Page:Life of William Blake, Gilchrist.djvu/464

 Mr. Crabb Robinson was not only a friend and admirer of Wordsworth, but among the believers,—fewer then than now,—in the new poetic revelation to be found in his works. The edition of 1815 was the first in which Wordsworth's poems were arranged into classes; and contained the celebrated new Preface on the various distinctive characteristics of poetry, as well as the celebrated Preface and Supplementary Essay, first printed in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Blake's notes extend over the first volume only: they are characteristic iterations, according to his wont, of favourite dogmas.

In the Preface to the edition of 1815 Wordsworth writes, 'The powers requisite for the production of poetry are, first, those of observation and description.' 'One power alone makes a poet,' answers Blake,—'Imagination; the Divine Vision.' On the line—

Blake comments—'There is no such thing as natural piety, because the natural man is at enmity with God.' And again, on the fly-leaf, under the heading,—Poems referring to the Period of Childhood,—'I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually; and then he is no poet, but a heathen philosopher, at enmity with all true poetry or inspiration.' At the end of the divine poem To H. C. Six Years Old, he exclaims: 'This is all in the highest degree imaginative, and equal to any poet, but not superior. I cannot think that real poets have any competition. None are greatest in the kingdom of heaven. It is so in poetry.' Against the heading, 'On the Influence of Natural Objects,'—to the frost scene from the then unpublished Prelude, we have the singular, yet (to one who has the key to Blake's peculiar temperament) not unintelligible avowal: 'Natural objects always did, and now do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that