| This dissertation discovers and discusses Blake the allegonst. To varying conventions of allegory, ranging from literary to theosophical, Blake responds severally and with different emphases as his career develops, although he works always against allegory's tendency towards neoclassical didacticism and arbitrary, transparent correspondence of figure and meaning. This dissertation accounts for Blake's encounter with the tradition of each significant convention, in each case through a figure of major influence.; The first convention discussed [chapter 1] is the most sweeping: an interpretation of everything worldly as significant of spiritual meaning, from the sun to the hills to the wheels and worms. This conception of allegory Blake encounters principally in the writings of Swedenborg, to whom he is particularly close in his relatively early compositions, The Songs and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake's interest in worldly objects as capable of spiritual meaning is strongest in this period of his development.; His earliest encounter with a theory of allegory [chapter 2], however, comes in the form of Winckelmann's Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks , which Blake owned even as a boy. This work sets forth a familiar, aesthetic conception of allegory, wherein images or emblems artfully represent comes to understand the world and worldly objects as both aesthetically and spiritually inspired.; A third, closely related moment in Blake's exploration of allegory [chapter 3] comes in the form of John Bunyan's Book for Boys and Girls, which conceives allegory to poetize natural objects as figures for spiritual meaning; additionally, Bunyan provides Blake a formal poetic basis for the Songs.; Unsatisfied, Blake turns from object-oriented allegory towards epic, dramatic allegory. This turn away from the object is performed in his Book of Thel [chapter 4], and results in his later prophetic works, where the principle influence is the gothic allegory we find foremost in Spenser; this becomes the ultimate model for Blake's counter-neoclassicism, as his verse grows wilder and his allegorical figures become mythic rather than objective. |
