Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
Blake and the Scholars: II
By F.W. Bateson
The Poetry and Prose of William Blake
edited by David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom
Doubleday, 906 pp., $12.50
A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake
by S. Foster Damon
Brown University, 460 pp., $20.00
In the House of Commons a hundred years ago a false quantity in a Latin quotation might ruin a promising political career. So at any rate the legend goes. Today, if an episode for which I happen to have first-hand authority is representative, a misquotation from Blake—the one English Romantic who is still universally O.K.—seems to be the comparable faux pas. The episode occurred a few years ago at a meeting, as I understand, of Harold Macmillan's cabinet, when Iain Macleod, the Minister of Health, was using Blake to confirm the platitude that persuasion is preferable to compulsion:
Review, 1704 words
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