| Kierkegaard, Creation Anxiety, and William Blake's Early Illuminated Books asks the question, "Why do we fear the possibility of our own creations?" of William Blake's early Illuminated Books (1789-1795), relying upon Soren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety along with Either/Or and Concluding Unscientific Postscript for a theory of personality and of anxiety. I justify my reliance upon Kierkegaard to read Blake with a description of three widespread cultural tensions prevalent in Blake's London and Kierkegaard's Copenhagen: tensions between monarchy and democracy, science and religion, and nature and artifice. These tensions serve as potential sites of individual anxieties and all signal deep changes in human self-understanding, changes Kierkegaard registered in his pseudonymous authorship and Blake in his mythological works. Eventually, these tensions come to be seen as the sources of Creation Anxiety in William Blake's Illuminated Books. Kierkegaard's aesthetic sphere becomes particularly relevant to Blake's creation myths as I establish correspondences between Kierkegaard's immediate erotic sphere and Blakean Innocence through a close reading of the Introduction to the Songs of Innocence. After Innocence falls into Generation, Creation Anxiety begins with Blake's critique of Generation in poems such as The Book of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and "To Tirzah" of The Songs of Experience, Generation fully giving way to an explicitly articulated Creation Anxiety in The Four Zoas. After establishing this trajectory from Innocence to Generation to Creation Anxiety, through a close reading of The [First] Book of Urizen I expose the three cultural tensions previously described as the sources of Creation Anxiety in William Blake, coming to understand literary representations of our fears of our own creations as a trope for our fear of human self-recreation through developments in politics, science, and religion. |
