Muses, Madmen, and Prophets by Daniel B. Smith

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets by Daniel B. Smith

Author:Daniel B. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00


What is expressed here is an aspect of poetic creation that hasn’t changed in nearly three thousand years. Language can never be separated from the lungs and from the breath. It was first spoken; in its original state, language is audible speech. Yet as Davison admits, inadvertently or not, to place an emphasis on the aurality of language in the modern world smacks of nostalgia. In the middle of an encomium for breath, he lapses into the past tense, as if he is making what he knows to be a conservative plea for a return to a purer time, a time in which body and language were more intimately related.

This sense of nostalgia reflects an important truth about the history of voice-hearing. As shown, the mournfulness that is sometimes expressed by religious thinkers about the loss of the culture’s ability to truly hear, whatever values are woven into that act, is misplaced. At the same time, hearing has lost something vital, so that it is often necessary to speak of it as if it were in quotation marks—as something internal rather than external, as “hearing.”

This shift from literal to metaphorical auditory experience is often overlooked, and one consequence has been that the reports of voice-hearers have frequently been misinterpreted. William Blake is a case in point. During his lifetime, Blake frequently claimed that his art came from external, divine sources. About his epic poem Milton, he wrote to one of his patrons: “I have written this poem from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will. [The] Time it has taken in writing was thus renderd Non Existent…& an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life all producd without Labour or Study.”18 And later: “I may praise [the poem] since I dare not pretend to be any other than the Secretary the Authors are in Eternity.”19 To another patron Blake wrote that he preferred the countryside to the city because there the “voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen.”20

In exchange for these confessions, Blake was often accused of insanity—which was no light matter considering that several of his contemporaries, such as William Cowper and Christopher Smart, were for a time incarcerated in asylums. One reviewer, commenting on Blake’s illustrations, described them as “the offspring of morbid fancy,” and of Blake’s poetry wrote, “Should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat.”21 Others, though less harsh, were no less dismissive. Late in life Blake was walking down a London street when a young girl asked her father who he was. “He is a strange man,” her father replied. “He thinks he sees spirits.”22 What these critics missed was that Blake was not speaking literally. He was describing an internal, psychological experience in archaically external terms—and self-consciously so. There is evidence for this in the



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