“Feet of Beasts”: Tracking the Animal in Blake

Abstract

William Blake depicts nonhuman creatures, wild and domesticated, less as materialist delusions or temptations to false selfhood, or for that matter as mere symbols, than as visionary instances of what exceeds and challenges the fallen human senses. Repeatedly, Blake's illuminated works put us on the track of the animal and of the animal's relation to the human and to our embodied animality. Hence, in the later epics' apocalypse of the Human Form, multifarious animal being becomes a vital source and regained portion of a corporeal otherness and expanded genius, forming a mingled, divine being – a being sublimely shared. Blake's representations of animals, including human-animals, thereby unsettle any simple, too-simply anthropocentric, sense of animality in his oeuvre and its ultimate “Human Form Divine.”