Kipling's Poems: Plain Tales From the Hills and Others Book

BLAKE: THE SPECTRE BETWEEN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

"O spectre over Europe and Asia!" chanted William Blake in one of his Major Phropecies: Jerusalem. A century after, Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels spread their Communist Manifesto, bearing the unforgettable line: "A spectre is haunting Europe..."

Could it be so that this is a mere coincidence? Marx himself nevertheless, was oceanic in his philological background. His readings would date back to the first poetry of the West'Homerʼs The Iliad & Odyssey. The very difference though, if previous studies could not unearth who was first, between Blake and Marx'the latterʼs opener had been mostly passed to generations with the American spelling of the word: "specter."

In the 20th century, Blake resurfaced again'earlier than the coming of the Beat Generation where Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan mused on him. Before such contemporaneous appeal, Blakeʼs first biographer Arthur Symons, and William Butler Yeats had a singular observation on the poet. Blakeʼs "intellectual heir" is Friedrich Nietzsche, they said. Years and miles apart were the gaps however, of these two thinkers. Blake was of the 17th century, while Nietzsche would be in the latter time. But both had that similar intensity (and even insanity) in their literature. No one could deny that they had these aphorisms in the voice of a distant sage shining from their works; and yes, the two were shut down by their contemporaries, they retreated from the public world, and wrote and wrote (and also painted in the case of Blake) without a grasped audience. The two opened fire at their predecessors: Blake lambasting Plato and Locke; while Nietzsche focused on Socrates and Descartes, among others. They have either, though not the clearest similarity, a sour taste of the publicʼs yearning to religion. Not the clearest because Blake had prophecies dismissing only "natural religion."

The most fascinating in the end are their notable metaphors or symbols. If Blake had Urizen and the Red Dragon; Nietzsche had Zarathustra and the Golden Dragon. Parallel this might seems, but the similarities are there. No matter how rejected these two were in their time'they are smiling now. No poet and philosopher had been more influential and imitated than Blake and Nietzsche. Especially the poet and painter who could be the first spectre'the first dragon.