^{Note 1} For an enlightening discussion of nonsynchronism as a phenomenon whereby ideas appear before they have a historical context that can put them into practice, see Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and Dialectics,” New German Critique, No. 11 (1977), pp. 22–38.

^{Note 2} De Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 162. The quotation is part of a complex argument leading to the claim that literature, in its historicity, is a form that at once affirms and betrays its own mode of existence. However, in his presentation of the aporia of literature, de Man never makes clear whether his perspective on the paradox of modernity originates in a privileging, then a deconstructing of only one form of literary language (i.e., representational) or of all forms of literary discourse.

^{Note 3} This example of rhetorical compensation appears in Monroe K. Spears, Dionysus and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 7, but the very title of the book indicates the fatal ambivalence within the discourse of modernity.

^{Note 4} In this discussion I mean not to collapse the distinction between modernity and modernism but to emphasize the interrelationship between those modernists who would oppose the cult of the new and those who would implement it. And I would agree with Matei Calinescu in his historical overview of modernism, The Faces of Modernity: Avant Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 70–85, that the dialectical interplay between these opposed modernisms only discloses the movement's essential nature as a tradition against itself. But the very nature of this antitraditional tradition, through the play of the negation, reveals the wish endemic to all modernists: to recover the immediate by denying themselves.

^{Note 5} Baudelaire was the modernist who suggested, in his essay on Constantine Guys, that the present moment is the real source of our originality (“The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Lois Hyslop and Francis Hyslop [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1964]).

^{Note 6} My translation from Heidegger, Vorträge und Auf-sätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), p. 117.

^{Note 7} Werner Brock, “Hälderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” trans. Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being (Chicago: Gateway, 1949), p. 274.

^{Note 8} Smith, Poetic Closure (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 19. For an extended discussion of the notion, see Smith's On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), esp. the chapter “Licensing the Unspeakable,” pp. 107–24.

^{Note 9} For an insightful discussion of “pure possibility,” see Edward Casey, “Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment,” Yale French Studies, 52 (1978), 244–67, the source of this formulation. The article continues Casey's phenomenological analysis of the imagination in Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977). I remain uncertain whether, in Casey's analysis, repetition is an act of consciousness separate from the imagination or whether it partakes of the same intentionality.

^{Note 10} Crabb Robinson was full of gossip over Blake's conversation with Milton—“according to Blake, atheism consists of worshipping the natural world, which same natural world … is a mere illusion produced by Satan…. Milton often begged Blake to refute [his errors in Paradise Lost]” (quoted in D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, The Prophetic Writings of William Blake [Oxford: Clarendon, 1926], i, 344).

^{Note 11} For expansion and clarification of this idea, which is grounded in a polemical, as well as theoretical, discussion of Milton's place in the tradition of epic prophecy, see Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 104–05. In Visionary Poetics: Milton's Tradition and His Legacy (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1979), which I read only after I had written this article, Wittreich transforms the model in a way too nuanced to go into here and produces what I find the most insightful theory of prophetic form available.

^{Note 12} Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake's Complete Writings (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 480. All subsequent citations of Blake's works, given parenthetically in the text, refer to this edition. All Milton quotations are from Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), which is abbreviated in parenthetical references as PL.

^{Note 13} For a much fuller, although differently focused, discussion of Milton, see my essay “The Hand of Fire,” in Blake and the Moderns, ed. Robert Bertholf and Annette Levitt (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, forthcoming).

^{Note 14} Susan Fox, in her splendid Poetic Form in Blake's “Milton” (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), also isolates simultaneity and multiple perspectives as the informing strategies of Milton, but the need for coherence and completeness inherent in her mode compels her to argue for a completed perception composed of the various perspectives and secured by the ultimate vision of Christ. Thus, her discussion is guided by a teleological and totalizing principle that I think is foreign to Blake's vision.

^{Note 15} In “Blake's Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton,” Blake's Sublime Allegory, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., and Stuart Curran (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 287, W. J. T. Mitchell registers his sense of this moment's plurisignificative import:

The Bard's Song, which functions as the Genesis of the narrative in Milton, seems almost ready at several points to become its Revelation. The quarrel between Satan and Palamabron begins to sound more like Armageddon (8:26–40) than Cain and Abel; the assembly's judgment begins to look like a Last Judgment when it calls up “Two Witnesses” as did John of Patmos. These echoes remain ironic and immaterialized in the Bard's Song; but they create the sense that “the time” in some sense is always potentially at hand.

But even after recognizing the visionary element in the poem, Mitchell seems intent on reincorporating this potential time into the cyclical scheme of comedy. The reader might also refer to Jerome J. McGann's “The Aim of Blake's Prophecies and the Uses of Blake's Criticism,” in Wittreich and Curran (pp. 3–21). For a sustained and cogent analysis of prophetic form, though one too limited to Northrop Frye's spatial conception of time, see Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971).

^{Note 10} For example, in that incredibly dense scene at Beth Peor, Milton is Christ to Urizen's John the Baptist and vice versa, Adam and Moses to Urizen's God and vice versa, Satan to Urizen's Palamabron and vice versa, and Rintrah to Urizen's Satan and vice versa. The final effect is one of rapid oscillation from selfhood to human form divine, with Milton playing both parts seemingly at once.

^{Note 17} Kierkegaard, in one of his famous ironic moods, “defined” repetition as recollection of the future and recollection as repetition of the past (Repetition, trans. Walter Lowrie [New York: Harper, 1964]). When we hold these two definitions together we get an experience of the moment similar to that proffered in Milton.

^{Note 18} When imagination appears in Blake's poetry in the form of the Second Coming, it does not assume the form of a perceived image but sees itself through the images that appear to contain it. Thus, the imagination for Blake is not symbolic, for it is the relation of Palamabron and Rintrah before differentiation into opposed subjects; that differentiation, while it remains an immanent possibility, does not become actualized until Satan dissimulates as both Palamabron and Rintrah.

^{Note 19} For Derrida's famous analysis of the literary sign as the double articulation of the signifier and the signified see Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allistan (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973). His true advance over Saussure, however—apart from his deconstruction of Saussure's privileging speech above writing—inheres in his assertion that the signifier, though phenomenal, is not reducible to a strictly physical form; rather it is a sheer appearing exclusive of the brute presence of the empirically real. Once Derrida effects this reversal, the signifier can displace the signified as the life of language; but once this signifier's potential for significance gets displaced into the play of difference, which “rules” language, the resultant undifferentiated status of the signifiers defuses the potential for significance. Consequently, Derrida's differance has more in common with compulsion masquerading as language than with Blake's radically free project of the imagination.

^{Note 20} Just as Milton's subjectivity ceased to be necessary when Milton re-cognized his poems, so Blake, when he stops beholding what he has done and imagines what he can do, ceases to remain a self-present self; but through the imagination he does initiate the figuration of his own subjectivity. In witnessing his selfhood from the perspective of his imagination, he does not reflect on his selfhood but partakes of the act of creating it.

^{Note 21} Eliot, “The Naked Man,” Athenaeum. 13 Feb. 1920, pp. 208–09.

^{Note 22} “I have been facing him [Eliot] for four years, and … I have discovered a safe tangent to strike which, if I can possibly explain the position,—goes through him toward a different goal. … I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say, in the time of Blake” (The Letters of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber [New York: Liveright, 1952], pp. 90, 115).

^{Note 23} Altieri, “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 105–09, is a more expansive discussion of Eliot as a bridge between sub-jectivist and objectivist modernists, with the distinction inhering in the increasing objectivization of the pertinent act of mind.

^{Note 24} Crane explained his uses of repetition when he wrote to a friend that “throughout the poem motives and situations recur under modification of environment” (Letters, p. 275).

^{Note 25} “To Brooklyn Bridge,” 1. 15. All references to Crane's poetry are to The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Doubleday, 1966).

^{Note 26} Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), p. 304. Pearce pinpoints the difference between Eliot and Whitman with clarity, but I think his analysis of Crane's The Bridge is too dependent on expected notions of mythic narrative to appreciate Crane's achieved intention.

^{Note 27} Miller, A Critical Guide to “Leaves of Grass” (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957); Feidelson, Symbolism in American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953); Anderson, The Imperial Self (New York: Random, 1971); and Cox, “Mark Twain, The Triumph of Humor,” in The Chief Glory of Every People, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1973). Miller's influence in advancing my understanding of Whitman extends beyond his book : most of the ideas I present in this essay came to life in a graduate seminar led by Miller at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1972, and I am still thinking through some of his suggestive perspectives on the centrality of Whitman in American poetry. For a full discussion of his views see The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979).

^{Note 28} For an illuminating discussion of the genius loci, see Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 311–36. Whitman's comparison of himself with Blake is telling: “both are mystics, extactics, but the difference between them, … and a vast difference it is: Blake's visions grow to be the rule, … spurn the visual objective life, and seat the subjective spirit on an absolute throne…. But Whitman … always holds the mastery over himself” (Faint Clews and Indirections, ed. Clarence Gohdes and Rollo G. Silver [Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1949], p. 53).

^{Note 29} “Myself and Mine,” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Boston: Houghton, 1959), p. 174. Subsequent citations of Whitman's poetry refer to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 30} Hans Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Méthode, 2nd ed. (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965).

^{Note 31} Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Fla.: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), p. 148. In these seminal essays, Benveniste suggests several renewed applications for the middle voice (pp. 145–52).

^{Note 32} Arpad, “Hart Crane's Platonic Myth: The Brooklyn Bridge,” American Literature, 39 (1967), 85; Quinn, The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1955), p. 146; Vogler, Preludes to Vision (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971); L. S. Dembo, Hart Crane's Sanskrit Charge (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1960).

^{Note 33} Bloch, In Das Prinzip Hofjnung (Frankfurt: Suhr-kamp, 1959), p. 231. Bloch's entire analysis of the wish is worth examining to establish a genuine difference between a mere nostalgia for what has been and a radical confrontation with what may be genuinely other.

^{Note 34} For a brilliant explanation of the etymological interconnections among crisis poems, crossroads, topoi, and criticism, see Harold Bloom's Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 375–406. I would add, however, that if Bloom had included translation as still another etymological strand, he could have uncovered renewed perspective on the relationship between the overman and the poetic text.