Abstract

Despite overwhelming evidence of the poet's life-long preoccupation with Francis Bacon and his revolutionary philosophy, scholars treat Blake's relationship with Bacon as unimportant in comparison with his ideas about other thinkers and writers. Blake's complaints against Bacon's philosophy are misconstrued as attacks on other philosophers, such as Locke. And Blake's marginalia in Bacon's Essays--the most direct evidence for Blake's understanding of the modern philosophy he devoted so much energy to answering--are dismissed as the expressions of an irrational prejudice or mined for indications of Blake's attitude toward contemporary political events. ;The Essays marginalia, however, reveal an understanding of Bacon's ideas that academic criticism has only begun to achieve in the past two decades. Blake's most violent attacks on Bacon are supported by Blake's careful analysis of the disingenuous method of argumentation employed in the Essays. Blake's notes point to a pattern of rhetorical trickery by which Bacon deceives the gullible among his readers. The poet also recognized and rejected the hidden message the author of the Essays addressed to the subtler reader. Blake uncovered in these Essays Bacon's blueprint for a materialist universe: rejection not only of God but of any supernatural element in human experience, substitution of the lust for power for the pursuit of truth and goodness as the motive force in human activity, and reduction of nature--human nature as well as the nature of physical objects--to a series of coincidences of impersonal forces. ;The evidence of Blake's marginalia in other books, letters, and poetry is that the discovery of Bacon's pernicious intentions and the necessity of resisting the Baconian world view triumphant in Blake's own time preoccupied the poet to the end of his life. Milton and Jerusalem contain attacks on the modern outlook replete with references to details that caught Blake's attention as he read the Essays. These poems also contain evidence of Blake's similarly careful reading of at least one other work by Bacon, The Advancement of Learning. The evidence demands that we recognize not only Blake's incisive criticism of Bacon's method of argument and revolutionary philosophy but also the large role Bacon plays in Blake's thought