The spectre in Blake's poetry

Vine, Steven (1988) The spectre in Blake's poetry. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Starting with an analysis of Blake criticism in Chapter 1, the thesis argues that critical interpretation of Blake has typically been idealist in its approach. Against this, the thesis shows how the subversive figure of the `Spectre' in Blake's poetry profoundly questions the idealist empire of the `Imagination' which on another level the texts strive to establish. Chapter 2 examines Blake's revolutionary poems of the 1790s, and through an analysis of Blake's and Burke's conceptions of the sublime, argues that Blake's aesthetic of `vision' is compromised by the `Spectre' of that which eludes the eye of vision. Analysing a series of short texts from Blake's Notebook and letters, Chapter 3 argues that Blake's Spectre is an ironic figure which implies a logic of poetic catastrophe on the one hand, and of comedy on the other. Chapter 4 examines `creation' in the Lambeth prophecies, and argues that these texts dramatise a spectral logic of creativity in which poetic creation is inseparable from the compulsive repetitions of disaster. Chapter 5 considers the Spectre in The Four Zoas as a trope of poetic power and fall, and uses Bakhtin's account of language and Freud's myth of primitive society to explore the ambiguities of disaster and delight in Blake's language. Chapter 6 considers the `Negative' in Milton, and argues that the spectral Negative gives birth to a logic of substitution in language which displaces the attempts of the text to redeem Milton in a final act. Chapter 7 examines the Spectre in Jerusalem as an ironic image of the visionary poet, and argues that the Spectre's uncanny operations in the text provide a way of reading the apocalyptic mobility of Blake's language at the end of the poem.

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