Amongst the early English Romantics, two writers in particular were infl uenced by Boehme: William Blake (1757-1827) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Along with William Wordsworth (1770-1850), these men are often listed together as avatars of the early Romantic movement in English poetry. Although Wordsworth owned copies of Boehme and occasionally paraphrased him, it was Blake and Coleridge who displayed the deeper affi nity with his theosophy. 1 In this chapter, I examine fi rst how Blake’s reading of Boehme infl uenced his works, and conclude by contextualizing Blake’s engagement with Boehme within English Romanticism at the turn of the eighteenth century, with particular reference to Coleridge’s response to Boehme. 2

I BLAKE AND BOEHME

We do not know when Blake fi rst read Boehme, and no edition of Boehme owned by him is known today. 3 Blake nowhere discusses Boehme critically. We have no annotated copy belonging to him, and there are only two direct references to Boehme in all of Blake’s works and known letters. 4 A note made by the journalist and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson in 1825, two years before Blake’s death, indicates that Blake, like his contemporary Coleridge, knew the Law edition: Crabb Robinson here notes that Blake praised “the fi gures in Law’s transl.n as being very beautiful,” thought that “Mich:Angelo co d not have done better,” and called Boehme “a divinely inspired man.” 5 This, however, is the only known contemporary source directly quoting Blake on Boehme. 6 We do not know exactly which of Boehme’s works Blake knew, although there are indications that he owned more than one edition: in a letter from 1864, Frederick Tatham (who inherited many of Blake’s books from Blake’s wife Catherine) notes that Blake owned “a large collection of works of the mystical writers, Jacob Behmen, Swedenborg, and others,” but no specifi c titles are mentioned. 7 Given the availability of Boehme’s works in English, it is not hard to imagine that Blake would have owned other Boehme editions than the

“huge quartos” of the Law edition 8 —perhaps some of the cheap, readily available collections of mystical or prophetic texts in which Boehme was often included. 9

What we can discern, however, is an original and imaginative appropriation of Behmenist motifs in Blake’s texts and images, a reception of Boehme through creative engagement with his writings. It seems that Blake-like Coleridge, as we shall see-engaged with Boehme from early on. In one of the two direct references to Boehme in the Blake corpus, Blake mentions him in a letter to his friend, the artist John Flaxman (1755-1826). Flaxman was, as Blake himself had briefl y been, connected with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in London, and in a poem that is included in the letter and intended to praise Flaxman, Blake lists some of his poetic-prophetic infl uences:

We note here that Blake mentions Boehme together with Paracelsus and that the two are placed in the company of the poets Milton and Shakespeare as well as the prophets Ezra and Isaiah (all of whom Blake admired) as sources of inspiration-early sources, that is, since he appears to have been familiar with them from before “The American War” began in 1775, when he was seventeen. 11

Further indications that Blake engaged with Boehme at an early age are found in the Behmenist complexion of Blake’s fi rst two illustrated books All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion (both 1788). 12 In All Religions are One —the title alone is quite a statement-Blake proposes that “As all men are alike (tho’ infi nitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source/ The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius” (E2). These lines may be understood as echoing the ecumenical, inclusive outlook of Boehme and the Behmenists. 13 But they have also been argued to refer to Boehme’s concept of der rechte Mensch in the phrase “the true Man.” 14 Furthermore, there might be visual connections between the Behmenist tradition and All Religions are One , in that this is where Blake-probably for the fi rst time-uses the visual trope of a centrally placed hovering bird with extended wings. 15 This bird is similar to the dove shown, for example, on the title page of Boehme’s Three Principles of the Divine Essence in Theosophia Revelata (1730) and later seems to become partly translated into one of the central fi gures in Blake’s visual language: namely the hovering fi gure with extended arms, which denotes (divine) creativity. 16

Blake’s early engagement with Boehme is also evident a few years later, when Blake produces his fi rst illuminated book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Here we fi nd the second of Blake’s two direct references to Boehme. Blake once again puts Boehme in distinguished company, mentioning him (as in the letter to Flaxman) together with Paracelsus and Shakespeare. As before, this occurs within a Swedenborgian context. Indeed, one of the central themes in The Marriage is Blake’s critique of Swedenborg, whom Blake accuses of having degenerated from an original living religious vision to a hardened and unimaginative religious system . Blake’s critique comes immediately after his own period of involvement with the New Jerusalem Church in London and represents Blake’s break with Swedenborg. 17 “Any man of mechanical talents,” Blake writes,

may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infi nite number. But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.