Behn, Bysshe, and the Blakes: Bibliomancy and the Joys of Unbinding

An instance of bibliomancy from Blake’s Notebook raises significant questions about intertextuality, anthologizing, and the pleasures and powers of reading. Catherine Blake participates in an ancient tradition in which a text is granted prophetic power through random selection. In this case, the book is Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry, a miscellany already made up of texts severed from their contexts and their authors, and the chosen passage is from Aphra Behn’s “On a Juniper Tree Cut Down to Make Busks.” The Notebook, itself a work space containing several genres, thus records a palimpsest of acts of excision which are also acts of pleasure.