Abstract
In a letter to Thomas Butts dated 25 April 1803 Blake wrote:
I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say to you. My heart is full of futurity.1 I percieve that the sore travel which has been given me these three years leads to Glory & Honour. I rejoice & I tremble ‘I am fearfully & wonderfully made’.I had been reading the cxxxix Psalm a little before your Letter arrived. I take your advice. I see the face of my Heavenly Father he lays his Hand upon my Head & gives a blessing to all my works why should I be troubled why should my heart & flesh cry out. I will go on in the Strength of the Lord through Hell will I sing forth his Praises. that the Dragons of the Deep my praise him & that those who dwell in darkness & on the sea coasts may be gathered into his Kingdom. Excuse my perhaps too great Enthusiasm (E, 729)2
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Notes
An echo perhaps of Charles Wesley’s paraphrase of the Book of Common Prayer, Psalm 45: ‘My heart is full of Christ/Its glorious matter to declare.’ See John R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford, 1999), 233.
See Jennifer Jesse, William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness (New York, 2013), 217–239 (223).
See Andrew Lincoln, ‘Restoring the Nation to Christianity: Blake and the Aftermyth of Revolution’ in Steve Clark and David Worall, eds., Blake, Nation and Empire (Basingstoke, 2006), 153–66 (153).
For the view that Blake underwent a religious conversion see Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse & Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 2003), 70. For a more cautious and sceptical view see
Jean Hagstrum, ‘“The Wrath of the Lamb”: A Study of William Blake’s Conversions’ in Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds., From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays for F. A. Pottle (Oxford, 1965). See also
Henry Summerfield, A Guide to the Books of William Blake for Innocent and Experienced Readers (London, 1998), 131–56 and
Margaret Bottral, The Divine Vision: A Study of Blake’s Interpretation of Christianity (Rome, 1950), 28: ‘he (Blake) came to realise more and more clearly that the salvation of man cannot be accomplished merely by political and social revolutions. The intractable factor is always the human heart. Revolution cannot be a substitute for regeneration.’
See John Wesley, John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, Albert Outler and Richard Heitzenrater, eds (Nashville, 1987).
See Michael Ferber, ‘Blake’s Idea of Brotherhood’, PMLA, 93: 3 (May 1978), 438–47.
Martha Winburn England and John Sparrow, Hymns Unbidden: Donne, Herbert, Blake, Emily Dickinson and the Hymnographers (New York, 1966), 106.
Letters, Vol. 5, John Telford, ed., The Letters of John Wesley Volume 5 (London, 1931), 141. Cited in
Isabel Rivers, Reason, and Grace, Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 Volume I: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge, 2005), 245.
‘Christian Perfection’ (1741) in John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, Albert Outler and Richard Heitzenrater, eds (Nashville, 1987), 73.
Ibid., 49. Crabb Robinson documented that ‘Speaking of the Atonement in the ordinary Calvinistic sense, he (Blake) said “It is a horrible doctrine; if another pay your debt, I do not forgive it.”’ See Crabb Robinson’s Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb Etc. Being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson, Morley, Edith J., ed., (Manchester, 1922), 26. My parenthesis.
Jonathan Roberts, ‘St. Paul’s Gifts to Blake’s Aesthetic: “O Human Imagination, O Divine Body”’, The Glass, 15 (2003), 8–18 (8).
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003), 70; see
Richard. E. Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (Gainesville, 1983), Chapters 1 and 2.
Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (New York, 1999), 8–9.
See also Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, 2006), 41.
See Charles Wesley, ‘“Awake, Thou That Sleepest”’ (1742) in John Wesley’s Sermons: An Anthology, Albert Outler and Richard Heitzenrater, eds (Nashville, 1987),
Hunt, Leigh, An Attempt to Shew the Folly and Danger of Methodism in a Series of Essays, First Published in the Weekly Paper Called The Examiner (London, 1809), 2. See Mee, John, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2003), 71–72.
See Foster S. Damon, A Blake Dictionary (London, 1965), 172.
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© 2014 Michael Farrell
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Farrell, M. (2014). The New Birth. In: Blake and the Methodists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137455505_9
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