A Study of William Blake and YANAGI Muneyoshi in Comparative Literature and Culture

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Inspired Upanishad philosophy in India, William Blake established his own version of Christianity based on the concept of mutual forgiveness. When YANAGI Muneyoshi published William Blake in 1914, he wrote that Blake had something in common with "Oriental" philosophy, which was not far-fetched comment at all but reasonable observation.In Meiji and Taisho periods Blake was generally received as either a poet of nursery rhymes or a symbolist, but Yanagi focused on the aspect of a social reformer in Blake. Yanagi studied Blake by himself, without accepting the theories of British and American scholars of Blake uncritically, just as NATSUME Soseki, a former lecturer in the Imperial University of Tokyo and later well-known novelist, gave lectures on English literature on the basis of his own understanding of the text.