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William Blake: the Creation of the Songs: from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing. - book review
Criticism, Fall, 2001 by Michael Ferber
On one seemingly technical point--whether, apart from the Songs, Blake composed directly on the copper plate (in a wax "resist"), as many scholars believe, or he wrote and revised on paper before transcribing onto copper, as Phillips believes--I have to say I think Phillips has the better argument, though he might have been more explicit about what "composing" means. It is true that we lack first drafts of almost all later works and some earlier ones, but the argument from silence is dangerous; surely it is more remarkable that the Songs notebook has survived than that other textbooks have not. Moreover there is the manuscript of The Four Zoas, a draft of a work never engraved but quarried for Milton and Jerusalem. It is also true that Blake claimed that Jerusalem was dictated to him, but if Blake was taking it down onto copper plate the dictator must have been the most patient of spirits. In any case, Blake gives it away in Jerusalem itself, where he writes, "When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare...." We get the absurd idea of "Verse" whose "Cadence" is not determined! Blake appears to have "consider'd" a great deal, and it is hard to agree that he did it all while hovering over the plate. He had to lay out the design, with space for the text, and then write the text, backward, in careful "copperplate hand," in a sticky resist. He could erase mistakes, but it cost some time and trouble even before the resist hardened. It is pleasing to imagine his spiritual advisers coming every day with different inks and nibs, making him cross out what they dictated the day before, and sitting around chatting while he labored over his plates. But that was their job; they were his own spirits.
Michael Ferber University of New Hampshire
COPYRIGHT 2001 Wayne State University Press
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
