Robert F. Gleckner

Years ago, I was introduced to the serious study of William Blake’s poetry by Robert Gleckner’s The Piper and the Bard (Wayne State UP, 1959). Still, today, I think it might be difficult to find a clearer or more helpful introduction.

Back then, I had learned to classify Blake as one of the pre-Romantics, along with Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, James Thomson, and perhaps William Cowper. Textbooks and college courses were organized that way. The profession had not yet agreed to identify an Age of Sensibility that was one of the major focuses of the Eighteenth Century in British Literature. So these guys came before Wordsworth and Coleridge, but clearly didn’t belong with Alexander Pope and Dr. Samuel Johnson. Put them in a borderland, and call it pre-romanticism. That’s what I had learned as an undergraduate.

But then I discovered Blake on my own. In my teaching I wanted to give him his proper place: as the first and most visionary of the British Romantics. Struggling with my own perceptions and misperceptions, I ran across the newly published book by Gleckner. Now, I wish I had read more of Blake’s prophetic works on my own before I discovered Gleckner, but I was about to teach Blake for the first time to college sophomores. The Piper and the Bard became my primer.

Writing in the 1950s, Gleckner was obviously working out of two separate and, in a way, opposing traditions, both of them relatively recent. First, he was influenced by the New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren. Still actually rather “new,” it emphasized close textual analysis, with particular attention to linguistic subtlety, structural complexity, organic unity, ambiguity and paradox in serious poetic texts. John Donne and T. S. Eliot were the guiding stars, prime exemplars of “serious” poetry. Gleckner seems determined to add Blake to their firmament.

Blake studies, on the other hand, had been advanced to a new depth in the seminal work, Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye, in 1947. Applying what he would later define and defend as mythic or archetypal criticism (see his Anatomy of Criticism, 1959), he examined Blake’s lifetime commitment to a “fourfold vision” and the recurrent images in which this vision was embodied. Gleckner, then, used Blake’s vision as described by Frye in his close textual analysis of the subtleties of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as well as of four other longer works from roughly the same period of his writing.

Nowadays, one might want to refine, expand, and extend virtually all of Gleckner’s readings, but at the time his study was a major breakthrough in clarity and relevance. In his first two chapters, “The Structure of Blake’s Poetic” and “The Imagination,” in effect, he summarizes Frye. He explores the “fourfold vision” succinctly but in some detail: Ulro, “single vision, or Newton’s sleep,” which he found hardly relevant to the Songs; Generation, or experience, the double vision of ordinary human experience, “the human form human” or the “human form sexual” ; Beulah, or innocence, the threefold vision of children still at one with all creation, and lovers, recreating a sense of oneness with another; and Eden, the fourfold vision, what Gleckner calls a “higher innocence,” or an imaginative sense of the oneness of humankind and of all realities. The voice of he Piper, according to Gleckner, expresses the imaginative vision in innocence; the voice of the Bard does the same from the standpoint of experience. They are not dissonant, but complementary voices, each in its own way imaginative but limited.

Between the first of Blake’s illuminated works, The Songs of Innocence (of 1789) and the parallel Songs of Innocence and Experience (of 1794), Gleckner explores Tiriel, as a prophetic revelation of the state of experience; The Book of Thel, as a spiritual failure of an Innocent; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as Blake’s quarrel with Emmanuel Swedenborg; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, as a tragic vision; and two songs originally included in Innocence, but then shifted to Experience, as a passage to experience ("The Little Girl Lost" and "The Little Girl Found").

But it is in his close reading of the Songs that Gleckner achieves his triumph. For example, in his reading of the Introduction to each, he delineates the contrasting voices of the Piper and the Bard. In the “Holy Thursday” and “Chimney Sweeper” songs, he shows the clear demarcation between innocence and experience. Naturally the songs of experience are more complex and subtle; hence, they reward his close analysis: for example, “The Garden of Love,” “The Sick Rose,” and “The Tyger.” However, “The Divine Image” in Innocence incorporates a sophisticated insight into that state; hence, according to Gleckner, “The achieving of such precision and symbolic power finally led Blake to decide that the lyric could [italicized] carry the weight of the state of experience after all . . . .” By far the most complex of the Songs of Innocence is “The Little Black Boy,” in which love, or “the human form divine,” is almost incredibly achieved.

Gleckner taught me to explicate Blake. Even his four brief references to “The Clod and the Pebble,” side glances really, showed me how to use that poem as a keynote in leading students to understand the limitations of both innocence and experience. Marriage, or the creation of a new oneness, is the unstated theme of “higher innocence” implied in that poem.

Two or three major inadequacies in The Piper and the Bard are obvious to Blake readers now: Gleckner does not deal at all with the designs, rendering all his interpretations as only partial. Consequently, he misses another set of parallels that are clearly as explicit and as meaningful as the verbal ones; for example, see the blossoms in “Infant Joy” and “The Sick Rose.” The New Critical obsession with ambiguity and paradox may have colored some of his readings and have led him to neglect what are apparently the poems that are more accessible to the common reader; for example, “Infant Joy,” “The Blossom,” and, in Experience, “The Fly” (which he admits to omitting because “I don’t know how to read” it).

But, early on, in his preface, he includes a quotation from Blake himself that clearly demands explication de texte, both for poems and designs:

“All art is founded, I intreat then, that the Spectator will attend to the Hands & Feet, to the Lineaments of the Countenances; they are all descriptive of Character, & not a line is drawn without intention, & 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.” [Vision of the Last Judgment]

What a splendid beginning Gleckner made with his precise and thoughtful reading of Blake’s Songs.… (altro)