¹ Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 25. Frank Kermode discusses the romantic origins of the postromantic separation between the artist and society in “The Artist in Isolation,” Ch. i of Romantic Image (New York: Random, 1957): “These two beliefs—in the Image as a radiant truth out of space and time, and in the necessary isolation of men who can perceive it—are inextricably associated … ” (p. 2). “The ‘difference’ of some of the English Romantic poets is almost too well known; they were outcast because they had to pay for their joy and their vision. Sometimes they attributed their condition to some malady in themselves, but they also blamed the age in which they lived …”(p. 7).

² Almost any study of politics and the arts during the romantic period will have something to say about the audience of the romantic artist. Besides Williams' book (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), I think especially of the work of David V. Erdman, E. P. Thompson, and Carl Woodring.

³ Here and elsewhere in the essay, “phase” is the term of convenience used to designate parts of a dynamic theory—but not chronological stages in some scheme of historical development.

⁴ No proper theory—as in the observation that Blake's “apocalyptic humanism … can hardly be pressed into literary or even general aesthetic service. Blake connects less with the literary tradition than with cabbalistic and visionary theories of knowledge” (W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History [New York: Random, 1957], p. 424).

⁵ In The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams warned against making Blake or Shelley the center of a theory of romanticism (p. 313). Blake has been given an essential role in a number of more recent accounts. Perhaps the first was Northrop Frye's “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” Romanticism Reconsidered: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Frye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 1–25; expanded later as “The Romantic Myth,” in Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random, 1968), pp. 3–49. In his discussion Frye does not develop any characteristically romantic idea of an audience, but he does conclude broadly that “It seems as though Romanticism finds it difficult to absorb the social perspective …” (p. 38). If I understand him on this point, his conclusion seems true enough, though I think the opposite may be said of, say, Enlightenment mimesis.

⁶ Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” in David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 4th ed., rev. (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 555. The abbreviations used in the essay are ? for the Erdman edition, AR for Blake's annotations to Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, DC for A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, MHH for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, PA for the “Public Address,” and VLJ for “A Vision of the Last Judgment.”

⁷ The “recovery of projection” is Frye's phrase and the theme of his essays on English romanticism, especially “The Drunken Boat.” “Internalization” is the term adopted by Harold Bloom in, for example, his essay “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,” Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 3–24. Morse Peckham has discussed similar changes in all versions of, and additions to, his theory of romanticism, beginning with “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, 66 (1951), 5–23. The extent to which romantic internalization is taken into account may profoundly affect the interpretation of romantic manifestos. A good example is Earl R. Wasserman's “Shelley's Last Poetics: A Reconsideration,” From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 487–511. Wasserman argues that Shelley's “platonism” in the Defence is put in the service of internalization (or, as Wasserman calls it, “intuition”).

⁸ Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross, rev. ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954), ii, 12. This edition also includes Coleridge's “On Poesy or Art,” quoted below.

⁹ Eliot, “William Blake,” in Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 275.

¹⁰ I discuss the Enlightenment idea of “harmony” versus Blake's idea of “line” in various contexts, including Blake's ideas about art, in “Blake and the Artistic Machine: An Essay in Decorum and Technology,” PMLA, 92 (1977), 903–27.

¹¹ See, for instance, the brief discussion in Wylie Sypher, Literature and Technology: The Alien Vision (New York: Random, 1968), p. 119, especially the remark that “What could be drawn seemed real; what was lighted or colored was a transient impression.”

¹² For instance, the anonymous reviewer in The Bee; or, The Exhibition [of paintings at the Royal Academy] Exhibited in a New Light … (London, 1788) defines expression as “that wondrous power of Painting which conveys the ideas of Characters and Passions of the Person represented …” (p. 7).

¹³ As in The Bee, p. 7: “Expression seems to be the immediate gift of Heaven. …for although the skill … may be wanting, the original Genius is displayed. …”

¹⁴ Rev. Matthew Pilkington, A Dictionary of Painters from the Revival of Art to the Present Period, rev. Henry Fuseli (London, 1805), p. xviii.

¹⁵ Joshua Reynolds, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds …, ed. Edmond Malone, 2nd ed. Corrected (London, 1798), ii, Discourse 7, 221–22. This is the volume that Blake annotated. The most accessible modern edition is Robert Wark, ed., Discourses on Art (London: Collier, 1966), p. 118.

¹⁶ Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 85, 216, 158, and 156.

¹⁷ Version of 1802, from The Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, ed. Paul M. Zall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 59.

¹⁸ The Prophecy of Dante, in the Oxford Standard Authors edition of Byron's Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, new ed. corrected by John Jump (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 370–79.

¹⁹ Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952), p. 33.

²⁰ A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr. (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. 12–13.

²¹ I discuss the reunion of artist with work in more detail in the PMLA essay cited in n. 10 and in “What Is the History of Publishing?” Publishing History, No. 2 (1977), pp. 57–77.

²² At some point after etching “To the Public,” Blake made a series of relevant but puzzling deletions of virtually every reference to his or the audience's “love,” “friendship,” and so on. Thus, for instance, the italics in the following quotation represent deletions on the copper plate: “the love and friendship of those with whom to be connected, is to be blessed” (E, 143). Yet he left intact his “hope” that “the Reader will be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord” (E, 144). Obviously Blake was not completely satisfied with the relation of artist to audience described in the etched text of “To the Public” and intended to compose substitutions for at least some of the deleted words and passages. But he never did, not even in the only copy of Jerusalem that is elaborately colored (copy E). A number of the sentences on Plate 3 thus remain non-sensical unless the deleted words are reinstated (as they are in all modern editions). If related to Blake's sup-pression of the Preface to Milton in the two later copies, the excisions in the address “To the Public” may be part of a pattern of evidence suggesting a withdrawal of faith in the audience.

²³ Some recent studies have defined Blake's idea of the audience in a biblical context. In Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), the discussions of Blake as a prophet, and of his works as part of a prophetic strain in English literature, sometimes turn on a conception of the prophetic audience: “The real dialectic of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell occurs not in the prophecy itself but in the antagonism Blake establishes between it and its prospective audience” (p. 195). A romantic context can lead to comparable conclusions. For example, in Blake's Composite Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), W. J. T. Mitchell interprets the illuminated books as episodes in a romantic “epic of consciousness” that makes the reader a participant rather than a judge. Essentially, Mitchell's argument extends Frye's notion of literary anagogy to the audience, so that the “ultimate effect” of Blake's narrative invention “is to draw the reader into it, or what is the same thing, invite the reader to incorporate the pictures into himself (p. 140). I discuss Mitchell's audience-centered approach to Blake's ”antinarrative“ in a review in the Wordsworth Circle, 10 (1979), 275–78.

²⁴ In “The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction,” PMLA, 93 (1978), 463–74, Robert DeMaria, Jr., rightly contrasts the “profoundly judgmental” reader implicit in Johnson's criticism with Coleridge's ideal reader, who “enters into a kind of collaboration with the poet” (p. 468). DeMaria also points out that, while Johnson's reader is part of an “external tribunal” (p. 467), Coleridge's is a reflection of himself.

²⁵ Wasserman, p. 504. Wasserman, however, concentrates on the poetics outlined in Shelley's Defence. There is a larger picture. Cf., e.g., the discussion of Shelley's desire and his attempts to find a poetic mode that will allow him to address a mass audience, in Stuart Curran, Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1975).

²⁶ The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), ii, 388.

²⁷ See also Byron, Prophecy of Dante II.23–34 and the conclusion, iv. 146–54.

²⁸ Thomas R. Frosch discusses Blake's idea of the body, and its romantic and modern contexts, in The Awakening Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974). Although Frosch seldom mentions the artist's audience, the final chapter, “The Body of Imagination,” considers the question of a renewed community capable of accommodating renewed bodies—i.e., the community “beyond the dualism of the community and the individual” (p. 154).

²⁹ Parts of earlier versions of this paper found forgiving and vigorous audiences at Mills College, Arizona State University, and Louisiana State University. Meanwhile, Michael Fischer and Hugh Witemeyer of the University of New Mexico and Marvin Morillo of Tulane University offered a number of indisputable suggestions for revision—gratefully accepted.