Blake and the Comic Tradition

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My research seeks to untangle Blake from conventional narratives, which read him solely as an always-earnest visionary, and instead reveal his engagements with the comic mode. My proposed PhD study will illuminate that these two Blakes are not incompatible. As Blake writes, abstention from laughter is 'a power unknown to many a vigorous mind' ('Annotations to Lavater') - comedy is not only funny but is imperative to his notion of mental dynamism. I will analyse Blakean comedy through a close, interdisciplinary reading of his text and images. First, I will consider Blake's surprising inheritance of an Augustan humour. My study will read Blake's radical union of high/low, epic/trivial (like Milton's descent from Golgonooza 'to Blackheath east to Hounslow west/ To Finchley north to Norwood south') in relation to Pope and Swift's bathos. Mock-heroic falls and a warped sense of scale enact Blakean vision which explodes hierarchy in revolutionary immanence. My research seeks to resituate Blake in literary history, characterising him not only as a Romantic poet but also, and no less significantly, as a squarely eighteenth-century one. I will then consider Blake's similarities to Christopher Smart's prophetically charged humour as well as the underexplored influence of Chaucerian bawdiness and the Shakespearean Fool on Blake's comedy. I am keen to widen my research to explore Blake in the context of contemporary visual satire and the grotesque register of Gothic art.