642
PARTISAN REVIEW
would prove capable of participating in the responsible discussion of signifi–
cant works of literature .
That time is past, we know, and all its easy raptures now wear the sad
forlornness of deflated illusions . But
if
there is something more than a
passing coincidence to be found between Blake's advance over the past
thirty years to a position of central importance in the academic study of
literature and the self-conscious mission of a whole postwar generation of
teachers of English to enlarge literary studies into as broad a community as
it could, then three of the four books under review have a special interest
for us .
Let me begin, however, by way of paradox: that the book which has
the least resonance within the context I've been trying to establish also
happens
to
be the only one of the four which seems
to
me really indispen–
sable for the serious study of Blake-David V. Erdman's edition of the
illuminations Blake created for his own poetry . For whatever the reservations
one may have about the specific details of Erdman's annotations, the appear–
ance of "all" of Blake's illuminated works in a single, moderately priced
volume is a major event in Blake scholarship. (I put quotation marks around
all because, in spite of the declarations of completeness on the cover and
title page, Erdman's edition has necessarily had
to
reflect individual choices
for black and white reproduction from among Blake's own multiple versions
of particular works.) With the appearance of
The Illuminated Blake,
in fact,
one can hope that the academic tendency
to
evade the radical uniqueness
of Blake's genius will soon go out of fashion.
With
Blake's Night,
on the other hand, David Wagenknecht has
produced a kind of milestone
in
the repeated attempts since
Fearful Symmetry
to
assimilate Blake still further into a demonstrable literary "tradition."
Taking as his thesis the notion that "the idea of pastoral" is fundamental
to an understanding of Blake's poetry, Wagenknecht gives us a sustained
interpretation of Blake remarkable chiefly for two reasons : its internal
coherence and its emotional poverty . And while at least some readers no
doubt will be content with the coherence, I suspect a good many more will
find in Wagenknecht's rigidly hermetic conception of " literature" an
additional confirmation of the reductiveness of Frye's methods in hands
other than his own . Consider, for example, this passage from
Blake's Night:
Europe
describes by means of a sinister parody of Milton's "On the
Morning of Christ's Nativity" the advent of Ore, an event important
to the interpretation of " The Tyger ."
