radical aesthetic

I like Blake. I didn't know what he was really like. In high school we studied his poetry, and it was all those short poems that are so kind of....I don't know what word to use....limp, twee...but then much later, when I studied English at uni, I found his epic hundreds of pages long poems that represent a whole reality/ system that Blake devised, and it's so complex and deep and strong, that I really appreciate it but have never been able to have much of an understandng of it. A useful book - and a book that will give you a good sense of the wildness of Blake's whole system - is A Blake Dictionary (1988) by S Foster Damon and Morris Eaves. It's one of the very few alphabetically arranged books that I really like, because it's fascinating and gives you a way in, or some help towards a way in, to Blake, if you also put in a lot of work.

Harold Bloom also wrote a lot about Blake and loved his poetry from a young age...by the age of 9 or 10 he had copied Blake's long poems out into notebooks so that he would still have access to them whenever he had to return the book of them to the library. Another of my favourite literary critics and favourite works of literary criticism is Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye, in which he teaches us how to read Blake. He suggests that Blake never intended his work to be obscure or esoteric, but the problem we have with it is that we can no longer read allegory. Learning to understand allegory is, according to Frye, the key to understanding Blake's poetry. And that's one of the purposes of his book - to teach us about that. The thing is though, Frye's book and the task of learning to read allegory are basically as complex and difficult as any other way of approaching Blake's poetry, so it's not like 'Blake for Dummies'....it's more like, if you can handle this mental work out, it will help to equip you for the further cognitive challenge represented by Blake. 

We think of these great Romantic poets as being part of the literary establishment - like they're the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron - but the reason why we see them like that now is because of how transgressive they were. Wordsworth changed poetry. In his 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems' (1802) Wordsworth writes about how he wants to do something new, and he's critical of the contemporary trends in poetry writing, and he explains his agenda because, as he says, if he just published the poems he was going to publish with no explanation, people wouldn't even recognise them as poetry. It's always truly impressive - and it's happened a few times in literary history - when a writer has the audacity to express some kind of radical vision, without having yet achieved it, and then they achieve it, and that's what Wordsworth did. He redefined poetry.