Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Monday 9 January 2017

Silly Willy Blake

"The Tygers of Wrath
are" most certainly not
"wiser than the horses of instruction."

4 comments:

Marcus Billson said...

Blake's willy wasn't silly.

Wofl said...

Well, if you knew what his poor wife had to endure (from grotesque positions to Swedenborgian orgies) you would conclude that the ridiculously-overrated pseudo-naive poet was ruled by his willy. It was he, and not Lord Byron, who was mad, bad and dangerous to know.

Marcus Billson said...

Where is the provenance for "grotesque positions", by which I assume you mean "sexual positions"? And Swedenborgian orgies? Blake is underrated rather than overrated, by far the least read, understood, or appreciated of the so-called Romantics. His wife had a nervous breakdown in middle age precisely because he wanted "to spread his love" around and engage in such antics, but he didn't for her sake. She got better. Being ruled by one's willy is hardly being silly. Strange how you are so judgmental in calling him pseudo-naive. He was an avid political exponent of the two momentous revolutions in his lifetime--the American and the French--something not one of the other Romantics dared be so bold about, and his depictions of the blight of poverty in London are really nowhere else in the poetry of his time. On top of that, he was a most original and accomplished graphic artist.

Wofl said...

"Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination" is the source of my comments on his sexual obsession.
The quality of his poetry and his graphics is very much a matter of opinion.
I do not rate them. The one is faux-simple and the other simply unappealing to me.
He may have advanced the art of printing (with hand-colouring), but I find his prints too obsessive.