0.1 ‘Embryos of Existence, Free’: Romanticism and the Rise of Developmental Biology

Exploring William Blake’s vast body of literary and visual works in the contexts of Romantic-era biology, this book begins with a difficult but important question: What is life? This is a question posed, indeed, by Blake himself through the desperate voice of Albion as he laments the futility of earthly life:

Does life really begin with conception and end with death? Is there more to life than this? For many eighteenth-century readers, a comforting answer to this question could be found articulated in a work well known to Blake, Edward Young’s popular and influential long poem Night Thoughts (1742–45). According to this poem, which Blake later illustrates, earthly vitality is but a false shadow of the real life of the spirit, which only truly begins to unfold after the death of the physical body. The grave is, paradoxically, ‘populous’ and ‘vital’, a place where the dead ‘live! they greatly live! A life on earth/ Unkindled, unconveiv’d!’.Footnote ² As Young writes, material existence is:

This book argues that throughout his career, Blake worked seriously through the tension between the materialist account of the body questioned by Albion and the idea expressed by Young that life must be identified not with vulnerable flesh but with the virtual “bud of being” hidden within it, and which indeed, might survive it.

Moreover, this book argues that uncovering Blake’s debt to the preformationist science that informed the latter idea is essential to understanding his poetic application of ideas from biology across a range of subjects, from radical spirituality to revolutionary politics, from experimental poetics to anti-neoclassical aesthetics. Young’s pessimistic view of the natural world and his description of physical death as spiritual rebirth is firmly grounded in eighteenth-century Christian orthodoxy. However, the specific language and images he uses to describe the nature of this rebirth reflects how very recent discoveries in biology were shaping how this emphasis on the spiritual quality of life was articulated and conceptualised. Young’s passage is full of references to preformation, the idea that life was pre-organised in embryonic form in the seed or the egg. More specifically, as he expands on this passage, Young alludes to the spermist version of this theory, namely that the seeds of life are passed on through the father:

The soul possesses, to return to the first passage cited, life ‘unconceiv’d’ – in other words, a life unimaginable to embodied beings, but also a life whose origination is not to be traced to material causes. Speak of the organic in embryonic terms, and the twenty-first-century reader might expect motifs of gestational development and evolutionary plasticity. However, Young’s metaphor implies not the emergence and self-organisation of intelligent matter but the unfettering and unfolding of pre-existent form.

Embedded in a brief passage in a sublime poem of more than 10,000 lines, Young’s embryo metaphor is easily overlooked. However, read alongside Young’s later work, it offers an insight into the ways in which popular understandings of life were undergoing a profound shift in the eighteenth century. In Night Thoughts, Young finds in the organic world an apt metaphor for the ancient concept of the pre-existence of the soul. However, Young presents a different use of the organic metaphor in his later work, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In this landmark essay on individual genius, Young advocates for inventiveness over imitation in art by aligning human ingenuity with nature’s profuse powers of generation. For Young, genius is beyond acquired skill: it seems to ‘partake of something Divine’.Footnote ⁵ At the same time, the work of genius is also a work of nature:

Genius itself is a quasi-natural, quasi-mystical force: it is the “vital root” of human creativity. Young’s vision of the vegetative world no longer assumes the unfolding of pre-existent forms. Instead, what characterises the organic, and, by analogy, the aesthetic, is development, emergence, evolution, plasticity. The material world is not one of loss and degeneration but of creativity and self-formation. Life is that which rises spontaneously, which organises itself into existence, which partakes in self-origination.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the new organicist paradigm would come to exert a profound influence on Romantic literature and criticism. As Hazard Adams writes, Young is at the forefront of literary criticism when he moves its emphasis ‘from discussion of rules and conventions of literary statement to interest in originality and innate “genius”’.Footnote ⁷ As taste shifted away from neoclassical propriety and polish towards the vigour and force of what Alexander Gerard calls ‘real natural genius’, this redirection towards originality is supported by a reconceptualisation of nature itself: as James Engell argues, the new paradigm dictates that ‘the artist should imitate the inworking, creative, and organizing spirit of nature, the natura naturans, rather than copy or imitate nature’s outward form and appearance, the natura naturata’.Footnote ⁸ Influenced by natural scientific discourses around evolution and organic development, poets and critics increasingly came to appraise art in terms of genius, self-sufficiency, and originality. Nature, the source of life’s innate drive towards change and variation, becomes the vital force behind human genius and creativity. This is the notion of creative origination expressed in Keats’s famous pronouncement that ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’.Footnote ⁹ Or, in the words of Coleridge, describing the works of Shakespeare, that organic form ‘is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within’; that ‘All is growth, evolution, genesis – each line, each word almost, begets the following’.Footnote ¹⁰

Not everyone, however, embraced the ascendance of the developmental paradigm in biology. This monograph demonstrates how Blake saw dangerous implications in this vital materialist conception of life. A vision of life which located vitality in plastic self-shaping threatened to over-celebrate the agency and pliability of matter. Blake’s books are filled with images of monstrous vitality, of selfish matter which disrupts other forms of life by constantly striving to reorganise everything around it according to its own image. However, the stakes of Blake’s critique go far beyond biology, for the devouring logic of self-organisation is not confined to organic matter. Blake’s rich use of symbolism reveals how the materialist logic of life is not only present at all levels of the organic (in the twisted gonads, in the creeping worm, in the labyrinthine brain) but also at all levels of human activity: in the exploitative economics of capitalism, in the insatiable appetite of empire, in the unimaginative (re)productions of the art market. The suggestion that art and poetry might be the output of a primarily natural creative processes was, for Blake, a particularly pernicious product of a burgeoning evolutionist ideology. But Blake’s works are also full of images of regeneration and renewal, of variously vegetable, animal, and human forms rising as “embryos of existence, free”, shedding behind them the husks and shells of their material (and materialist) selves. In defiance of the growing belief that biology governs life, Blake sought to find a unit of identity which had the stubborn power to withstand material influences on identity.

The rise of the developmental paradigm in biology was attended by the ascendance of a secular historicist consciousness in European thought. With works such as Vico’s La Scienza Nuova (1725) and Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), writers and philosophers began to understand various phenomena, from the psychological life of an individual to the cultural life of the nation, in terms of development, perfectibility, and progress. Empiricist science saw ‘[t]he late eighteenth-century convergence of medicine, natural science, philosophy, literature, and history around the figure of the anthropos – as an embodied, natural object’, enabling the development of anthropological disciplines which increasingly understood human beings to be constituted by their material conditions and physical environment.Footnote ¹¹ This understanding had potentially worrying implications as an imperialist, industrialising Britain sought to exploit the vital capacities of the body. As these ways of thinking emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, Blake sought to defy the reduction of life to material causes and forces. In turning to preformationist imagery and language, Blake resisted this trend in the history of ideas by working with rather than against the language of biology. The preformationist paradigm, gesturing towards an understanding of time that radically differed from the emergent evolutionary sense of time that grounded the concept of modernisation, offered Blake an alternative conceptualisation of life. As Saree Makdisi has argued, Blake’s work puts forth a kind of ‘anti-history’, a radical attempt to oppose the discourse of modernisation amidst the emergence of a universal conception of history.Footnote ¹² I argue that the language of preformation, which emphasises how life renews itself in spite of the degenerative effects of time, was essential to this Blakean strategy of writing against history. It is in the visionary moment that we discover the contours of what was always already liberated. It is in the visionary moment that we see ourselves as “embryos of existence, free”.

Amidst the ongoing popularity of contemporary criticism which embraces open-ended becoming, amidst the rise of philosophical movements which draw attention to the phenomena of self-organisation and emergence, it has perhaps become difficult to read as exuberant a poet as Blake as one who emphasised ontology over ontogeny, being over becoming. With the rise of new vitalism and feminist materialism, critics and philosophers have turned their attention towards the extent to which vibrant matter can resist cultural inscription and explode existing social relations.Footnote ¹³ This book, however, insists on recognising the diverse ways in which biology can be and has been used to articulate a search for political liberation. Biomaterial plasticity is not a new concept, and in fact it has historically been used to support oppression. ‘[F]rom the beginning’, writes Kyla Schuller in her study of nineteenth-century eugenic discourses:

Finding value in recovering and historicising early responses to the biopolitics of plasticity, this book reveals how Blake’s preformationist worldview, grounded in his unorthodox Christian beliefs, was hardly static or stultifying. Rather, it enabled him to formulate radical ideas about the possibilities and conditions of human freedom in a period which was wrapped up in questions about biopower and empire. By examining his responses to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century debates on ontogeny, this book shows Blake anticipating twenty-first-century discussions around the tension between freedom and biological determination in creative and surprising ways.

0.2 ‘Where Contrarieties Are Equally True’: Preformation and Epigenesis in Blake’s Myth

Two very different biological paradigms are constantly held in tension in Blake’s works, paradigms which, as the examples from Young evince, manifested themselves in opposing theories of generation. One of the dividing lines in eighteenth-century biology was organised around a key question in ontogenesis: Was the embryo already fully formed in the egg or the seed? Or did it organise itself into existence?Footnote ¹⁵ As microscopy developed, biologists were increasingly drawn to speculation around the visible and invisible structures of rudimentary life. Proponents of preformation, a widely accepted theory at the time, believed that all living beings are originally created by God as germs fully formed in miniature. Each germ lies dormant until it finds the appropriate conditions for development and growth, expanding and unfolding according to its germinal plan into a mature organism. This is the theory which informs Night Thoughts. Young’s description of the dormant embryo in the paternal seed alludes to the spermist version of the preformationist theory of generation. Proponents of epigenesis, however, believed that each embryo originated not at the dawn of Time but at the moment of conception. Moreover, it did not emerge immediately fully formed but developed gradually out of undifferentiated matter. Though it appears in Young’s later Conjectures, the idea is an old one, dating to as far back as Aristotle. The concept was revived when William Harvey refreshed this ancient idea with new observations, arguing in his 1651 Exercitationes de generatione animalium that ‘the generation of the chick from the egg is the result of epigenesis’ since ‘all its parts are not fashioned simultaneously, but emerge in their due succession and order’.Footnote ¹⁶ Its structure is not preformed; rather, ‘its form proceeds simultaneously with its growth, and its growth with its form’.Footnote ¹⁷ I argue that Blake presented epigenesis as a materialist conception of life masquerading as a vitalist one and saw preformation as a model better aligned with his spiritual conception of vitality, which emphasised the importance of the universal “human form divine” as the ultimate source and type of life for each unique living being.Footnote ¹⁸

Both Blake’s belief in and anxiety about the possibility of sustaining a coherent self in the modern world must be understood against the backdrop of contemporary discussions in the life sciences. While his language of spiritual identity drew upon a rich tradition of Christian mysticism, it was also indelibly shaped by the most cutting-edge discoveries and discussions in natural philosophy. Blake’s notion of personal identity, formulated in opposition to the evolutionary theories that were emerging at the time, was indebted to a broader preformationist discourse that resonated throughout the long eighteenth century. This book proposes that only by revisiting Blake’s works in the context of contemporary research on ontogenesis and organic form can we gain a deeper understanding of his language of individuality, politics, and art.

Blake may not have read a lot of this research first-hand (it is difficult, in any case, to trace Blake’s reading), but he certainly had access to its key ideas via sources such as Erasmus Darwin and John Hunter. As I shall discuss in Chapters 1 and 2, the preformationist outlook was indirectly mediated from Charles Bonnet to Blake via Johann Kaspar Lavater. The diversity in nature of the sources I cite throughout this book, which range from religious sermons to anatomical lectures, from political pamphlets to scientific publications, attests to the extent to which science and literature in Western Europe were involved in ongoing cross-fertilisation over the long eighteenth century. The latest natural philosophical speculations and empirical observations were widely disseminated in the public sphere, where they were quickly assimilated into fiction and poetry. Gentleman scholars like Erasmus Darwin directly used literary forms to disseminate and develop their ideas, dissolving the boundaries between literary and scientific modes of thought. Natural philosophers openly allowed cultural values and religious belief to influence their interpretations of empirical data, and even, as we shall see, parish priests knew enough scientific material to use it to embellish their Sunday sermons. In other words, knowledge of contemporary biological research was pervasive enough for as inquisitive and perceptive an artist as Blake to develop his ideas around it. Blake inherited a rich store of signs. This book uncovers how certain eighteenth-century biological ideas, filtered through the artistic and literary imagination, mingled with multiple discourses and traditions to produce fertile soil for Blake’s own experimental mythmaking.

The belief in the existence of a fundamental source or type of life might seem quaint to we who live in an age shaped by post-humanist theory. The historical manifestations of this belief warrant attention, however, not only for their intrinsic interest but also because they invite us to examine our own assumptions about the nature of life. Over the last two decades, the question ‘What is life?’ has persistently preoccupied literary critics interested in uncovering the ways in which developments in the life sciences led poets such as Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Blake, and Wordsworth to give ‘serious thought to scientific attempts to establish what life is, serious thought that often informed their poetry in numerous ways’.Footnote ¹⁹ In the hands of an experimentalist, life was the electric, dynamic power of the flesh – no wonder, then, that critics have accordingly characterised Romantic vitality in similar terms. Denise Gigante, drawing attention to the late eighteenth-century shift in the life sciences from a preformationist outlook towards a fascination with the powers of self-formation, brilliantly characterises various Romantic writers as ‘all committed to defining and representing the incalculable, uncontrollable – often capricious, always ebullient – power of vitality’.Footnote ²⁰ Living form was ‘protean, procreative’, a monstrous plastic power of self-creation which resisted formal restraints and served as a model for art.Footnote ²¹ However, for many eighteenth-century biologists, the elusive quality of life was often attached not to the powers of self-organisation, but to the ability of the species to perpetuate itself as an eternal type through the ravages and accidents of time. The regeneration of form was the true mark of life; evolution and change, conversely, threatened it.

In 1965, Carmen Kreiter opened the dialogue around Blake and Romantic biology by drawing attention to the presence of proto-Darwinian concepts in Blake’s work.Footnote ²² Since then, there has been renewed interest in Blake’s proto-evolutionary and embryological imagery. While this work has been invaluable, much of it has neglected the theological contexts in which the concepts of generation and regeneration were entrenched. Stefani Engelstein’s 2000 article on the ‘Regenerative Geography’ of Blake’s texts delves deftly into Blake’s ‘double obsession with the artistic production and biological reproduction of the human body’, but it also leaves unexplored the theological contexts in which the concept of regeneration is embedded.Footnote ²³ Tristanne Connolly’s rich study William Blake and the Body (2002) further contextualises Blake’s complicated scenes of birth and gestation against anatomical and reproductive science, but her account of how Blake’s descriptions of Urizen ‘play with both concepts, preformation and epigenesis’ leave much room for elaboration with regards to the former.Footnote ²⁴ In Sweet Science (2018), Amanda Jo Goldstein insightfully asks whether ‘[w]e have too quickly seized upon epigenesis – loosely construed as the vital, dynamic refutation of deistic, mechanical predetermination – as Romanticism’s fit, provocative, and progressive life science’.Footnote ²⁵ However, inasmuch as she questions existing readings of Blake, Goldstein shares Gigante’s characterisation of preformation as a theory bespeaking predestination, and as so argues that while Blake ‘satirizes one powerful model of epigenesis’, he nonetheless ‘invites us to reconstruct another’.Footnote ²⁶ Placing Blake in dialogue with Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, she argues that Blake demolishes the vitalist depiction of life as the power to self-organise. Instead, Blake often shows living bodies as bodies of matter which are codetermined by their milieu. I share Goldstein’s scepticism about the association between life and self-organisation. However, I believe that Goldstein’s dismissal of preformation, like Gigante’s, limits our understanding of Blake’s works. Meanwhile, Annika Mann argues in 2019 that the ‘paradoxical womb imagery’ in The Book of Urizen (first composed in 1794) ‘in its impossibility goes far beyond that of preformation or epigenesis, challenging the view that Romanticism was committed to vitalist and individualist poetics.Footnote ²⁷ However, Mann’s focus on Urizen neglects how Blake draws upon preformationist imagery in works such as The Four Zoas (c. 1796–1807) and Jerusalem (1804–20), perpetuating an ongoing critical dismissal or neglect of preformation as a relevant conceptual framework for reading Blake.

Blake, however, had use for preformation. Throughout his works, Blake appropriated images of preformation and epigenesis from the life sciences and mapped them onto a Christian soteriological scheme. Scenes of generation re-enact the fall from innocence (which in material terms is the fall into embodiment) while scenes of regeneration depict in symbolic terms the soul’s eventual liberation from its physical prison, resulting in the perpetuation of eternal identity in Christ. As such, he associated epigenesist imagery with fallen embodiment and preformationist imagery with the overcoming of the vicissitudes of matter in the reassertion of eternal identity in Christ (who claims ‘I am … the life’, John 14:6). Contrasting preformationist theology against epigenesist biology, the true vitality of the soul against the false vitality of the flesh, Blake emphasises the idea that to vitalise nature was to humanise it, to recognise the living subjects residing within this world of wilful flesh and fickle matter. Thus, while it is important to show how there was never a strict division between science and poetry in the Romantic period, it is equally important to remember that life, as a concept, was not confined to the life sciences alone. For William Blake, life had an undeniable Christian significance, a significance which disrupts any critical attempts to define Romantic vitality solely in terms of the organic body. Before we trade in a conceptual currency which invests in the phenomenon of self-organisation the positive values of freedom, creativity, potency, dynamism, and power, we might engage in a deeper study of how generation was variously understood in the eighteenth century in order to interrogate the symbolic value we attach to the concept of epigenesis, and, more broadly, plasticity. The vegetable powers of self-organisation may be protean and procreative. However, they are not, according to Blake, truly vital.

0.3 Generation and Regeneration: William Blake and the Logic of Life

I argue that the ready dismissal of preformation found in recent Blake criticism has resulted in a misunderstanding concerning the relationship between generation and regeneration in Blake’s work. Los’s exclamation, ‘O holy Generation! [Image] of regeneration!’ (E150) might seem to suggest that generation and regeneration operated by the same logic, that ‘ultimately the biological processes of vegetation and generation were to serve as models for the regenerative activity of reading in organizing the poem’.Footnote ²⁸ Blake, however, scratched out the word ‘image’.Footnote ²⁹ Evidently, he was not satisfied with the idea that generation was a model for regeneration. Broadly speaking, in the biological context, while generation referred to the inception and gestation of new young, regeneration referred to the healing of adult organisms.Footnote ³⁰ Naturalists keenly carried out empirical observations of the spectacular regrowth of lost appendages in newts and salamanders, and these wondrous powers of renewal and restoration led at least one naturalist (Lorenzo Spallanzani) to wonder whether ‘obtaining this advantage for ourselves’ might not be considered ‘entirely as chimerical’.Footnote ³¹ The English physician Charles White seemed to answer this question when he described his attempts to amputate a child’s extra thumb. To his astonishment, the thumb apparently grew back with a fresh nail. Cases like this (however improbable) led White to the conclusion that each part of the human body could be regenerated in its own kind. Living organisms, as he writes, are ‘wonderfully living machines, differently wrought, yet so completely fashioned, and all tending to one great point, the preservation of themselves and their species’; as he continues, ‘these admirable fabrics cannot have proceeded from chance, but must have been the work of an Omnipotent Creator, who has formed them with the most perfect wisdom, and attention to their several interests and situations’.Footnote ³² The essential powers of life were not powers of change and protean growth but of restoration and healing.

In a spiritual context, regeneration, a cornerstone of Protestant theology, was explicitly placed in opposition to generation, just as salvation was juxtaposed against the fall. For Anglicans, regeneration was often identified with the ritual of baptism, a ritual of rebirth. As Jesus insisted, ‘[e]xcept a man be born again’, ‘born of water and of the Spirit’, rather than through his mother’s womb, ‘he cannot see the kingdom of God’ (John 3:3–5). Moreover, regeneration entailed entrance into Christian community. In the Anglican rite of baptism, the infant’s regeneration involves being reincorporated into the body of the church. As the priest announces, ‘We yield thee most hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this infant with thy holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy church.’Footnote ³³ Evangelical and nonconformist theologians, however, distinguished regeneration from baptism (or, indeed conversion), for simply joining a congregation was not sufficient. One had to go through a gradual and transformative inner experience through receiving Christ into one’s heart and exchanging the life of the flesh for the life of the spirit. As the Presbyterian clergyman Thomas Gouge writes, ‘by the work of Regeneration Flesh is turned into Spirit, that is, the carnal corrupt disposition of man is changed and alter’d into a renewed and sanctified disposition’.Footnote ³⁴ Describing regeneration, the Calvinist preacher Thomas Boston used a bodily metaphor highly reminiscent of Blake’s myth (according to which Albion disintegrates with the fall and is reorganised through regeneration): ‘Man is, in respect of his spiritual state, altogether disjointed by the fall; every faculty of the soul is, as it were, dislocate: in regeneration the Lord looseth every joint, and sets it right again.’Footnote ³⁵ Extended to a religious context, the term regeneration describes a kind of spiritual healing and rejuvenation which restores us to our original state.

If generation entails self-organisation, regeneration entails its opposite, the restoration of the self to a state of spiritual union, which can only be carried out through Christ’s intervention, not the innate powers of the individual.Footnote ³⁶ As Thomas Frosch observed in The Awakening of Albion (1974), Blake presents us with the dangers of fixating on the material manifestations of spiritual phenomena. As Frosch elaborates, central to the theme of Jerusalem is the notion that the egotistical, lustful love of Vala, who represents the powers of Nature, is ‘irresistibly like’ the selfless love of Jerusalem, who represents Spiritual Society.Footnote ³⁷ But while Jerusalem’s love liberates humanity, Vala’s love, a ‘false/ And Generating Love’, entraps it, acting as ‘a pretence of love to destroy love’ (E161). I argue that the relationship between generation and regeneration should be understood according to this very logic. If generation is the image of regeneration, it is its mirror image, an image in reverse. If generation suggests infinite plasticity, divergence, and mutation, regeneration suggests its inverse: the restoration, perfection, and perpetuation of eternal types through their expression in the individual.Footnote ³⁸ And it is the tension between the two which gives Blake’s myth so much of its force.Footnote ³⁹

Blake borrows the language of preformation to describe how the soul participates in eternal life; he also borrows from the language of epigenesis to describe how the material body participates in growth and decay. The scientific validity of these theories is of relative unimportance to him. Incorporating opposing biological theories into one significative framework, his myth allows apparent contradictions to co-exist in dialectical relationship. We might here compare Blake to Swedenborg, who similarly reconciled two very different views of life in one body of work. Swedenborg understood the material nature of life in epigenesist terms.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Divine Love and Wisdom, he announces as erroneous the preformationist idea that ‘Man is in his Fulness from his First, which is his Beginning, and that by growing he is perfected’, and proceeds to describe a vision bestowed upon him by angels of the gradual delineation of human embryo in the womb.Footnote ⁴¹ But the life of the body is not to be confused with the life of the soul, for the physical body, only a ‘Recipient of Life’, is not to be confused with ‘Life itself’.Footnote ⁴² One might detect a distinctly preformationist flavour in his description of how the organic body is only that with which the soul temporarily clothes itself: ‘Who that confirms himself in Favour of the Divine from the visible Things of Nature, doth not see a certain Image of the earthly State of Man in these Creatures as Worms, and an Image of his celestial State in them as Butterflies?’Footnote ⁴³ Though a subversive reader of Swedenborg, Blake would have found in the Swedish mystic and scientist a model of thought that makes compatible a vibrant materialist vision of nature and the distinction between the ideally organised inner life of the spirit and the outer material self.

The mythical space of Blake’s poems is like his mythical Beulah: it is a place where ‘Contrarieties are equally True’ (E129). Beulah is the place of ambivalence, a place where opposites can be married without cancelling each other out (Beulah, in Hebrew, means “espoused”). Yet while ‘Contrarieties are equally true’, they are not necessarily true of the same thing. In this case, the logic of epigenesis is true of generation, of mortal life and the physical body, but the logic of preformation is true of regeneration, of immortal life and the spiritual body. By working within the mythical mode, Blake synthesises two competing paradigms within one complex field of concepts, staging a symbolic encounter between two different ontologies, between being and becoming, between the virtual and the actual. Subject to constant revision, Blake’s myth undergoes constant renovation, never settling upon a final form or achieving a full reconciliation of opposites, and yet at its heart the tension between the spiritual and the material remains a key organising force. I agree with Leo Damrosch when he notes that ‘potent contradictions lie at the heart of Blake’s system and that the never-ending struggle to reconcile them gives his work its peculiar energy and value’.Footnote ⁴⁴ But as Damrosch demonstrates, even as the moving parts within this system shift and change, the contradictions around which his system is structured maintain their relevance over time. Hence I also agree with Damrosch’s view that when it comes to interpreting Blake, ‘[w]hat is needed is a metacommentary that examines the conceptual bases of his system and seeks to explain the difficulties that underlie the specific points around which commentary ordinarily swirls’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This book is thus, in part, aimed at adding to this project of building a Blakean metacommentary by examining how Blake navigates the tension between immanence and transcendence through his juxtaposition of different biological frameworks.

While scholars in recent years have read Blake as largely affirmative of vitalist theories of life, my argument consists in questioning the idea of Blake’s investment in vital materialist philosophies. My project seeks to understand his attitudes to politics, spirituality, textuality, sexuality, and originality in relation to a paradigm that was highly influential during his lifetime yet has been overlooked in contemporary criticism. This book thus adds to the increasing body of scholarship issuing from the exciting subfield of Romantic literature and science by attempting to recover an understanding of vitality that might not immediately appeal to modern sensibilities and yet afforded, in Blake’s works, a symbolic language of ideological resistance to the oppressive forces of modernity that reconciled radical spiritual belief with cutting-edge scientific knowledge.

0.4 William Blake against Plasticity: Spirituality, Politics, Poetics, Aesthetics

This book is organised primarily by theme, and will refer to works across Blake’s corpus even as the discussion proceeds in a loosely chronological manner through his rich literary and artistic career. Throughout this book I will consider eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century friction over not only the question of what constituted the original, the radical (in the sense of inherent, fundamental), but also how the present and the future might be organised, might unfold. I place Blake in dialogue with pious biologists and sex-minded antiquarians; medical men and Doctors of the Church; visionary scientists and systematic mystics; French revolutionaries and British reactionaries; Neoclassical scholars and Romantic critics alike.

Discussing how preformationists developed their theories in response to the perceived shortcomings of the theory of epigenesis, the first chapter reveals why preformation, which was used to articulate ideas of virtual form and genetic inheritance, might have been appealing for Blake and his contemporaries. Drawing connections between Blake and figures such as Charles Bonnet, Johann Kaspar Lavater, and Jacob Boehme, it shows how Blake’s preformationist tendencies explain some of the differences between his conception of life to those of major figures in European Romanticism such as Coleridge, Goethe, Herder, Blumenbach, and Kant. Exploring ableist and racist implications of relevant discourses, the final section discusses how preformationist science supplied Blake with the conceptual means to develop understandings of human difference and selfhood which differed from that of many of his contemporaries.

Chapter 2 develops the book’s argument by expanding upon the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. In the eighteenth century, theologians and natural philosophers frequently drew upon research into the nature of plant and insect life to speculate upon the nature of our “future state”. From the seed in the husk to the larva in the chrysalis, preformationist science offered Blake potent images with which to present the idea that the soul might persist beyond the death of the body. This chapter examines these symbols as they appear across Blake’s corpus, from early illuminated books such as The Book of Thel (1789) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793) to later works such as The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. It particularly identifies the entomologist Charles Bonnet’s concept of palingenesis as an important potential influence for Blake. The chapter also discusses the broader eschatological implications of Blake’s preformationist symbolism, showing how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. If we are all members of Christ’s body, branches on Christ’s vine, our ultimate regeneration entails the reincorporation of the individual soul into the wider life of the Human Form Divine. Drawing on the ideas of anthropologist Alfred Gell, the final section of the chapter explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the materiality of the Blakean book.

Chapter 3 demonstrates how Blake’s biological myth, though obscure, was deeply embedded in contemporary revolutionary discourses. Reading the Urizen books against Blake’s neglected, unpublished The French Revolution (1791), this chapter puts Blake in intimate dialogue with Burke, Sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape. In doing so, it contests assumptions in recent Blake criticism that the poet found images of political freedom in epigenesis. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter then discusses the further connotative development of the word “organisation” in The Four Zoas, which picks up on the use of the term in British responses to France’s imperialist military project in the Revolutionary Wars. Like France, Urizen attempts to “organize” the world according to his own rational principles. Ultimately, for Blake, the ideal state is something timeless, regenerated generation after generation – it must be a state of the spirit, not of the law. Crucially, it was after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages that Blake came to envision political change in preformationist terms of rejuvenation instead of epigenesist themes of gestation and birth.

Providing a foil against Blake’s preformationist conception of vision and identity, Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. By examining the motifs of fluidity in Erasmus Darwin’s work and comparing them to Blake’s descriptions of epigenesis, the chapter shows how Blake grappled with the vitalist idea that human intelligence and culture emerge from fluid matter imbued with the powers of self-organisation. Through its incomplete and revisionary nature, The Four Zoas critiques the materialist search for origins and exposes the impossibility of grounding meaning in unstable media. The first section of the chapter discusses the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive liquid force, illustrating and criticising the materialist argument (found in Mandeville and Malthus) that love and altruism are merely the evolutionary products of libidinal self-interest. The final section returns to the textuality of The Four Zoas and shows how the nervous mind and the sinuous text work together to give unreliable body to thought. Comparing Blake’s poetics to that of Erasmus Darwin and Edward Young, the chapter discusses the mimetic qualities of Blake’s revisionary verse and ends with an analysis of the poem’s fantasies of symbolic liberation through physical destruction. These fantasies envision the release of life and art, as pure mental energy, from material embodiment.

Chapter 5 explores how different models of generation and sexuality provide a framework for juxtaposing inspired and uninspired creativity in Blake’s late epic, Milton (c. 1804–11). The chapter presents the poem as a highly imaginative response to the organicist tendencies of late eighteenth-century criticism. The first section traces Blake’s beliefs about the evolutionary history of sexuality to Erasmus Darwin on the one hand and Jacob Boehme on the other. It then situates Milton’s preformationist imagery against the gendered language of late eighteenth-century literary criticism to show how Blake resists the naturalisation of genius and inspiration (William Haley makes an appearance). The chapter then examines how the gendered and sexualised scenes of epigenetic growth in the poem symbolise a kind of narcissistic poetic activity that denies any participation of the divine. The final section shows how Milton’s sexual myth resists historicist efforts by Erasmus Darwin, Richard Payne Knight, and others to reduce the origin of religion to fertility worship.

In Chapter 6, the final chapter of the book, the focus shifts towards Blake’s artistic theory and practices, providing a deeper understanding of his anti-historicist inclinations. During the late eighteenth century, the injection of organicist language into neoclassical aesthetics produced a new cult of original genius. This chapter examines discussions and depictions of statuary, particularly the famous Laocoön fragment, as well as debates around copying and imitation (involving, notably, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others) to demonstrate how Blake used preformationist ideas to resist the adulation of self-sufficiency, formal autonomy, and cultural autochthony in late eighteenth-century criticism. The rise of historicism in art criticism during the second half of the eighteenth century established originality and unity as aesthetic ideals, a development that occurred alongside the invention of art history as a modern discipline. This chapter situates Blake in opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose highly influential developmental history of art relied heavily on organic metaphors of autopoiesis. Winckelmann encouraged the modern artist to become, like the Greeks, ‘inimitable’, original. This chapter, however, shows Blake turning the emerging Romantic discourse of originality (found in Goethe and Herder) on its head. The artist’s task is not one of creation but regeneration, not of producing something wholly new but of giving new life to the preformed visions found in works of old.

Illuminating a neglected aspect of Romantic biology, this book thus aligns Blake with preformation and its resistance to burgeoning ideas of evolution in an age immediately preceding Charles Darwin. Combining literary, historical, and visual analysis, it shows how preformationist thought must be considered when examining Blake’s understanding of form (whether political, spiritual, or aesthetic) and embodiment. It reveals how approaching Blake’s works through the framework of preformationist science (which itself fused Christian thought and empirical observation) and related discourses can highlight the way in which Blake anticipated and resisted secular, materialist understandings of life and creativity. Indeed, I suggest that the field of Romanticism and the life sciences is due a fuller reconsideration of the period in light of preformationist modes of thinking, thinking which held demonstrable relevance and vitality across eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe even as developmental modes of thought rose to predominance.

Preformation had an important position in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century culture, and in Blake’s case, supplied the vocabulary for a highly original response to modernity’s threat towards inner freedom and communal life. As I discuss more fully in my Conclusion, preformation allowed Blake to develop as an alternative to plasticity an ideal of elasticity, namely the individual, and indeed, the community’s indefatigable ability to regenerate itself, time after time, even as the material forces of biology and politics attempt to shape us from within and without. As contemporary thought appeals to impersonal vital processes for visions of liberatory agency, this book attends to an understanding of vitality that identifies the stubborn kernel of identity in each unique being as the strongest source of resistance to the homogenising forces of vital flesh and plastic matter.