Blake by T.S. Eliot — Read

I.

If one follows Blake's mind through the several stages of his poetic / development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild / pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the / peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something / which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and / Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare-and also / in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar / honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly / terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, / because it is unpleasant. Blake's poetry has the unpleasantness of great / poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none / of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, / have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour / of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the / human soul. And this honesty never exists without great technical / accomplishment. The question about Blake the man is the question of the / circumstances that concurred to permit this honesty in his work, and / what circumstances define its limitations. The favouring conditions / probably include these two: that, being early apprenticed to a manual / occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in / literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than / that he wanted it; and that, being a humble engraver, he had no / journalistic-social career open to him.