Blessed William Skullbullet : Blake, Thomas Kinsella and Digital Humanities(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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  • Blessed William Skullbullet : Blake, Thomas Kinsella and Digital Humanities

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The William Blake Archive is one of the finer achievements in digital reproduction and one of the best resources available online for any writer. The archive reproduces, amongst other things, copies of all of Blake's 19 illuminated works, with a comprehensive critical apparatus for the visual and literary contexts and sources of Blake's work. Advanced text-searching and image-searching tools offer new ways of accessing and exploring the work of this singular figure. Yet does Blake's work still have impact on contemporary poets, whether in its original form of illuminated book or in textual or digital reproduction? If so, in what way does this influence manifest itself? This is the question I wish to bring to bear on a discussion of the contemporary Irish poet, Thomas Kinsella, on whose poetry Blake is an acknowledged but so far little examined influence. Kinsella's first work, in Another September (1958) and Downstream (1962), emerged out of a blending of Audenesque forms and tone with Yeatsian magniloquence. Beneath both of these primary sources, however, beat an insistent mythopoeic drive that eventually issued in 'Nightwalker' (1968), a phantasmagoria of modern Irish life, and Kinsella's creation of a secular myth of personal and social origins in Notes from the Land of the Dead (1972) and the continuing series of Peppercanister poems (1972〜). I will show how Blake's work sanctions and informs both Kinsella's drive toward the creation of a unified personal system of understanding and the ways in which this system gradually cedes to a poetics of indeterminacy and process, which mirrors the transformation in critical approaches to Blake fostered in part by the materiality emphasized by the nature of the William Blake Archive. I will be concerned not so much with how digital reproduction transforms our way of seeing Blake, but, beginning with the idea that, in Willard McCarty's words, digital reproduction has not so far 'contributed much to the interpretive operations that are central to the humanities', I will explore how Kinsella's sequence A Technical Supplement (1976) might inform academic engagement with the digitalization of the humanities, our new context which is fundamentally the old dilemma between task, tool, and the role of craftsmanship.

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