produced is a Poem Entitled 'Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion,' but find that to Print it will Cost my Time the amount of Twenty Guineas. One I have Finishd; it contains 100 Plates but it is not likely that I shall get a Customer for it.8
As you wish me to send you a list with the Prices of these things they are as follows: . s d America 6. 6. 0 Europe 6. 6. 0 Visions &c 5. 5. 0 Thel 3. 3. 0 Songs of Inn. & Exp. 10. 10. 0 Urizen 6. 6. 0
4. A businessman who was an old and loyal friend of Blake and a buyer of his illuminated books. Blake wrote this letter only four months before he died on Aug. 4, 1827. 5. Cumberland was trying to interest his friends in buying a set of Blake's engravings, Illustrations of the Book of Job. 6. Isaac Newton's Method of Fluxions (1704) announced his discovery of the infinitesimal calculus. To Blake, Newton was the archrepresentative of materialist philosophy.
7. I.e., a free art, not subject to authoritarian control, and suited to the free citizens of a republic (rather than the subjects of a monarch). 8. This single colored copy of Blake's Jerusalem survives in the Mellon Collection.
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The Little Card9 I will do as soon as Possible, but when you Consider that I have been reduced to a Skeleton, from which I am slowly recovering, you will I hope have Patience with me.
Flaxman1 is Gone & we must All soon follow, every one to his Own Eternal House, Leaving the Delusive Goddess Nature & her Laws to get into Freedom from all Law of the Members into The Mind, in which every one is King & Priest in his own House. God Send it so on Earth as it is in Heaven.
I am, Dear Sir, Yours Affectionately
WILLIAM BLAKE
9. A small illustrated name card that Blake exe- time and illustrator of Homer and Dante, had died cuted for Cumberland; it was his last engraving. the preceding December. 1. John Flaxman, a well-known sculptor of the ROBERT BURNS
1759-1796
When Robert Burns published his first volume of Poems in 1786, he was immediately hailed by the Edinburgh establishment as an instance of the natural genius, a 'Heaven-taught ploughman' whose poems owed nothing to literary study, but instead represented the spontaneous overflow of his native feelings. Burns took care to call attention to those qualities in his verse?the undisciplined energy and rustic simplicity? that suited the temper of an age worried that modern refinement and propriety had undermined the vigor of poetry. But even though he cast himself (in the half- modest, half-defiant words of his Preface to Poems) as someone 'unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule,' Burns was in fact a widely read (although largely self-educated) man and a careful craftsman who turned to two earlier traditions for his poetic models. One of these was an oral tradition of folklore and folk song. The other was the highly developed literary tradition of poetry written in the Scots dialect of English.
His father?William Burnes, as he spelled his name?was a God-fearing and hardworking farmer of Ayrshire, a county in southwestern Scotland, who, unable to make a go of it in a period of hard times and high rents, died in 1784 broken in body and spirit. Robert, with his brother Gilbert, was forced to do the heavy work of a man while still a boy and began to show signs of the heart trouble of which he was to die when only thirty-seven. Although his father had the Scottish esteem for education and saw to it that his sons attended school whenever they could, Burns's education in literature, theology, politics, and philosophy came mainly from his own reading. At the age of fifteen, he fell in love and was inspired by that event to write his first song. 'Thus,' he said, 'with me began Love and Poesy.' After he reached maturity, he practiced at both. He began a series of love affairs, fathering in 1785 the first of a number of illegitimate children. He also extended greatly the range and quantity of his attempts at poetry. So rapid was his development that by the time he published the Kilmarnock edition, at the age of twenty-seven, he had written all but a few of his greatest long poems.
The Kilmarnock volume (so named from the town in which it was published) is one of the most remarkable first volumes by any British poet, and it had a great and immediate success. Burns was acclaimed 'Caledonia's Bard' and championed by intellectuals and gentlefolk when he visited the city of Edinburgh soon after his book came out. The peasant-poet demonstrated that he could more than hold his own as an urbane conversationalist and debater. But he was also wise enough to realize that once the novelty wore off, his eminence in this society would not endure. He had a
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fierce pride that was quick to resent any hint of contempt or condescension toward himself as a man of low degree. His sympathies were democratic, and even in 1793 and 1794, when partisans of parliamentary reform were being prosecuted for sedition in Edinburgh and Glasgow, he remained (like William Blake in London) an outspoken admirer of the republican revolutions in America and France. In religion, too, he was a radical. Against the strict Calvinism of the Presbyterian kirk (church) in which he had been raised, Burns was known to profess 'the Beligion of Sentiment and Beason.' A letter of December 1789, in which he seizes the chance to play a free-thinking Son 'of Satan,' merrily proclaims his intention to take up a theme that will, he says, be 'pregnant with all the stores of Learning, from Moses & Confucius to [Benjamin] Franklin & [Joseph] Priestl[e]y?in short .. . I intend to write Baudy.' Burns's satires on the kirk and taste for bawdy vulgarity could offend. Furthermore, his promiscuity gained him considerable notoriety, less because womanizing was out of the common order for the time than because he flaunted it. Many of the friendships that he made in high society fell apart, and Burns's later visits to Edinburgh were less successful than the first.
In 1788 Burns was given a commission as excise officer, or tax inspector, and he settled down with Jean Armour, a former lover, now his wife, at Ellisland, near Dumfries, combining his official duties with farming. This was the fourth farm on which Burns had worked; and when it, like the others, failed, he moved his family to the lively country town of Dumfries. Here he was fairly happy, despite recurrent illness and a chronic shortage of money. He performed his official duties efficiently and was respected by his fellow townspeople and esteemed by his superiors; he was a devoted family man and father; and he accumulated a circle of intimates to whom he could repair for conversation and conviviality. In 1787 James Johnson, an engraver, had enlisted Burns's aid in collecting Scottish folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Burns soon became the real editor for several volumes of this work, devoting all of his free time to collecting, editing, restoring, and imitating traditional songs, and to writing verses of his own to traditional dance tunes. Almost all of his creative work during the last twelve years of his life went into the writing of songs for the Musical Museum and for George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. This was for Burns a devoted labor of love and patriotism, done anonymously, for which he refused to accept any pay, although badly in need of money; and he continued the work when he was literally on his deathbed.
