by Sloane Madden
Literary writing is constantly responding to the works of others: rewriting, endorsing and refuting existing ideas and views of culture. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake makes clear through references to the Allegory of the Cave that he has read Plato’s classic text Republic, and throughout the text, Blake engages with the ideas and issues that are presented in Republic. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell responds particularly to Plato’s views on the relationship between desire, wisdom, and poetry in a way that interrogates the Platonic views on these topics. Blake’s text suggests that poets must go against the classic Platonic views in order to be able to improve the world, and as such that it is poets who are the wisest and most important members of society.
In both Republic and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the authors present and defend their views on the role of desire in a soul and how indulging desire impacts the individual. While both authors argue that desire plays a key role in our human experience, they have vastly different views on the relationship between desire and wisdom. For Plato, desire is a “disease, shameful condition, [and] weakness” that needs to be restrained in order to achieve wisdom (Plato 121 444 e). Such accusatory diction describing desire and vice allows Plato to convey to the reader the importance of “moderation, justice, and reason” when learning to be wise and fair (263 591 b). As a result, the reader is told that indulging one’s inner desires when it is not required makes them immoderate, unjust, and unreasonable.
The emphasis Plato places on the importance of restraining desires directly contradicts the views Blake presents in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For Blake, indulging desires is an essential step in humanity’s journey towards enlightenment. Indeed, throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he refers to desire and energy as “eternal delight” (Blake 29 Plate 4), and argues that “[t]hose who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained” (30 Plates 5-6). Blake’s text likewise asserts that desire is an essential part of the human experience, and those who ignore it only do so because they “only [have a] shadow of desire” within them (30 Plates 5-6), and as a result have never known the power of true desire. The emphasis Blake places on desire’s place within society contrast’s Plato’s views, and as such destabilizes the conventional Platonic view of the impact of desire. As a result, Blake redefines desire not as a moral sin that must be restrained, but as an essential part of ourselves that must be interacted with and indulged if we want to achieve our highest potential.
Though Plato’s Republic presents the controlling of desires as beneficial both the individual and society, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell refutes this by asserting that restraining desire instead harms the individual, and as a result, society. When it comes to the impact of indulgence upon the individual’s ability to contribute to society, Plato asserts in Republic that wealth, and by extension desire, “makes for luxury [and] idleness” (Plato 97, 422 a). In other words, if citizens indulge their desires, they will live with monetary wealth, but they will live “without philosophy” and as a result they will not benefit society (290 619 d). As such, Plato argues that desire must be restrained so that humans do not become enslaved to the corruptive nature of desire (250 579 e), as when indulgence is valued, virtue, and by extension wisdom, “is valued less” by the individuals and their society (221 551 a). In response to this, Blake uses the Proverbs of Hell to emphasize the importance of indulging desire for a society. On Plate Seven, Blake asserts that “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity” (Blake 31 Plate 7). By describing prudence, one of Plato’s core values, using typically undesirable terms, Blake is likewise able to frame prudence as undesirable. The fact that Blake personifies prudence using the feminized image of the undesirable old maid serves to strengthen this idea, as it makes this version of prudence both undesirable as a person and an undesirable social outcome. Therefore, Blake asserts that while those who are prudent and moderate have monetary wealth, ignoring desires means that they have not gained life experiences, and as a result have not gained the wisdom necessary to help society improve. This personification not only allows Blake to frame moderate individuals as undesirable, but also allows him to imply a relationship between experiences and wisdom.
The idea that ignoring desires breeds sickness of the mind serves to reinforce this idea: while those who are moderate may be just or reasonable, they will never truly be satisfied as “reason…governs the unwilling” (30 Plates 5-6). According to Blake, not only is prudence socially undesirable, but “[h]e who desires but acts not breeds [internal] pestilence” (31 Plate 7). This goes against Plato’s view of a “healthy” city (Plato 48 373 a), which is one that only needs the necessities to be happy. Essentially, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell opposes Plato’s view of a “city with a fever” by arguing that by governing desires and overvaluing reason (48 373 a), humanity is depriving themselves of the very thing that is characteristic of a just society according to Republic: satisfaction (95 420 c). In other words, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell argues that a society that ignores or restrains desire is unhealthy, whereas the one that indulges is the only society that can bring satisfaction. Because no one is satisfied if they restrain their desires, Blake asserts that attempting to ignore our desires merely harms us as individuals, and therefore harms society. Blake’s non-Platonic view serves to respond to Republic’s assertions on desire and its impact on society, thereby attempting to reimagine and reframe indulgence as necessary to a productive and creative world.
Though this refutation of Plato’s beliefs would have been shocking to many readers, Blake’s text then goes one step further, asserting that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake 31 Plate 7), thereby refuting Plato’s argument and undermining the traditional view that indulgence and desire hinder our ability to gain wisdom. While Plato does concede that “the desire for delicacies is…necessary to [some] extent” for humans to survive (Plato 229 559 b), he clarifies that
The desire that goes beyond [the necessities] and seeks other sorts of foods, that most people can get rid of, if it’s restrained and educated while they’re young, and that’s harmful both to the body and to the reason and moderation of the soul…[is] rightly called unnecessary[.] (229 559 c)
This passage shows Plato’s assertion that some desires are necessary, but when desire goes beyond humanity’s base needs, it becomes unreasonable and dangerous. It is exactly this ostensibly dangerous desire that Blake believes is crucial in attaining wisdom, as Blake believes that the wise individuals are those who have lived the most experiences. Plato views wisdom as inherently virtuous, Blake as something that is gained through potentially sinful indulgences. This understanding of experience as knowledge emphasizes the power of poets, and how their ideas must contrast societal expectations in order to have the potential to change the traditions that lay the foundations of society.
By stating that one cannot achieve wisdom without indulging their desires in what Plato would regard as excess, Blake not only destabilizes conventional eighteenth-century views of desire and sin, but also directly contradicts Republic and questions the emphasis it places on moderation. According to Plato, “a person of understanding [will] direct all his efforts to attaining [the unified] state of his soul” (263 591 c), and in order to achieve this essential unification, while he must love learning and knowledge, he must also “guard against [corruption]…either by too much money or too little” (263 591 e). The fact that Plato states that one must have moderation in order to be wise stands in stark contrast to Blake’s view on indulgence. For Blake, indulgence and the gaining of experiences is the only way to truly achieve wisdom, and as a result Blake, unlike Plato, believes that if the common man “persist[s] in his folly he would become wise” because he would have satisfied his desires (Blake 31 Plate 7). Blake views the man who indulges himself as the only man who is truly satisfied and wise, and as a result the only man that can properly contribute to the ideal society. For Plato, it is the exact opposite. According to him indulgence, excess, and imagination merely leads a man to his ruin, as with these traits he does not care for society, but merely for himself. This contrast between the individualist and collectivist viewpoints serve to strengthen The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’s contrary nature and allows it to emphasize this unusual view of the relationship between desire, experience, and wisdom in a way that interrogates the cultural and philosophical views of Blake’s society.
Aligned with their differing views on desire and its relation to wisdom, Plato and Blake also differ on their views of the people who use desire and creativity to influence society: artists and poets. Though Plato does seem reluctant to exclude artists from his perfect city, he does so because he believes they can corrupt others due to their lack of knowledge. This belief is exemplified in Books Six and Seven with the Allegory of the Divided Line, in which he ranks the different types of understanding and knowledge:
Thus there are four such conditions in the soul, corresponding to the four subsections of our line: Understanding for the highest, thought for the second, belief for the third, and imagining for the last. Arrange them in a ratio, and consider that each shares in clarity to the degree that the subsection it is set over shares in truth. (Plato 185 511 e)
Plato places understanding, the level of knowledge only philosophers can achieve, at the top of the line, and the poet’s tool of imagination at the bottom. He argues that the poets are “inexperienced in truth [and thus] have unsound opinions” about all manners of life (255 584 e), and it is due to the fact that poets have “no grasp of the truth” about what they imitate that they are not only inferior (271 601 a), but also dangerous to society, as lack of knowledge can lead to the spread of innovation, thereby destabilizing Plato’s stagnant ideal society.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell reverses Plato’s hierarchy of knowledge, as Blake uses Plato’s devalued tool of imagination to demonstrate the power that poets hold. While Blake does ironically agree with Plato that “true poet[s are] of the Devil’s party” and as such can corrupt others with their words (Blake 30 Plates 5-6), Blake disagrees with Plato’s assertion that this power is detrimental to society. In fact, Blake’s text asserts the opposite, stating that “what is now proved was once, only imagined” (32 Plate 8), thereby stating that since imagination is inevitably the root of knowledge, imagination cannot be useless in developing a society. This ability to use persuasion to “remove[…] mountains” and influence society (35 Plates 12-13), Blake argues, is unique to poets and essential in creating a new society as “without contraries there is no progression” (29 Plate 2), and while Plato would argue that “any innovation in music or poetry…threatens the whole system” (Plato 99 424 b-c), Blake responds by stating that the progression and improvement of society is more important than maintaining the status quo. This assertion allows Blake to use imagination and creativity to respond to Plato’s request for justification about the importance of poetry while also signifying to his own society the importance of the innovation and imagination that only poets can provide (278 607 d).
Throughout The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake challenges both Platonic and eighteenth-century English views about the relationship between desire, experience, and wisdom, as well as the power of the poet. By suggesting that indulgence leads to wisdom and that poets’ creativity is essential, Blake undermines the unchanging beliefs presented in Plato’s dialogue, thereby proving that humanity needs the innovations and ideas of poets to survive, adapt, and flourish throughout their lives and labeling poets, not philosophers, as the wisest people in society.
Works Cited
Plato, Republic. Translated by G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett, 1992.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Dover Publications, 1994.