or never learned anything new during all those years. But the fact that the Blake that Damon calls to memory for his Dictionary is very largely the same Blake that Damon had first assembled for his Philosophy and Symbols four decades earlier confirms not just Damon's stubborn faith in his own critical powers but also the capacity of institutions to retain what they need to retain and to build on the remembered past, while resolutely sloughing off what they need to.

"Damon's . . . Philosophy and Symbols (1924) has been the foundation stone on which all modern interpretations of Blake have built" (Bateson review, 25). Having laid the foundation in the 1920s, it was only proper for Damon the pioneer to return to it in the 1960s with a late scholarly tribute to his own work. By then a flourishing temple of Blake studies had arisen, presided over by an academic

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download