“My Fingers Emit Sparks of Fire”: William Blake, Letter Writer

Hitherto, William Blake’s letters have received limited and partial scholarly exploration. Following Archibald G. B. Russell, both Geoffrey Keynes in his edition of the letters and David Wells in his 1987 published MA thesis seem determined to prove that the letters, especially their “gnomic statements”, can only be “understood in relation to his collected writings.” Thirty years on, this chapter will consider these and more recently discovered additions to this body of letters within the equally illuminating immediate social historical micro-contexts surrounding the poet-artist as well as very recent developments in scholarship relating to the romantic letter; in light of such ground-breaking work, can the body of Blake’s letters finally be seen not as merely secondary supportive biographical materials but finally as a work of art in themselves? Almost twenty years ago, canonical Romantic scholars suggested that Blake’s letters are the only that rival Keats’. And yet while Keats’ end with the poet’s death at twenty-six, Blake’s surviving letters to a range of recipients really only begin at the age of forty, imperfectly reflecting the last three decades of Blake’s through middle into old age. This chapter reviews the business, as well as the homosocial sympathy, affection, and enthusiasms spiritual and otherwise of these seemingly rapidly composed letters stretching from the final days at Hercules Buildings to the equally busy last days at Fountain Court. Consulting manuscripts, considering the considerably wider body of letters (punctuated by considerable silences) with a nuanced biographical, historicist lens, Blake as letter-writer emerges in unprecedentedly sharper focus.