This book demonstrates the way in which William Blake aligned his idiosyncratic concept of the Selfhood – the lens through which the despiritualised subject beholds the material world – with the atomistic materialism of the Epicurean school as it was transmitted through the first-century BC Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. By addressing this philosophical debt, this study sets out a threefold re-evaluation of Blake’s work: to clarify the classical stream of Blake’s philosophical heritage through Lucretius; to return Blake to his historical moment, a thirty-year period from 1790 to 1820 which has been described as the second Lucretian moment in England; and to employ a new exegetical model for understanding the phenomenological parameters and epistemological frameworks of Blake’s mythopoeia. Accordingly, it is revealed that Blake was not only aware of classical atomistic cosmogony and sense-based epistemology but that he systematically mapped postlapsarian existence onto an Epicurean framework.
Author(s): Joshua Schouten de Jel
Series: The New Antiquity
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 276
City: Cham
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: The Epicurean and Lucretian Slur: Francis Bacon
1 Blake’s Marginalia
2 English Translations of Lucretius
3 Bacon’s Atomistic Tradition
4 Pan, Cœlum, and Cupid
References
Chapter 3: The Epicurean and Lucretian Slur: Isaac Newton
1 Bacon, Newton, and Locke: The Epicurean Trinity
2 The Polypus
3 Epicurean Animism
4 ‘Newton’
5 ‘Newtons Particles of light’
6 The Rainbow and the Peacock
7 The Newtonian Rainbow
References
Chapter 4: Simulacra and the Selfhood
1 Epicurean Epistemology and Blake’s Visions
2 Lucretian Dreams
3 The Book of Thel
4 ‘Theotormon is a sick mans dream’
References
Chapter 5: Urizenic Phantasiae
1 Lucretian Cosmology and the Dart Metaphor
2 Urizenic Phantasiae
3 ‘Dark revolving in silent activity’
4 The Urizenic Architect
5 Hobbesian Epistemology
6 ‘Urizens self-begotten armies’
References
Chapter 6: The Cosmic Chains of the Machina Mundi
1 Weaving Cosmic Chains
2 ‘Satans Watch-Fiends’
3 The Cosmic Clock
4 ‘The Ancient of Days’
5 The Sun/Son and Heliotropic Plants
References
Index
