The Designs

This chapter begins with a familiar refrain, since critical studies of Blake's verse continue to appear which ignore his visual art, or pay it only lip service: Blake meant the poems and designs of his Illuminated Books to remain together. When picture and poem are separated the result is 'Loss of some of the best things.' The designs, he writes, turning the equation around, 'perfect accompany Poetical Personifications and Acts, without which poems they never could have been Executed.' ¹ Nor would he have approved of readers who treat the designs as so much attractive but irrelevant decoration. Painting, he believed, ought to be 'as poetry and music are, elevated to its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception' (DC: E532). Pictures ought to be studied as closely as poems:

I intreat that the Spectator will attend to the Hands and Feet the Lineaments of the Countenances they are all descriptive of Character and not a line is drawn without intention and that most discriminate and particular <as Poetry admits not a Letter that is insignificant so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass <insignificant> much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark>.

(VLJ: E550) ² Explicit statements of this sort are backed by great personal sacrifice. Critics who fail to read the poems in light of the designs forget how high a price Blake paid to create his illuminated 38pages '— in time, money, patronage, friendship and spiritual energy.' ³ 'I know myself both Poet and Painter,' Blake insists, defying those (often, as in this case, important patrons) who would prevent his 'more assiduous pursuit of both arts.' ⁴ Only a few sympathetic contemporaries understood the nature of the designs: Coleridge spoke of 'Blake's poesies, metrical and graphic'; Robinson mentions 'poetic pictures of the highest beauty and sublimity'; the anonymous author of 'The Inventions of W.B., Painter and Poet' (Keynes thinks it C. A. Tulk), finds 'The figures surrounding and enclosing the poems . . . are equally tinged by a poetical idea'; to Allan Cunningham, writing in the same year, 1830, text and design are 'intertwined . . . so closely in his compositions, that they cannot well be separated.' ⁵