William Blake and the Moderns

Edited by Robert J. Bertholf & Annette S. Levitt

Subjects: Literary Criticism, Biography
Paperback : 9780873956161, 294 pages, June 1983
Hardcover : 9780873956154, 294 pages, June 1983

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Table of contents

Introduction: The Tradition of Enacted Forms

Abbreviations

PART I

The Seven Eyes of Yeats
Hazard Adams

Blake, Whitman, Crane: The Hand of Fire
Donald Pease

Blake, Eliot, and Williams: The Continuity of Imaginative Labor
Leroy Searle

Blake and Roethke: When Everything Comes to One
Jay Parini

Robert Duncan: Blake's Contemporary Voice
Robert J. Bertholf

Blake, Ginsberg, Madness, and the Prophet as Shaman
Alicia Ostriker

PART II

Joyce's Blake: Paths of Influence
Robert F. Gleckner

Why the Sons of God Want the Daughters of Men: On William Blake and D. H. Lawrence
Myra Glazer

"The Mental Traveller" in The Horse's Mouth: New Light on the Old Cycle
Annette S. Levitt

A Fourfold Vision: William Blake and Doris Lessing
Susan Levin

PART III

The Humanized Universe of Blake and Marx
Minna Doskow

Blake, Teilhard, and the Idea of the Future of Man
Eileen Sanzo

William Blake and the Problematic of the Self
William Dennis Horn

Notes on Contributors

Index

Description

Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt have assembled thirteen essays that establish Blake as a "central voice molding modern literature and thought. " The essays in this volume examine Blake's influence on modern poetry, the modern novel, and modern thought from various critical approaches. This collection maps out the lines of direct literary influences and indirect intellectual affinities that make up the tradition of enacted form. Through the use of various aspects of Blake's form and ideas, this book reasserts the idea of continuity, the drive for wholeness, and the arrival of new poetic forms.

Blake is considered one of the major and most modern of Romantics. This collection positions him as a precursor of the modern, using his vision and poetry as a base for discussing a central issue in literary theory today—influence and the literary tradition—just how is the legacy of a literary artist passed on, and how is it resurrected in the works of subsequent generations.

Robert J. Bertholf is Curator, The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is editor of Robert Duncan: Scales of the Marvelous, a collection of essays, and the author of Robert Duncan: A Descriptive Bibliography. Annette S. Levitt has taught at Pennsylvania State and Temple universities, and has published articles and reviews on John Milton, William Blake, Joyce Cary, Garcia Lorca, and Roger Vitrac.