This chapter continues the discussion of eighteenth-century representations of Lady Macbeth as a monstrous wife and mother, examining how this was depicted in a series of paintings that portray Lady Macbeth as dominating and exerting control over her timid spouse. After the French Revolution, British caricaturists cast Jacobin sympathizers as the witches in Macbeth, and visual artists such as Johan Zoffany, Henry Fuseli and William Blake invoked the figure of the witch to fuel fears regarding dangerous female sexuality and the horrific consequences of giving women social and political power. Mary Wollstonecraft, who embodied these fears for Fuseli and Blake, along with Germaine de Staël and Sarah Siddons, responded by emphasizing the psychological elements of Macbeth and representing Lady Macbeth as a sympathetic character.

As it traces the emergence of organic life and the gradual transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin’s treaty in verse The Temple of Nature develops a poetics of what eludes our sense of sight, of the viewless and eyeless beings at the radical origins of life. The chapter thus retraces a poetic journey back to a perceptual framework in which sight does not yet exist. Erasmus Darwin tries to apprehend life before the first eye opened, to envision a world so young that sensation itself had just been born. That journey also goes back to the origins of the alliance of poetry and science in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura and its poetics of corpora caeca, those viewless bodies that create entire worlds through blind contact. It lastly registers some of the aesthetic and epistemic aftershocks of Lucretius’ and Darwin’s poetics of blind bodies in the poetry of William Blake.

Ginsberg was a ceaseless experimenter, constantly pushing boundaries whether personal, social, or literary. Drug use was one such privileged means of attaining the transcendent states that Beat writers such as Ginsberg coveted. Ginsberg began his experimentations while at Columbia, keeping detailed notes of his experiences and remaining vigilant that his experimentation did not turn into addiction. Exploring psychedelics with Timothy Leary alerted Ginsberg to the wider social possibilities of its use, and he became famous worldwide as an advocate of drug experimentation. While his use waned later in life, Ginsberg was a firm believer in the power of drugs to challenge current depictions of reality, all the while remaining honest and open about their deleterious effects. Ginsberg openly called for the legalization of many drugs, broader experimentation both socially and scientifically, and castigated US drug policies and their negative consequences. This chapter explores the reasons for Ginsberg’s use of drugs, his advocacy for them, and the various poems he wrote while under the influence of substances collected mainly in Kaddish and Other Poems (1961).

A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.

Allen Ginsberg’s entrance into Columbia University in 1943, through to his graduation in 1948, constitute a key phase in his evolution as poet and inerasable presence in the Beat Movement. The classes he takes there with key teachers such as Lionel Trilling become essential even as he develops familiarity with the Manhattan of Greenwich Village, East Harlem, the galleries, jazz, café culture, and the darker reaches of Times Square and 42nd Street. While at Columbia he experiences his celebrated Blake vision and meets Lucien Carr, Herbert Huncke, David Kammerer, Henri Cru, and, essentially, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Briefly expelled from Columbia, with a brief stint in the maritime service which takes him to West Africa, he returns to the university and embarks even more fully on the career which will lead to “Howl” and his standing as Beat legendary name.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

Chapter 3 explores A. C. Swinburne’s intermedial engagement with Milton. In Swinburne’s republican poetry, Milton emerges as a significant figure associated with virtue and freedom; both poets link questions of liberty to bodily violence. The chapter discusses Milton’s Areopagitica, the divorce tracts and the Piedmont sonnet alongside Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, before turning to Paradise Lost. The chapter draws on queer readings of Milton’s epic to argue that Milton’s erotic, androgynous universe informs Swinburne’s anti-theistic poetic project, particularly in its treatment of bodily indeterminacy and the figure of the hermaphrodite. Swinburne’s reading of Milton is considered alongside his reading of Sappho and Charles Baudelaire, as well as William Blake: Swinburne alludes to erotic moments in Paradise Lost at the same time as he transforms William Blake’s illustrations of the poem, in an act of commingling presented as an example of Swinburne’s ‘intermedial ekphrasis’.

Chapter 4 shows how The Four Zoas, as an unfinished manuscript, formally registers Blake’s troubled fascination with evolutionary models of the mind. The first section of the chapter compares the images of fluidity associated with Tharmas, who continually emerges from and dissolves into the waves of the unconscious, against Erasmus Darwin’s poetic descriptions of liquid ontogeny. The next section examines how the sexual drive appears in the text as a disruptive fluid 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.

Chapter 2 discusses the soteriological nuances of Blake’s preformationist imagery. 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. The chapter also shows how the ecological aspect of this paradigm further provided Blake with the vocabulary to articulate how life after death is ultimately a communal affair. The final section of the chapter, reading Blake through Alfred Gell, explores how attending to the preformationist language of exuviae and shells can shed new light on how to approach the exuvial materiality of the Blakean book.

Chapter 5 explores how different models of generation and sexuality provide a framework for juxtaposing inspired and uninspired creativity in Milton. The first section situates the poem's preformationist imagery against the developmental organic metaphors of late eighteenth-century literary criticism to show how Blake resists the naturalisation of genius and inspiration. The chapter then considers how the poem's scenes of epigenetic growth are used to symbolise a kind of narcissistic poetic activity which denies any participation of the divine. Building upon recent work on Blake's depiction of homosexuality, I show how Blake casts inspiration in homoerotic light to separate literary production from biological reproduction. The last section expands upon Milton's sexual myth by reading the poem against efforts by Erasmus Darwin, Richard Payne Knight and others to account for the origins of world religions via recourse to ancient fertility cults. This chapter ultimately argues that Milton, ending with the mythic transformation of reproductive bodies into symbolic images, presents itself as a poetic attempt to reverse the naturalising tendencies of late eighteenth-century criticism.

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. Having discussed Blake’s critical attitude towards political self-organisation, this chapter discusses the further connotative development of the word “organization” 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. The chapter ends with a discussion of how after a turbulent revolutionary decade of utopian miscarriages, Blake came to envision political change in terms of regeneration and rejuvenation instead of gestation and birth.

Chapter 6 further explores Blake’s anti-historicist inclinations in the contexts of his artistic theory and practices. 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. 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.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.

Chapter 1 chapter presents a revised account of Blake’s relation to two major paradigms in eighteenth-century embryology: preformation and epigenesis. Challenging criticism that aligns Blake with a bio-ontology that privileges open-ended development and plastic self-shaping, this chapter reveals why preformation, which was used to articulate ideas of virtual form and genetic inheritance, might have been appealing for Blake. Tracing the links between Blake and preformationist biologists such as Charles Bonnet via Johann Kaspar Lavater, it shows how Blake’s preformationist influence explains 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, it 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.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

‘Blake’s Scattered Leaves’ explores the sibylline poetics of the poet and printmaker’s book making in America, Europe, The First Book of Urizen, and The Four Zoas, rematerializing Blake’s practices of invention and composition within and against constraints and teleologies of printing. Attention to material cultures of book making produces new readings of Blake’s sibylline metaphors and poetical possibilities, and practices of interleaving, repurposing of proofs, demediating the text, and freeing images as separate designs. Blake exploits the constitutively mobile potential of full-plate illustrations produced in different workshops, retaining that mobility in his illuminated books, where different placements make each copy unique and blur boundaries between different books. To capture the dynamic trajectories of mobile book parts or independent art works is to reconfigure the hybrid history of Blake books, questioning distinctions between book parts and artworks crystallized by institutional divisions of knowledge that separate the library from the print room.

This chapter moves backward in time to trace the Maroons’ decolonial relationship with the environment, starting with Queen Nanny, a leader in the First Maroon War and a present-day National Hero of Jamaica. Narratives of Nanny’s warfare against the British noted that her fight included growing pumpkins in the rugged Blue Mountains. The chapter then turns to a critically neglected Romantic-era text, R. C. Dallas’s History of the Maroons. Although primarily a military history, Dallas repeatedly admired the Maroons’ communal “superabundance.” Similarly, J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, accompanied by William Blake’s illustrations, described Maroon settlements as viable, sustainable societies that were notable alternatives to plantation capitalism. The Maroons’ agricultural and culinary “superabundance,” documented by Dallas, Stedman, and Blake alike, suggests a Romantic-era ecological critique rooted in communal decolonial practices, which supplements the Romantic figure of the solitary walker who critiques society by communing with nature.

Lauren Dembowitz’s chapter focuses on race and visual culture, drawing on Blake’s notion of the “bounding line” with its “infinite inflexions and movements” that recast the visual image without relying on the inhumanity and philistinism of mass production. These “inflexions and movements” allow us to imagine new possibilities for familiar images, such as that of the “Hottentot Venus,” Sarah Baartman. Rather than write off these images as racist stereotypes, we can, with Dembowitz’s Blakean method, attend closely to how the material history of the visual text is imbricated with the history of race, which is subtly transformed with each new iteration. As Dembowitz powerfully concludes, the image compels us to “contend with the ways we are ‘intimately connected’ with, ‘bound up in,’ and ‘dependent upon’ that figure and the real women she overwrites for understanding how racial capitalism lives on in our present.”