The usual label attached to Blake’s poetry is “mystical,”
which is a word he never uses. Yet “mysticism,” when the word is not simply an
elegant variant of “misty” or “mysterious,” means a certain kind of religious
technique difficult to reconcile with anyone’s poetry. It is a form of
spiritual communion with God which is by its nature incommunicable to anyone
else, and which soars beyond faith into direct apprehension. But to the
artist, qua artist, this apprehension is not an end in itself
but a means to another end, the end of producing his poem. The mystical
experience for him is poetic material, not poetic form, and must be
subordinated to the demands of that form. From the point of view of any genuine
mystic this would be somewhat inadequate, and one who was both mystic and poet,
never finally deciding which was to be the adjective and which the noun, might
be rather badly off. If he decided for poetry, he would perhaps do better to
use someone else’s mystical experiences, as Crashaw did St. Teresa’s.
I do not say that these difficulties are insurmountable, or
that there are no such things as mystical poets. But they are very rare birds,
and most of the poets generally called mystics might better be called
visionaries, which is not quite the same thing. This is a word that Blake uses,
and uses constantly. A visionary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual
world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured
and charged with a new intensity of symbolism. This is quite consistent with
art, because it never relinquishes the visualization which no artist can do
without. It is a perceptive rather than a contemplative attitude of mind; but
most of the greatest mystics, St. John of the Cross and Plotinus for example,
find the symbolism of visionary experience not only unnecessary but a positive
hindrance to the highest mystical contemplation. This suggests that mysticism
and art are in the long run mutually exclusive, but that the visionary and the
artist are allied.
Such a distinction cannot be absolute, of course, and one
type blends into the other. But Blake was so completely a visionary and an
artist that I am inclined to think that most true mystics would reject his
attitude as vulgar and insensitive. Porphyry speaks of his master Plotinus as
having four times in his life, with great effort and relentless discipline,
achieved a direct apprehension of God. Blake says:
I am in God’s presence night & day,
And he never turns his face away.
To Blake, the spiritual world was a continuous source of energy: he harnessed spiritual power as an engineer harnesses water power and used it to drive his inspiration: he was a spiritual utilitarian. He had the complete pragmatism of the artist, who, as artist, believes nothing but is looking only for what he can use. If Blake gets into the rapt circle of mystics it is only as Mercury got into the Pantheon, elbowing his way through with cheerful Cockney assurance, his pockets bulging with paper, then producing his everlasting pencil and notebook and proceeding to draw rapid sketches of what his more reverent colleagues are no longer attempting to see.