Excess in Blake's poetry

Résumé du document

The usage of excess is a seducing and appealing concept, and therefore has to be studied cautiously. Essentially, the term ?excess' is used to describe amounts that are greater than needed, allowed or usual. It can also be associated with a behavior that is unacceptable because it is considered extreme and immoral. Moreover, there is no doubt that what have always retained, disrupted things are the excesses; and what is commonplace or moderated is invisible. Thus, the excess portrayed on William Blake's poetry might be based on a new vision of the world that went against the institutions of the society of the time. However, from an artistic point of view, excess ought to be understood as an outburst. Consequently, excess should not be taken negatively, but should depend on intensity, quantity, and originality. Therefore, to what extent we can consider that Blake's poetry, especially in the two studied anthologies entitled the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is the point of discussion here.

Extraits

[...] The Tyger, as for him, is much dualist. Contrary to what we may think, the Tyger does not symbolize evil, but rather a source of energy. The Tyger embodies ferocity, divinity and beauty. It actually has multiple aspects, and therefore celebrates the artistic creation and the poetic imagination. Consequently, these two states exist as a cycle, an interaction, and create tension, movement and energy, in order to access a new vision of the world and of the individual. Blake's poetry reaches another dimension, which is the one of spirituality; his great achievement was to uphold the image of a spiritual man in world dominated by material forces. [...]

[...] Blake constantly reconsidered the interplay both between the two states of the soul and among the songs that convey these states: 'the sick rose'/'blossom', little girl lost'/‘the little girl found' etc . In order not to make amalgams, Blake blurred the marks, and made echoes between the two concepts. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘Excess of joy weeps, Excess of sorrow laughs'. Furthermore, Blake uses emblematic images that are also quite ambiguous and multiple, for instance the Bard and the Tyger. The vision of the Bard comprehends both innocence and experience, and uses the notion of cycles. [...]

[...] Romanticism is characterized by reliance on imagination and subjectivity, idealization of nature and exaltation of feelings and emotions. Rousseau in his Confessions simply said felt before I thought'. Therefore, the body had a fundamental place in the reading and writing of the romantic poetry. Blake's poetry is not only about words, but also about the rising and emancipation of the senses, that is to say a physical implication. Indeed, his words were sang, danced and carved. Blake wanted to avoid blank spaces between his poems, and integrated texts and designs in his anthologies. [...]

[...] sweet Love! was thought a crime' Little Girl Lost'. Moreover, his songs, subtitled ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul', and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, based on the thought that ‘without contraries is no progression', are obviously devoted to a deep analysis of the human soul. It would be a mistake, as I've already said, to think Blake considered innocence and experience as antithesis. They were certainly different and contrary notions, but they were in interaction, and co-existed, which reveals a particular vision of the world and of human beings. [...]

[...] Besides, as the title of the work indicates it, his poems, before being poems, were songs. Indeed, the fluidity of his lines obviously reaches musicality. In ‘Introduction', taken from the Songs of Innocence, the reading is much rhythmic and melodic: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb/So I piped with merry chear/Piper pipe that song again/So I piped, he wept to hear'. Blake's own tradition of singing out his poetry even endured, if we refer to Allen Ginsberg, who, in 1960, set Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music. [...]