Blake, Burke, And The Revolution

Blake, Burke, and the Revolution(s) William Blake was a man born in an era of revolutions. Born in 1757, Blake lived through both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, not to mention the rich intellectual smorgasbord and the harsh ruling class backlash that happened throughout the
Blake was appalled by the condition of his fellow man, at home and abroad, and, as a Romantic poet and a spiritual enthusiast, he turned to poetry to convey his concerns, opinions, and prophesies. Blake rallied against both the Church and the Crown, hoping only to empower those who he saw fit. Burke, on the other hand, was an outspoken critic against the French Revolution, penning an intense intellectual essay against its undertaking. These
Blake's writings and illustrations, Burke's essay, and the general sentiments and rationale behind revolutionary ideals all contributed to an era of immense change and intellectual dick measuring. By looking more closely at Blake's life and two of his poems, America, A Prophecy and Europe, A Prophecy, I hope to better understand how Blake felt about the revolutionary ideals, as well as how his views on revolution differed from those of Edmund Burke's. In Great English Poets: William Blake, editor Peter Porter summarizes the finer points of Blake's poetry as such: "Put simply, William Blake's poetry offers the reader a way through the daunting thickets of religious dogma and establishment orthodoxy to the idea of personal revelation, to an intense experience of life perceived by our senses and our understanding" (Porter 10-11). Indeed, to the layman or common reader, much of Blake's poetry is simply an exploration of the intersections of the divine, the senses, and human comprehension. Blake, however, started from much simpler means. "[B]orn in Broad Street, London, in 1757" (Porter 12), Blake 's
At the beginning of the poem, the world we read of is newly created and has barely come into existence. It is dark and shadowy, a primeval world of fire and mineral. Blakean critic Howard Bloom suggests that the "unprejudiced reader of poetry, who begins on a reading of America for the first time, usually experiences a shock of surprise at the strangeness of the poem," stressing that the poem's aesthetic--its setting, characters, and subject matter--lends itself to "imaginative discernment and enjoyment" when properly recognized for its poetic prowess (117). The Daughter of Urthona has an iron tongue, and the red Orc is fed iron as sustenance. Bloom suggests in Blake's Apocalypse that "every female personage finally relates to, or is, a form of nature; every male at last represents humankind, both male and female" (118). If this is the case, then, the first lines of America, A Prophecy suggest a shadowy nature standing before a red human, a motherly figure confronting a growing and rebellious organism about to attempt to break free from the clay from which it has been created (118). The Daughter attends to the Orc, feeding him daily, but the Orc has "reached a stage in his natural cycle where his expanded desires compel him to attack his environment at its crucial center," i.e.