ABSTRACT
When he was 20 years old, he met an Englishman Bernard Leach, with whom he exchanged letters intensely discussing William Blake’s work and life, among other things, for decades to come. Out of many geniuses Yanagi adored in his younger years, William Blake seems to be the ideal exemplar whom Yanagi longed most to emulate. His yearnings to be one with these artistic geniuses such as William Blake permeated every page of his writing, and one can easily discern his admiration for these geniuses’ ease and freedom with which they expressed their artistic prowess and their “emanating” talents. Besides writing a 400-page monograph on Blake, he and his friend published a monthly journal on Blake and Walt Whitman for a year or so. He claimed, “Blake’s most revolutionary ideas are in poems that celebrated freedom (jiyū),” referring to Blake’s poem “London” (Yanagi 1914; reprinted in 1981: 82-83), which depicted the condition of human beings who are shackling themselves with artificial rules, being in the state of selfdenial and self-deception. He read into Blake’s poetry a universal human yearning for “emancipation from the tyranny of customs, and freedom to the flesh and the soul” (92) and Blake’s own yearning for “complete” freedom and self-affirmation. (93)
Explaining the spirit of his monograph on William Blake published in 1914 to a friend and colleague, Yanagi cited Walt Whitman’s words (in its English original): “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes” (quoted in Yanagi 1981: 626). Yanagi explained to the friend that he never meant his work on William Blake to be an objective introduction of William Blake, and he was well aware that it contained numerous contradictions and errors due to Yanagi’s subjective interpretations of Blake and his work. However, he wrote, that was precisely the point of the first-ever book on Blake in Japan. He proclaimed that the book was more about Yanagi himself trying to live and express himself through the figure of Blake, and what he wrote about was a Blake who lived inside Yanagi. He anticipated that there would be countless works on Blake in the future and that while they will be academic and scholarly, they will not be an expression of individuality (of Blake and the author’s own) in a way his own book was (Yanagi
1981: 627). He relentlessly sang praises for Blake’s rebellion against all forms of repression and control and saw all his rebellion as an homage to human beings’ infinity and emanation: “Freedom and liberation was the only Golden Gate that a man should enter.” (1914, 1981: 19) He saw that humanity and divinity are one in Blake and believed that an impulse to be free from rules and reason would release human creativity and imagination. He wrote his work on Walt Whitman in the same spirit, and the word freedom (jiyū) and liberation (kaihō) were ubiquitous in his works on these individual geniuses.
