Abstract
Blake and his contemporaries Wordsworth and Coleridge were all philosophical poets who worked to fill in the gap left by the deflation of “soul” to “self” in contemporary philosophy: in this deflation, they thought, what had been lost from view was the psychological dimension – the self's experience of itself. In their project, it turns out, they had an ally later in the nineteenth century in the philosophical iconoclast Søren Kierkegaard. All four, in different ways, recognized that the self's experience of itself is an uncertain and bewildering one, but one whose urgency cannot be ignored. The self confronts its own conscious specificity as a residue “that cannot burn or be burned up,” without knowing the origin or the purpose of this specificity. Unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake and Kierkegaard attempt to formulate solutions to this problem, but it is not clear whether these solutions are any more than therapeutic.