Customer Reviews

William Blake (Chesterton's biographies)

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Chesterton was a Catholic. Blake was anything but a Catholic. Chesterton makes his case clear. Blake's obscurity rivals the alchemists. Both were British. Both, I think, were geniuses. And Chesterton would be the first to admit that Blake's genius was at a level worth writing books about.

Chesterton's views about Blake have been neglected for their audacity and controversy, ironic since Blake was neglected for the same reasons. But after having trudged through Blake scholarship for several years, I just ordered this book and read it twice through and marked it up constantly. Chesterton is a show-off with his cleverness, but he's a very good show-off, and he overflows with insight even if he can outrage with his assertions. So you may find this book maddening, or refreshing. But if you can follow his train of thought and precise-but-highly-developed vocabulary, you'll never find it boring. And I found it the most eye-opening of everything I've read on Blake so far, and by far.

Chesterton had what one of my students called a "healthy dose of common sense" and that when you read him "you're constantly replying, 'Oh, of course!'" Considering that Blake is on the opposite extreme and can confuse his most devoted readers, Chesterton bridges a gap. He also entertains and challenges. So if you care to hear an alternative view, this book is the alternative view worth hearing.

I wish Amazon would let you know if a particular book is a print-on-demand edition; this one is. The body of the text was scanned from an older edition and run through a word-recognition program, never edited by a human eye. You end up trying to figure out what the sentence is actually supposed to be (which is hard with Chesterton's strong but 100-year-old Britishy grammar): when it says "riot" you should read "not," for instance.

It's also clear that the "real" edition of this book was well illustrated. If you want to know what drawings and engravings Chesterton is referring to, the few random images pasted into the middle of the book aren't very helpful. Crack open your other Blake books or fire up Google Image Search for reference.

Anyway, the content itself is awesome -- I've never really seen Blake so plainly as I have since reading Chesterton's review of the man and his work. I'm giving this edition four stars, only because there doesn't seem to be a superior edition in print to compare it to.

Well, it's funny, despite it's being a short book, it was too long.
It was very much like Mark Twain's joke about the sermon: he was listening to a sermon and thinking this is great, I'm going to give five dollars when the collection plate comes around. After a while, he thinks, well, maybe I'll just give a dollar. The sermon goes on longer. Finally, when the collection plate goes by, Twain steals a dollar out of it.
Chesterton starts off brilliantly, illuminating Blake - his poetic/artistic genius as well as his madness, seeming to capture the essence of the man in a few well constructed paragraphs. He had that extraordinary talent of being able to put into words sentiments you have never been quite able to articulate. But then he goes on. Inevitably, we must hear about the Catholic Church. And Western civilization generally. And oddly enough that discussion of where Blake is in relation to all that marginalized him. From that point of view, from a contribution to civilization point of view, Blake is no where. Fortunately, civilization is not a road we are paving with paving blocks consisting of people's life work. So, you may continue to admire him and love him, if you do.
It's certainly worth reading. As always, there is as much Chesterton as there is biographical subject. But this can be a relief after all the virtual non-entities who write so much biography and art history, prolific non-entities on all subjects! Still, he always gets tiresome, sooner or later.
Years ago I read his book on Dickens, which is superb. I wish that were re-published.