ABOVE
Blake evinces the defiance, insistence, and anxious vision of the radical Romantic, and perhaps an element of the paranoia sweeping along a visionary poet’s adherence to the reality principle. Another man’s or woman’s system always is hovering over creativity, always needs to be overcome; “another Man’s” system may horrifically become one’s own just after it has been created.
Note that it is a system, not a poem, that needs creating, a set of inter-related principles, a theory that ranges wide in its relevance and can act powerfully in changing environments; it can guide the making of a poem according to principles beyond the poem’s own precinct. Blake’s cry suggests that there are only systems; there is no outside.
In the next line, “I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create,” reason is “cold reason,” that excludes and purifies; to compare is to be satisfied with an existing system: “a” and “b” taken together (in metaphor and simile) assume the same bedrock of perspective. The history of modern innovative poetry traces a loosening of reliance upon metaphor. “my business is to Create” is not a juxtaposition of two very different realities occupied by the same person whose art requires simultaneous acknowledgement of capitalism and imagination, neither submitting to the other but perhaps constructing, at least for an instant, a better, less oppressive, system. “Another system” assumes reaction against an existing one that may hover visibly beneath its dramatic realignment.
BELOW
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