11 - Blake and the Pastoral-Georgic Tradition

Summary

As often with handbooks, one of the points of interest with William Blake in Context1 from Cambridge University Press (CUP) is what it omits. The section on ‘Form, Genre, and Mode’ includes essays on Comedy, Prophecy, Rhythm, Songs, Sound, Sublimity and System, Myth and Symbol. There is nothing, however, on the poetry of sen-sibility from the eighteenth century: the didactic-encyclopaedic, the mock-heroic, the topographic, as well as the pastoral and georgic. In the section on ‘Creative Cross-Currents’,David Duff's entry on ‘The Eighteenth Century and Romanticism’ restricts itself to Blake's slim volume of juvenilia Poetical Sketches (1783). There are also no index entries for John Barrell and Raymond Williams, still probably the most influential British commentators on the ideological representation of landscape. This is indicative perhaps of the waning interest in Marxist historiography: E. P. Thompson gets three passing mentions, and solely on Blake's possible connections to the Muggletonians rather than his more influential account of the formation of working-class conscious-ness. Somewhat disappointing as well is the fact that there is not a single reference to Marilyn Butler's Mapping Mythologies, despite her clear investment in the eighteenth-century genealogies of Blake's work, and despite the blurb CUP endorsed in 2015 depicting her as a ‘towering presence’.

Certainly, several aspects of Butler's posthumous volume deserve closer consideration. While her argument is explicitly directed against American idealist-philosophical critics (primarily Frye, Bloom and Hartman), whom she indicts for their ahistoricism, she also takes aim at the British Marxist narrative of eighteenth-century pastoral and georgic verse as simply an occlusion of class oppression. To rehabilitate the pastoral-georgic tradition, Butler reinstates a ‘Country’ party, whose perspective she argues was most fully articulated in the poetry of sensi-bility running from Thomson, via Akenside, Collins, Macpherson and Chatterton, through to Blake. She defines this group of writers in three ways. First, a ‘strong provincial ideology’ addresses a newly emergent readership excluded from high politics still centred on life at court. Secondly, a physical environment set in the regional periphery is often depicted in primitivist terms. Thirdly, it is a backdrop that is supple-mented by an alternative antiquarian genealogy of national culture (most vividly exemplified in the bardic persona of Iolo Morganwg adopted by Edward Williams).