Page:William Blake (Symons).djvu/44

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
20
WILLIAM BLAKE

agination in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was a metaphor.