Writing on 19th-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that "Regardless of the common reference to the sublime, to the fog, to Babylonian blindness, the London of each poet is different. Every time we read “London,” we have to start again. For poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, London was an extremely difficult subject to capture, as it was a city that conflated excess with the masses. Many Romantic poets of this period had a disdain for capitalism and its practices; something that London seemed corrupted by. As Michael Ferber comments: "The Romantics looked everywhere – to the guilds of the Middle Ages, to the cities of ancient Greece, to the 'noble savage' tribes of America from Tahiti, to the clans of Scotland, even the mysterious Gypsies. – for models not corrupted by capitalism and cash. Yet for poets like Wordsworth and Blake, the city of London formed a large part of their identity and seemingly could not be dismissed or exiled from their poetry. If distaste for capitalism and commercialism was not enough of a source of frustration in London, Sharpe also points out that not only did these poets feel a "mind-wrought aversion" to the city, but they also suffered from 'a quite literal blindness, as "Not only did the city, in its noisy plenitude and incessant mobility, resist efforts to see it poetically, but it was also simply difficult to see, because of the fog, the smoke and darkness." With its “incessant movement,” its thick fog, its persistent growth and change, London seemed inimitable and indescribable. Wordsworth and Blake were somewhat forced to set aside the faculty of vision in their London poetry and treat it in different ways, in an attempt to capture at least an essence of their impression. While Wordsworth's "Prelude" attempts to sum up too much and culminates in frustration, despair and disgust for the city, Blake's famous affection for "peculiar" work gives his poetry a certain sense of together capturing floating snippets of London life just as the individual would have apprehended it. Romantic poetry found in London an anti-sublime, or urban sublime, for it also presented an immeasurable realm, but attempts at apprehension or understanding brought no sense of grandeur or joy. Voices, sounds, and near, perceptible objects bring poets close to gleaning an impression of London, but both Wordsworth and Blake find themselves withdrawn in death, or in exile from the city that partially escapes the imitation and cannot offer any comfort or greater knowledge as perhaps the “romantic” mountains and lakes can. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay One of the most crucial characteristics of London in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (and which continues today) is its perpetual movement and change. As Sharpe notes: “Although poets often stopped to look at the city, whether from a window or in the middle of a crowded street, it was movement that they saw; it was the key element of the city and its essential literary identity.” Furthermore, Richard Schwartz points out that "the 18th-century Londoner was subjected to what appears to be an intolerable amount (and volume) of street noise." The confusion and discomfort resulting from these conditions becomes evident in theseventh book of Wordsworth's "Prelude" where he apprehends Bartholomew Fair: What hell / For eyes and ears, what anarchy and din / Barbarian and infernal - it is a dream / Monstrous in color, movement, form, sight, his Wordsworth perceives the fair as offensive to all faculties, as demonstrated by his fervent listing of "color, motion, form, sight, sound." In fact, movement and noise are so abhorrent to him that he abandons any attempt to describe them, instead reducing them to the realm of "dream", as his perceptions show. They are so outdated that they do not seem to conform to the reality. Blake, instead of trying to perceive the whole at once, uses a kind of tunnel vision in his poem "London", which selects particular sounds and, in doing so, presents them as representative of the most important sounds or the most striking. noises of the city: In every cry of every man,/In the cry of fear of every child,/In every voice, in every ban,/The handcuffs forged by the spirit that I hear. He begins here by focusing on the cry of a "man", then attributing this to a collection of "all voices", creating the feeling of hearing only one or two screams, while recognizing that this one is one of the many “cries” of the city. Blake doesn't just hear the simple screams either, but he hears the "spirit-forged" handcuffs in the sound, making sense of the noise by building from localized apprehensions in a way that Wordsworth does not in his writing of Bartholomew Fair. Blake also creates a sort of hierarchy of meaning in the poem, writing: But most, even in the midnight streets, I hear / How the young harlot's curse / Makes the newborn's tears explode [13- 15] The “curse of the harlot” is now lifted. above the other screams in the poem as the "most" frequent sound and probably, by the note of his "breath", the loudest sound for Blake. Again, sound also has an action in the poem, causing the "newborn's tear" to explode, giving meaning to the sound rather than leaving it as meaningless noise. Deprived of vision on the foggy streets of London, Blake thus draws attention to tiny sounds and then "zooms out" to reveal them as representative of something larger in the city, something also illustrated in his poem " The Chimney-Sweeper”: A little black thing among the snow,/Cry! 'cry! cry!' in notes of misfortune! [1-2]The young chimney sweep was a striking and common symbol of the woes of industrial London, and here Blake zooms in again by first presenting "a little black thing", then placing it "among the snows", perhaps the “blank” mass that London presents in an attempt to see it as a whole. In the singular voice of the chimney sweep, Blake is able to convey a sense of shared experience in London, evoking the appalling practice of selling children commercially, "they both went up",[4] the darkness and soot of London, "clothed me in the garments of death", [7] and perhaps even the blind eyes of the Church on these last two miseries, "they went to praise God and his priest and king”[.][11] Where London cannot be imitated by means of his own vision or voice, Blake instead appropriates the voices and “cries” of those most representative of living London; the chimney sweep, the prostitute or the soldier, working in details in order to obtain a more complete portrait of the city. Wordsworth struggles in book seven of "The Prelude" to delineate details in the same way as Blake, and instead attempts to categorize everything he immediately sees: And every character of form and face:/The Swede, the Russian; from the brilliant south,/The French andthe Spanish; from distant America, the Indian hunter; Moors,/Malays, Lascars, Tartars and Chinese,/And black ladies in white muslin dresses. [VII, P]At first, his impression, or his imitation, works well: he manages to categorize the mass of people he apprehends into different groups in order to give the reader a sense of the scene. However, we see that quickly, and quite early, vision quickly becomes a tedious and difficult mode of expression. The “lively breeze” that had greeted him at the entrance to the city turns into “scattered breezes,” while the “rapid, almost joyous dance of colors, lights, and shapes” degenerates into “a weary crowd.” [VII, P] The imitation and description through vision become very fragile at the moment when the narrator meets the beggar: "it was my chance/To be suddenly struck by the sight/Of a blind beggar, who, face straight,/Standed leaning against a wall, on his chest/Carrying a written paper to explain/The history of the man and who he was./My mind turned at the sight/As with the power of the waters [VII, P]The lineation here presents a very fragmented moment of perception – working in a manner almost the opposite of that of Blake. He apprehends the beggar, then is only slowly able to draw out various specific characteristics, especially noting “the story of the man and who he was” ultimately, whereas for Blake, this “story” of the person of London is inherent in everyone Moreover, sight brings about his poetry. the narrator's mind to "turn around" rather than engage with the character We then see that the vision is not completely forbidden or totally obscured, but simply an unreliable and difficult form to use in attempting to summarize. a feeling of London. Although Blake's London poetry is very aural, it cannot be said to be entirely so - he also uses the visual, but in a totally different way from Wordsworth. Blake again uses his “paths” to representation, that is, he addresses a particular trait in order to express something greater. For example: the cry of the chimney sweep/Every blackening church is terrible,/And the sigh of the unfortunate soldier/Flows in blood on the walls of the palace. [L, I&E]Here Blake makes the intangible “sighs” and “cries” tangible and visual. Instead of trying to simultaneously comprehend the people, landscapes, and societal structures of London via visual storytelling, Blake takes the sound of the sighing soldier and attaches it to the building, and thus to the institution of the monarchy, the uniting all into one. image to both create a simple impression, while commenting in a naturalized way on the failings of the governing body. He thus uses a sort of “road” to create a visual image by capturing what is immediately perceptible and apparent, which in this case are the sounds of London, by linking them, again, to larger structures. Although Blake does indeed seem to come closer to emulating Wordsworth's inimitable scale of London, both poets move away from the subject just as they are about to grasp or apprehend it, noting that the dark realities of the city and its disconcerting dimensions thwart a complete and satisfying impression of a "whole", while curbing the desire to find beauty there. In Wordsworth's case, as we see his attempt to capture everything fail, he finds himself retreating into the darkness in a last-ditch effort to describe what he sees: Here, house fronts, like a page of title, / With huge letters inscribed from top to bottom; / Stationed above the door, like holy guardians, / There are allegorical forms, feminine or masculine [VII, P] Here we see an amalgamation of comparisons, as he begins to »,.