WILLIAM BLAKE
he went wrong it was as an intellectual and not as a poet.
Take, for example, his notion of going naked. Here I think Blake is merely a sort of hard theorist. Here, in spite of his imagination and his laughter, there was even a touch of the prig about him. He was obscene on principle. So to a great extent was Walt Whitman. A dictionary is supposed to contain all words, so it has to contain coarse words. "Leaves of Grass" was planned to praise all things, so it had to praise gross things. There was something of this pedantic perfection in Blake's escapades. As the hygienist insists on wearing Jäger clothes, he insisted on wearing no clothes. As the æsthete must wear sandals, he must wear nothing. He is not really lawless at all; he is bowing to the law of his own outlawed logic.
There is nothing at all poetical in this revolt. William Blake was a great and real poet; but in this point he was simply unpoetical. Walt Whitman was a great and real poet; but on this point he was prosaic and priggish. Two extraordinary men are not poets because they tear away the veil from sex. On the contrary
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