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Blakes awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World: William Blake, Isaac Newton, and writing on metal
Jason Snart
College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137, USA Available online 17 August 2004

Abstract Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as opposites: Newton the great systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks the intricacies of each thinkers work. Further, this straightforward opposition fails to account for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position, applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful Newton and a useful Blake with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvres technique of critical thirding (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for an-Other position in the dialectic of Blake and Newton. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself mobilizes (or indeed creates) its own, subjectively useful, Blake and Newton in order to make particular arguments. r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Stuart Peterfreund published Blake in a Newtonian World in 1998. I adopt a similar, but fundamentally different title here: Blakes Awareness of Blake in a Newtonian World. What does Blakes art foreground in terms of Blakes awareness of his alignment with Newton and Newtonianism, and of his arts production in
Tel.: +1-630-942-2033.

E-mail address: snartj@cdnet.cod.edu (J. Snart). 0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2003.11.010

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what Blake likely felt was a Newtonian world? My aim is to reconsider the relationship between Blake and Newton, and to suggest both similarities and differences between the two in order to nuance what has perhaps become a too-easy opposition between Blake and Newton, as though the terms themselves referred consistently and transparently to the same thing. Blake and Newton were great systematizers, forced to confront and deal with gaps in systems of explaining human experience and natural phenomena. Yet to the gaps any system seemed to have, Newton and Blake reacted very differently. Newton looked for a suture: a predictive method which could describe and unite the variability of the micro- and macrocosms he explored. Blake, however, forced disruption, discontinuity and incommensurability, producing an art he likely hoped would reect and embody his experience of being in the world, and which would communicate the primacy he placed on the individual imagination. I will consider a few of Blakes self-referential poetic moments as comment on his awareness of the materiality (or on the Newtonianness) of artistic production, along with moments in Newtons work in which he expresses doubts about the unity of his own system. These examples suggest similarities between the often contrasted projects and personas of Blake and Newton, or, at the very least, they illuminate the complexities at stake in projects of contrast and comparison. Part of the purpose here is to question what or who Blake and Newton are, since such questions gure heavily in how they can be aligned relative to one another. Are they textual, or con-textual, constructions or re-constructions, psychoanalytic products (and of whose psyche)? Do they, or can they, exist beyond exegesiseven if Richard Westfall provides us with a 900-plus page biography of Newton, what do we know of how he walked? Not that we must know that particular detail to be able to talk of Newton, Newtonianism, or of any relation he had to contemporaries or to those who followed, but it is risky to assume that the biographical Newton operates consistently in relation to other gures or ideas, and that it is itself a stable and consistent object against which comparisons and contrasts can easily be made. Projects involving comparison and contrast thus involve lacunae and erasures, and are potentially incommensurate with other such projects, since they involve making subjective choices, whether or not those choices or the factors that mitigate them are implicitly or explicitly acknowledged. These choices involve decisions about what is included and excluded and about how certain categorieslike Newton for exampleare to function. Here, I attend to rewriting the traditional opposition between Blake and Newton (expressed by scholars as much as by Blake himself, at times), though I want to foreground the fact that I am choosing to make Blake and Newtonas nominal, methodologically useful tropesdo specic things. Donald Ault writes that, to most Newtonians there was no question whether a logical system could explain the whole of the world; the only question was, which system could best characterize natures inherent logical structure.1 Newtonianism became the set of keyseven the keythat would reveal the logic of action at a distance, light, alchemy, and the Bible. Newton sought an all-embracing model of
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Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 28.

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the universe on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. Richard Westfall notes that Newton presented himself often as a natural philosopher confronting the entire sweep of Nature,2 and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs writes that to Newton himself all his diverse studies constituted a unied plan for obtaining Truth.3 Blake sought just as obsessively as Newton to nd a system which would represent (even if it could not axiomatically explain) phenomena and human existence, and both men were, at various times, considerably uneasy with the projects they had laid out for themselves; certainly these projects changed over time, yet both were explicit about their goals and aims. In a letter accompanying his Hypothesis on Light (1675) Newton claims that the letter itself, as with the introduction to the Hypothesis, is to illustrate his optical papers only: that no man may confound this with my other discourses, or measure the certainty of one by the other.4 But, as Westfall notes, it is quite impossible to reconcile the actual Hypothesis with Newtons deprecations of it . . . The Hypothesis contained much more than an explanation of optical phenomena.5 For example, Newton spends half the Hypothesis offering what Westfall describes as a general system of nature.6 And as Newton must have foreseen, the ideas he expressed began a new round of disputes and controversies with Hooke and the Royal Society. Newtons fear that his ideas on light, no less than his ideas on a general system of nature, would surely ingage [him] in vain disputes and controversy suggests the degree to which he was aware that even his most experimentally sound system would not satisfy all those in the scientic community, given the potential gaps and inconsistencies it was sure to have.7 In short, Newton was extremely sensitive to the way in which his work would circulate once it left his control; a great deal of his rhetorical strategies are in fact attempts to maintain control over the text even in the face of readerly variability. Traditionally, Blake and Newton are set in opposition because the nature of what each was trying to produce has been construed as mutually exclusive. However, Blake is as tense as Newton about the way in which his own work is to circulate once it leaves his hands, and indeed what happens to textual productions once they leave the proverbial workshop. Blake is concerned that as he creates a new visionary system, the system itself can become xed, betraying the uid imaginary he is looking to represent. If Newton seems concerned with retaining a certain explicit uidity, or at least a separability between his discourses, even while constructing a general prescriptive system, Blake also seems caught in the tension between contextual uidity and the xity of his own vision once it is given shape on the page. Clearly, Blake and Newton worry over the gaps in their respective systems, whether those systems are poetic or scientic. Blake is not anti-system, as he is often claimed to be. Even claims against Blake as a systematizer fall back into the language of systems. Donald Ault attempts to
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Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 270. B.J.T. Dobbs. The Janus Faces of Genius. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 17. 4 Newton quoted in Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 269. 5 Richard Westfall. Never at Rest. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 270. 6 Ibid., p. 270. 7 Newton quoted in Ibid., p. 269.

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reassert the context of Loss statement, I must Create a System, or be enslavd by another Mans.8 Ault reminds us that it is not necessarily Blakes statement: Blakes treatment of Loss system . . . is not without irony . . . Blakes reaction was against all systems.9 Yet Ault writes, Blakes system is poetic or visionary.10 Ault might place system in hesitant quotation marks, but there still seems to be some type of poetic construction going on for Blake in terms of a framework which is systemic if not systematic (that is, Blakes art almost always foreground his confrontation with crises of representation, and as such even his most diverse productions seem to stem from the same set of artistic, textual, and material problems he faced). There is a project going on in Blakes work which is not so unstable as to elude the systematic entirely. Robert Gleckner writes that each of Blakes two song series . . . comprises a number of smaller units . . . so that the relationship of each unit to the series as a whole might be stated as a kind of progression.11 Gleckners progression model is overly linear, though the relationship of units he suggests is both productive for reading Blakes work, and evidence for a kind of Blakean system. W.J.T. Mitchell, whose Blake studies capture more of the poets uidity than do Gleckners, cites instances of illustrations which do not illustrate to show how Blake forces us to read pictures in the context of other, similar compositions.12 This suggests a sort of archetypal system or network in which illustrations import symbolism from other contexts in which they have appeared. This is all to say nothing of the degree to which Los, introduced above, is gured explicitly as creating a system, and thus how Blake may have envisioned the possibility that one could be both systematic and creative at the same time. Where Newtonianism requires that gaps and inconsistencies be either lled or erased (or avoided with covering letters), Blakes system highlights incommensurabilities as fundamental to the human condition. Blakes system is clearly established to oppose what he understands to be Newtons system.13 Yet much of our, and perhaps Blakes, view of Newton as mythic systematizer is the result of the accumulation we call Newtonianism. Newton was said to have told his nephew, Benjamin Smith, I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself, in now and then nding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.14 The social and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre offers a particular dialectical framework which suggests a way of thinking about the differences and similarities between Blakes and Newtons systems. This framework highlights the way in which the opposition of Blake and Newton as polarities can be articially reductive, and
8 William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) Jerusalem, Plate 10, line 20. 9 Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 29. 10 Ibid., p. 29. 11 Robert Gleckner. Point of View and Context in Blakes Songs. Blake. Ed. Northrop Frye. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966) 10. 12 W.J.T. Mitchell. Blakes Composite Art. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) 45. 13 Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 2829. 14 Newton quoted in Michael White. The Last Sorcerer. (Massachusetts: Helix, 1997) 343.

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further provides a way to situate Blake in relation to Newton, or Newton in relation to Blake, which takes account of the perspective from which the analysis itself takes place. That is, Lefebvres dialectical strategies highlight the object of study as persistently contingent on the position of the subject. Thus we can begin to think of Blake as a subject of study from the perspective of Newtonianism. Or vice versa, we can imagine Newton as, more correctly, Newton from the perspective of the study of Blake. This dialectic allows for opposition, but does not synthesize the opposites as a traditional dialectic might. Lefebvres dialectic preserves the thesis and anti-thesis as fundamentally important to how each is a product of the other. In The Production of Space (1974, translated in 1991), Lefebvre practices what Edward Soja has called a critical thirding, in which thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are . . . made to appear simultaneously.15 There must always be, for Lefebvre, An-Other third term in any binary set, whose operation and existence depends on perspective. Holding incommensurabilities without resolving them into a unity is central to both Lefebvres theorizing (and practice) and Blakes practice. Perspective is one of the fundamental conditions in Blakes vision of the fallen world, for it is an inescapable result of division. And it is individual perspective which is fundamental to the spatial dialectic in Blakes system, but which must be repressed in the temporal dialectic characteristic of the Newtonian system. Donald Ault writes that Perspective. . . is a product of the drive toward the suppression of multiplicity into unity, a drive which we have seen is overwhelmingly strong in Newton.16 When, in Blakes The [First] Book of Urizen, Urizen divides and separates from the Eternals, he looks back and says, Why will you die O Eternals?/Why live in unquenchable burnings?.17 Yet the Eternals burnings are, from another perspective (or, to use Lefebvres term, An-Other perspective) the imaginative re of creativity invoked in the Preludium: Eternals I hear your call gladly,/Dictate swift winged words.18 Urizen, from his perspective, seeks to organize himself and his world in order that he might take action on his own behalf. Yet where Urizen sees himself as law giver, the Eternals narrate a process of limitation (Blakes parody of the account of creation in Genesis). Throughout Blakes work, multiple and often irreconcilable perspectives (and textual versions) vie for centrality; indeed, scholars puzzle over which version of The [First] Book of Urizen is to be considered standard.19 Yet that
Edward Soja. Thirdspace. (New York: Routledge, 1996) 9. Donald Ault. Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blakes Anti-Newtonian Text. Studies in Romanticism 16:3 (1977) 299. 17 William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) 4:10. 18 Ibid., 2:34. 19 See especially Joseph Viscomi. Blake and the Idea of the Book. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Erdman describes the books of The Book of Urizen as on 28 plates, known in seven (now eight) copies, plus some scattered plates. However, his description of what he believes to be the correct plate order betrays, even as it tries to assert, textual stability. Erdman writes, There is only one possible arrangement of the text, since it is organized into numbered chaptersexcept that Plate 8, duplicating the numbers of Plate 10, may have been meant to replace it . . . Yet Plate 2 is out of order in Copy E, 15 follows 18 in A, and 8 follows rather than precedes 10 in copies B and F . . . (William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) p. 804; my italics).
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centrality is denied to any singular position, character, perspective, or version, for centrality (if it exists in Blakes work at all) is a space reserved for each creative, individual reader. The smoothing, universalizing effect of the temporal dialectic, with its progression towards synthesis, is denied in place of the spatial dialectic which can manage contraries as equally true. Blakes work is constantly reminding us that perspective is shifting and not xed. As we read in the Songs of Innocence, for example, we can note that we are reading from our world of adult experience; thus we are able to hear irony from characters like the Chimney Sweeper who himself, despite his desperate situation, seems immune to the emptiness of his belief that if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.20 In addition to poetic uidity, Blake practices a material uidity in his work, switching poems from the Innocence to the Experience collection and often back again in various printings. Ultimately, we are faced with the question: what happens to an innocent poem when it is moved to the collection titled Experience? Does the poem change, or do we, or do both? That these questions persist suggests something unsatisfactory about a system which prescribes universals in the face of local, individual, contextual exigencies. Edward Soja argues that Lefebvres The Production of Space is a bewildering book, lled with unruly textual practices, bold assertions that seem to get tossed aside as the arguments develop, and perplexing inconsistencies and apparent selfcontradictions.21 This seems an apt description of Blakes work as well, which is not surprising given that both authors worry over the systematization of their ideas, as that systematization erases perspectival and vocal multiplicity. Both authors are interested in thesis and anti-thesis as equally accessible and endlessly complex given the uidity of perspective. Ironically, Blake seems as dissatised with Newtonian perspective as Newton himself does. Only, where Newton looks to limit perspective and deny its multiplicity (as does all normal science, according to Thomas Kuhn), Blake looks to exploit it. Kuhn writes that normal science . . . often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.22 And further, certain experiments are often ignored if they [yield] neither consistent nor simple results . . . they [remain] mere facts, unrelated and unrelatable.23 Umberto Eco describes discovery in terms of the suppression of novelty: we travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of discovering . . . Someone discovers something different and tries to see it as absolutely analogous to what he already knows.24 Such discoveries or novelties suggest the necessity of uid perspective, or multiple systems for explanation and description, which experimental method does not invite. Each system of explanation competes against all others to account for phenomena. Donald Ault, following Kuhn, writes, in the years following the emergence of
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Ibid., p. 24. Edward Soja. Thirdspace. (New York: Routledge, 1996) 8. 22 Thomas Kuhn. Structure of Scientic Revolutions. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970) 5. 23 Ibid., p. 35. 24 Umberto Eco. Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. (New York: Columbia Press, 1998) 54, 74.

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Newtons paradigm . . . Newtons system insinuated itself into a vast range of intellectual disciplines.25 And it did so to account for all of their facts. But again, to speak of Newtons system and Newtonianism in this context is to do a potential disservice to the complexity of what is at stake. For even if the Principia is taken to be an explication of all micro- and macrocosmic phenomena, Newton is clearly aware of the gaps in his own system, and even, perhaps, the impossibility of closing the systematic project he has set himself to accomplish. His questions (including those in the Principia itself) highlight those gaps, in a way not too distant from the ways in which Blakes own poetic techniques highlight, indeed depend upon, the ultimate unanswerability of certain kinds of gaps between vision and material representation. Questions, even propositions, certainly invite a reworking of perspective. What Arnold Thackray describes as the profound failure of the Newtonian program [specically in chemistry]26 is more a result of assuming that Newton believed that his own system was, as the Enlightenment believed, a fully predictive and sutured method, where in fact Newton did not seem to believe anything of the sort.27 Newton is misrepresented by the Age of Newton if we forget that he began with what Joseph Priestley called bold and eccentric thoughts.28 For Priestley at least, Newton was, in his way, visionary. What the Newton biographies written by Stukeley and Brewster,29 for example, fail to give us is a Newton who remains hyper-aware that his general system of nature is one of many possibilities, and informed by the cultural, social, and historical climate in which it took shape. Blake might have sensed that behind Newtonianism was a visionary whose considerable imagination deserved attention. As Jean Hagstrum has written, [Blake] was deeply involved even in what he rejected.30 And Donald Ault begins his Visionary Physics: William Blake and Sir Isaac Newton both saw things few men see.31 Even amid Blakes most adamant criticisms of Newton and Newtonian science, we nd such works as Blakes portrait of Newton and Newtons redemption in Blakes vision of the apocalypse. Further, we see Blake implicating himself in the material, Newtonian, world through constantly self-referential poetic images. So rather than settle on a nal opposition between a clearly dened Blake and a clearly dened Newton, I want to suggest that these contraries can align in many different ways (not all of which may be reconcilable with each other).

Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) 46. Arnold Thackray. Atoms and Powers. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 6. 27 Ibid., p. 5. 28 Priestley quoted in Robert Schoeld. Mechanism and Materialism. (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1970) 3. 29 William Stukeley. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newtons Life. (London: np., 1752); Sir David Brewster. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co., 1855). 30 Jean Hagstrum. William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment. Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Northrop Frye. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966) 142155. 31 Donald Ault. Visionary Physics. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) xi.
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Wordsworth would write of Newton in the 1850 Prelude, the statue stood/Of Newton with his prism and silent face,/The marble index of a mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.32 Wordsworth evokes Newton as a lone, exploratory mind, suggesting a gure whose visionary capacity was not so far distant from Blakes own. In fact, Blake casts himself as the voice of one crying in the Wilderness.33 Northrop Frye, in his early Blake study, Fearful Symmetry, suggests that Blake paid homage to such gures as Locke, Newton, and Bacon, since excavating what Blake perceived as their errors might lead (in Blakes vision) to the redemption of their imaginative selves. It is important to remember the poetic method in which Blake tended to engage other thinkers: they were cast as contraries. For Blake to engage contraries at all was to work towards an understanding of their idiosyncrasy by way of disregarding their claims to empirical, and so universal, objectivity. Frye reminds us that, as Blake himself makes clear, it may be the idea of Newtonianism, or certainly the cultural grip Newtonianism had on his age, that Blake wants to investigate. Frye writes that it is not so much that Blake is unfair to them [Newton, Bacon, or Locke] personally,34 and later not one of these thinkers are as opposed to Blakes mode of thought as, for instance, Hobbes, whom [Blake] never mentions.35 Blake elsewhere signals two of the fundamental strategies of his poetic project: Opposition is true friendship and without contraries is no progression.36 One reason Blake may seem unfair to Newton personally (that is, Newton is made responsible for Newtonianism), is that Blake believed that some imaginative error led Newtons otherwise admirable visionary capacity astray. But Newton is worth poetic space, for Blake, because opposing Newtons ideas can lead to new understanding from previous error. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake speaks of an infernal printing process, printing by corrosives, which in Hell are salutory and medicinal.37 Blakes use of Newton as poetic material is a version of infernal reading, whereby error is revealedthat is, corrosives eat away at accumulationand we are left with Newton, the mind for ever voyaging, the visionary. Thus, in the apocalyptic vision that concludes Jerusalem, Newton is redeemed. In the revelatory moment, in forgiveness of sins which is Self Annihilation, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer converse in what Blake calls visionary forms dramatic.38 They create space and time according to the wonders Divine of Human Imagination.39 Blake thus gives primacy to individual perspective and creativity, and more importantly links creation
William Wordsworth. Prelude 1850. (New York: Norton, 1979) 3:60. William Blake. All Religions Are One. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) 1. 34 Northrop Frye. Fearful Symmetry. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947) 187. 35 Ibid., p. 188. 36 William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plates 20 and 3. 37 Ibid., 14. 38 Ibid., 98. 39 Ibid., 98:32.
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as dependent upon the perspective of the creator. Here, space and time do not subsume the individual in a predictive and prescriptive system. Liberation from universal systems does not deny the intellectual power of Newton or Locke; rather, they are celebrated as individual visionaries. Newton and the others are worth saving in Blakes poetic universe because they have been integral to the construction of that universe all along. The degree to which Blake and Newton are opposed by critics and scholars is not surprising, given that Blake himself sets up the oppositional paradigm. In The Song of Los, Urizen gives the Philosophy of Five Senses . . . into the hands of Newton and Locke.40 Newton is deployed as all that the Enlightenment had accumulated around him. Urizen is Blakes gure for reason, divorced from imagination. Urizen is horizon: he is limitation and division, and his knowledge of the world comes via massy weights . . . a line & a plummet . . . scales to weigh . . . [a] brazen quadrant . . . golden compasses.41 Newton is responsible for what Blake calls, Single vision. May God us keep, Blake writes, From Single vision and Newtons sleep.42 The single vision is that way of constructing knowledge and regarding experience which denies all but the empirical, and all but what the ve senses can deliver. Newton is deployed by Blake as a poetic character who represents not just a Newton, but a phenomenon that by Blakes time had taken on a tricky multidimensionality. Thackray writes, Newtonianism [meant] many things to many men.43 And Perry Miller argues that Newton himself was not quite a Newtonian.44 Ault writes that Newton was arguing for a single unied proto-philosophy and religion,45 and that One of Blakes central purposes in constructing anti-Newtonian narrative was to create in his readers an experience of the bankruptcy of the kinds of assumptions about the interconnections in knowledge, perception, and reality in the doctrine of the prisca sapentia.46 Central to Blakes creation of that anti-Newtonian narrative is the book: both as symbol and as material production. The book, the metal plate, is the site where Blake writes himself both into and out of the Newtonian world. Kuhn, writing on scientic revolutions, argues that textbooks expound the body of accepted theory [and] dene the legitimate problems and methods of a research eld.47 Prior to such textbooks, Kuhn argues, works like Aristotles Physica and Newtons Principia and Opticks performed a similar function. The books power to normalize lies partly in the way it can present perspective as xed and singular (or, put another way, in how it can function as a representational technology capable of erasing perspective). The Principia and Opticks gain cultural legitimacy from their
Ibid., 5:15. Ibid., 20:35ff. 42 Ibid., Letter to Butts, 722. 43 Arnold Thackray. Atoms and Powers. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 5. 44 Perry Miller. Bentley and Newton. Isaac Newtons Papers and Letter on Natural Philosophy. Ed. I Bernard Cohen. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958) 277. 45 Donald Ault. Incommensurability and Interconnection in Blakes Anti-Newtonian Text. Studies in Romanticism 16:3 (1977) 285. 46 Ibid., p. 277. 47 Thomas Kuhn. Structure of Scientic Revolutions. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970) 10.
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being grounded in the facts as established by mathematics. The printed page takes on, as metonym, the full weight of the argument written upon it. The ink is xed in place, sunk into the cotton laments; the pages are bound with string and glue and set in a hard shell. The material book is xed and contained. At least this seems to have informed Blakes view of the book, and of books as they circulated as cultural productions with particular internal values attached to them (that is, not only to their content, but to their ontological status as books). It is not surprising that the material act of production and the nal material product of that act play such a central role in Blakes poetic thinking, since he worked as an engraver. He dealt with acids and metal along with ink and water-colours. The page became the locus of metal and paint and as such must have become for Blake an immediately material metonym for the tension between the xity of single perspective on the one hand, and the uidity of imaginative vision on the other. Blake, in fact, begins his Songs of Innocence by way of introducing the tension he has encountered in xing his poetic vision on the page. The Piper/artist of the Introduction receives his inspiration to pipe, sing and nally write his happy songs.48 Yet the closer the creative act gets to the material page, the closer is the disappearance of inspiration. Inspiration calls, Piper sit thee down and write/In a book that all may joy to read. At that moment, he vanishd from my sight. And so the artist begins to transcribe vision into materiality: I staind the water clear,/And I wrote my happy songs/Every child may joy to hear. Blake captures the artists dilemma in the ambiguous wording of the line, I staind the water clear. The water, as visionary imagination, may be clear, but subsequently staind by the artists ink as vision is xed upon the page. Yet the water might be made clear by the artists vision, as though readers are offered greater clarity thanks to the artists effort. Blake is, in the end, willing to stain the waters, for at least every child may joy to hear his work, even given the materially constraining conditions of book production and selling. Without the xity of the book, poetic vision remains unorganized, inactive, and uncirculated. Perhaps what Blake has written regains some of its uidity when it is read, even read aloud, and thus the children hear his songs. The xity of the printed page is metonymic of the Newtonian world in The [First] Book of Urizen. Blakes preoccupation with books is, in fact, one dimension of his imaginative investigation of Newton, and as such a consideration of Blakes implication as bookmaker in The Book of Urizen helps to nuance the Blake and Newton tradition more generally. Urizen, as he is organized into human form, performs a cognitive and material organization in the act of writing: Here alone I in books formd of metals/Have written the secrets of wisdom . . . Lo! I unfold my darkness: and on/This rock, place with strong hand the Book/Of eternal brass, written in my solitude . . . One command, one joy, one desire,/One curse, one weight, one measure/One King, one God, one Law.49 In the Four Zoas, Urizen is pictured
William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. (New York: Anchor, 1988) 19. 49 Ibid., 4:2540. Curiously (perhaps perversely), Blake has not included Plate 4 in all the extant copies of Urizen; and nowhere in Blakes work do the characteristics most often attributed to Urizen (for example,
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Fig. 1. William Blakes Newton (1795). (Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY).

tracing the dreadful letters of his book, as though to strengthen their weakening argument by xing them even deeper into the metal surface. When faced with the material world his books have created, Urizen can only justify himself: Read my books.50 He all the while Traces the wonder of Futurity in horrible fear of the future.51 Urizen fears the future he has created, for his dependence upon the single perspective that his one command and one law require has paralyzed him into all but further measurement, division, and metallic re-inscription. Without the chaotic and destructive (though also reconstructive) energy of imagination, Urizen is stuck in his world of solid obstruction. The solidity of his world depends on Urizen keeping at bay the very chaos and destruction which could liberate him: And self balancd stretchd oer the void I alone, even I! the winds merciless Bound; but condensing, in torrents They fall & fall; strong I repelld The vast waves, & arose on the waters A wide world of solid obstruction
(footnote continued) that he represents measurement; imposes universality; writes his laws on books of metal; and denies multiplicity) crystalize more clearly. It is thus important to consider, even as I make my case for Blakes self-implication as a Urizenic bookmaker, that the very book in which this self-implication seems to occur remains textually and materially unstable, conditions very unlike those that Urizen desires for his own books. 50 Ibid., Four Zoas VII, 90. 51 Ibid., Zoas VII, 79.

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. . . Here I alone in books formd of metals Have written the secrets of wisdom52 In Blakes portrait of Newton, the character is a body of material potential (Fig. 1). He traces or measuresactivities also associated with Urizena Euclidean gure that both mimics and mirrors his own. In one sense, the gures body bends to produce the Euclidean triangle on the page, yet the placement of the scroll at the gures feet also causes the body to take the shape it does; he must bend if he is to reach it. The Newton of the picture is producing and produced by his measurement in a circular fashion not too distant from the inescapable circularity of Urizen measuring the world that he has produced; there seems no escape from the process of creation-as-measurement that each is caught in. Again, to nuance what might now be an overly simplied opposition between Urizen/Newton as measurers and Blake as creator, I stress that Blake does gure Newton and Urizen as creative. They are not denied that capacity in Blakes poetic vision, any than more Blake himself denies his own Urizenic involvement in producing books by the process of engraving on metal plates (a process that involved tracing, in the form of reengraving plates for re-use in the printing press, and measurement coupled with constant attention to the constraints imposed by the material size of the plate at hand). Yet in the Newton painting, set in apparent contrast to the denite outline of the gure Blake offers an ambiguous background which seems at once ocean, land, rock, vegetation and an accident of water-colour. Are these the vast waves Urizen repels to raise his wide world of solid obstruction?53 It is most tempting perhaps to align Blake (assuming Blake positions himself in the work intentionally or otherwise) with the indenite background whose uidity suggests the uid multiplicity denied by the Euclidean triangle. But in fact Blake could be aligning himself as much with the Newton gure as he is with the chaos of the setting. Peter Ackroyd has suggested that the Newton face is that of a younger, idealised, Blake: there is no reason to believe that Blake thought of Newton as a very different kind of writer from himself. Indeed there is an intensity about this image that suggests he recognised the creative importance of the scientists vision . . . Perhaps also, in this contemplative gure, there is some suggestion of the obsession and isolation that were part of Blakes own experience.54 Ultimately, Blake was too aware of himself as an artist in a Newtonian world to extricate himself completely from the material conditions of that world. Nor, does it seem, did Blake want to remove himself from the tensions and contradictions that accompanied his work as a poet and engraver. They were, in many ways, his source material for thinking through the uidity of poetic vision and the necessity of activating that vision by xing it on (or to) the printed page.
52 53

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Ibid., Urizen, 4:1926. Ibid., Urizen 4: 2324. 54 Peter Ackroyd. Blake. (London: Minerva, 1995) 201.

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So nally, how to reconcile Newton and Blake? Perhaps, as Blake has written, the Contrarieties are equally True.55 To align Blake with the uidity of imagination and Newton with the xity of the printed page is to miss some of the most important qualities in each creators work: the systematicity in Blakes work, that is, his willingness to engage his social and cultural moment in a concentrated and productive way through an art that required a degree of systematicity to produce its meaning; and the creative impulse in Newtons work to engage the problems of representation he, like any other creative artist, continually faced.

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William Blake. The Complete Poetry and Prose of Willam Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1988) Milton II, 30:3.

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