Blake and the Songs

Because Blake addresses the theme of generation most directly and fully in his illuminated books, it is important to consider here the principles guiding the interpretation of his art. Blake’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy are particularly revealing of Blake’s view of his own art, revealing how for him art and text were at all times part of a continuous whole. Several of Blake’s less finished illustrations for Dante’s epic have text written within and around them never intended for inclusion in the finished design. Bindman describes these bits of text as “angrily scribbled notes of complaint on some of the least finished drawings, telling juxtapositions of designs, and the highlighting of motifs against the grain of the text” (2000b, p. 4). These notes were to be colored over as Blake completed his illustrations. Drawings 7 and 22 are the most striking examples, but others are like drawing 2, in which perhaps two lines of text remain barely visible above God’s shoulders, nearly obscured by the drawing, and others are like drawing 102, in which the text briefly reminds Blake about design elements he intended to include in his drawing. Most unfinished drawings have no text at all. The exceptions, drawings 7 and 22, dramatically illustrate how very much Blake thought simultaneously in word and image. Image was a form of speech for Blake, text a form of drawing. Blake’s writing process seems to have been eminently visual. Joseph Viscomi suggests that “Writing backward a text already known is drawing words: words cease to be symbols or names and become forms, marks, lines, design” (1989, p. 71). Crabb Robinson recorded in his diary that Blake claimed, “When I am commanded by the Spirits then I write, And the moment I have written, I see the Words fly about the room in all directions[.] It is then published[.]—The Spirits can read and my MS: is of no further use[.]—I have been tempted to burn my MS, but my wife wont not let me” (Bentley, 1969, p.