'Primitive and original ways' in the early work of William Blake, 1778-1795

In an 1803 letter to Thomas Butts, William Blake affirmed the "primitive and original ways" of his art. The championing of the "primitive and original" surfaced especially in the 1760s, the age of Ossian and Gray, a period in which the bardic and heroic was valorized at the moment in which the sublimity they offered seemed steadily imperiled by commerce. In this dissertation, I investigate the background of ideas concerning the primitive and the original, particularly how such ideas influenced the work of Blake in the first quarter century of his poetic production, from 1778 to 1795, a period encompassing debates about the authenticity of Thomas Chatterton's verse, the French revolution, and the resultant anti-sedition laws of the 1790s. After examining the cultural context of the primitive as it appeared in ideas about bardic poetry, literacy, and community, I consider the extent to which Blake adapted or repudiated them. Notions of ancient British liberty pervade The Poetical Sketches (1783), yet a repudiation of the poet's role as official cultural custodian appears. In America: A Prophecy (1794), Blake repudiates bardic nationalism more assuredly. Between these works, in Tiriel (1789), Blake experiments with the invention of a past that had been central to the work of Chatterton.;Attendant to this examination of bardic nationalism is the question of the style in which Blake aspired to enthusiasm rather than decorum. Numerous speculative essays on primitive poetry, whether of Homer, the Hebrews, the Celts, or American Indians, posited a simple and vehement style absent logical transitions; I read Blake against a number of these essays. Bishop Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) typified the outlook that primitive (or barbarian) style was worthy of admiration---but not of emulation, since it emerged from a socially discordant historical period. Blake emulates this style, wresting it from the ideological matrix in which it was valorized, as well as from the notion that primitive sublimity required violent social transition, a formula he decisively renounces. Finally, Blake embraces the originality of imagination while he repudiates the antiquarian quest for originality through historical verification.