Eco- critical Reading of Swedenborgian Concepts in Blake`s Selected Poetry

 William Blake's long-lasting connection with Swedenborg has long been reflected by many researchers and it is impossible to examine the poet's works within the scope of ecological criticism without considering the importance of the Swedish philosopher in the formation of the poet's mentality. With infrequent exception, every foremost revision of William Blake's works embraces reference of the inspirations of Emanuel Swedenborg's theological books.

Background of the Study:

 There are some of the leaders of Eco-Romanticism such as Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber who fundamentally evade considering Blake an eco-conscious poet in the Romantic era. At the same time there are other critics who try to manipulate and ignore some of Blake`s negative representations of nature and show that he can be enlisted in Eco Critical readings of the present era. One of them is James McKusick who reads Blake`s Golgonooza as an “Ecotopia” of “human scale technology”; he advises the interested reader to read Jerusalem plates 18 and 19 as a caution against one of the most important ecological problems of the current era, the pollution (McKusick 102-05). There have also been some Blakean supporters who have tried to enter Blake into the ecological discussions of the present era and have attempted to raise Blake`s ecological concerns against those vast conventions that simply recognize him as a poet who sacrifices nature in favor of systematic imagination. Imagining Nature by Kevin Hutchings is an astonishing example which hopefully strives “to delineate an alternative, distinctively Blakean view of the relationship between humanity and nature” (Hutchings 3). Based on the aforementioned points, an Eco Critical reading of Blake’s selected poems has been done in this article considering Swedenborg`s “Correspondence” and “Influx”. Selected poems include The Hymn Jerusalem, parts of Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion and parts of Milton.

The art practitioner in the Romantic realm wishes to design all surrounding phenomena to pass through whole. It is widely believed that nature possesses its own self-governing language and all its features function regularly and it also has got a symbolic value, which makes it closer to the structures and peculiarities of unwritten language.  Swedenborg`s two conceptions of 'Influx' and 'Correspondence' have been believed to generate an accord between the surrounding natural world and the Man and he thought that there must be a genuine action of mind on our brain. The idea of ‘Correspondence’ seems to have a long history and it becomes an essential means to comprehend the cosmos and the essence of Man`s creation in Swedenborg`s thought. The reason that they are called correspondences is that they are entirely reactive and represent what they portray. There is an independent language spoken by natural elements and this conveys a symbolic asset which makes Man keep a closer contact to the structures and peculiarities of their surrounding environment. As was mentioned before ‘Correspondence’ acts as a universal principle and it is definitely dynamic so it involves causality. The true indication of this causal relation is named as ‘Influx’.

The author of this article concludes that the traditional eco-friendly metaphysics affirms the spiritual experience of plants and animals in nature after the environmental critical reading of selected parts of Blake's poems and suggests that it is possible to use nature itself to restore the consciousness of humans in the face of nature and all creatures and as a result, it is applicable to explore the deep ecological thought in Swedenborg's ancient concepts as well as Blake`s selected poetry.