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2. SOME ADDITIONS TO A BLAKE BIBLIOGRAPHY
—. “Dinner by the Amateurs of Vegetable Diet (Extracted from an Old Paper),” The London Magazine and Theatrical Inquisitor, IV (1821), 31-35. Reprinted in The Unextinguished Hearth: Shelley and His Contemporary Critics, ed. Newman Ivey White (Durham, N.C., 1938; New York, 1966), pp. 263-269.
This witty sketch contains the following reference which may or may not be to Blake (Professor White suggests that it is): “Mr. P[ercy] B[ysshe] S[helley] then gave, ‘the memory of Nebuchadnezzar, and may all begin page 5 | ↑ back to top kings, like him, be speedily sent to graze with their brother brutes.’ This toast excited much commotion, but was drank at last, without the adjunct, which it was deemed prudent to omit. Mr. B[lake], of Bible-celebrity, observed, that in supposing Nebuchadnezzar to have fed on grass, we are not borne out by the Hebrew text. This he would prove in his intended translation of the Bible. He also took occasion to declare his opinion, that the longevity of mankind before the flood was owing to their feeding on vegetables, not on raw meat, as had been erroneously supposed; but these were points he trusted would be cleared up in his treatise on ‘Antedeluvian Cherubim.’” (p. 267) If White is correct in his speculation, the first effort to link Blake and Shelley comes earlier than Deborah Dorfman supposes (see Blake in the Nineteenth Century: His Reputation as a Poet from Gilchrist to Yeats [New Haven, 1969], pp. 50-51).
Barker, Arthur E. “‘ . . . And on His Crest Sat Horror’: Eighteenth-Century Interpretations of Milton’s Sublimity and His Satan,” UTQ,[e] XI (1941-42), 421-236.
Barker sees “the paradoxical interpretation” of Milton set forth by Blake and Shelley “as the fruit of a steady (though complex) growth.”
Conway, Moncure D.[e] Bibliotheca Diabolica; being a Choice of Selection of the most valuable books relating to the Devil . . . (New York, 1874).
This comprehensive survey of the literature of diabolism lists The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a “serious and meditative” study of the “mystery of evil.”
E[liot], T. S. “The Naked Man” (A Review of Charles Gardner’s William Blake the Man), The Athenaeum (February 13, 1920), 208-209.
This review contains a large portion of Eliot’s essay on Blake published in The Sacred Wood (1920).
Ginsberg, Allen. Interview printed under the title of “Allen Ginsberg” in Writers at Work: The ‘Paris Review’ Interviews, 3rd Ser., ed. George Plimpton and Alfred Kazin (New York, 1967), pp. 279-320.
See esp. comments on Blake’s idea of Jerusalem (p. 299), on Ginsberg’s “ecstatic experience” from Blake (pp. 300 ff.), on “Ah, Sun-flower” (pp. 304-305), on “The Little Girl Lost” (pp. 305-306).
Huckabay, Calvin. “The Satanist Controversy of the Nineteenth Century” in Studies in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Waldo F. McNeir[e] (Baton Rouge, 1962) pp. 197-210.
Huckabay traces the idea that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost “from its inception in William Blake’s The Marriage of begin page 6 | ↑ back to top Heaven and Hell to its fruition in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Milton . . . .”
Werblowsky, R. J. Zwi. “Appendix A: [On Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]” in Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan (with a Preface by C. G. Jung) (London, 1952), pp. 107-110; also pp. 3, 61, 64, 81, 99, 101.
Werblowsky contributes significantly to our understanding of “Blake’s great contribution to Milton criticism” but is misleading, sometimes confused, in many particulars, esp. in his insistence that Blake held the Lucifer-Prometheus myth together by accepting Satan’s vitality “whilst ignoring the significance of his evil.”
Wilson, Colin. The Glass Cage: An Unconventional Tale of Mystery (London, 1966).
Novel. An imaginative interpretation of Blake’s relevance to the modern world. A commentary on this novel (by Stuart Curran) is forthcoming in the Fall, 1969, issue of Blake Studies.