A Marxist Reading of William Blake’s Selected Poetry: Machineries in Green Studies

Abstract

Being a dweller of Romantic ecology, William Blake familiarizes his readers with the slant of pastoral landscapes through the ecological sensibilities within the promiscuous city. In his poetry, he has speculated the adventurous plantation of slums in the metropolitan city in the light of machineries and matters that pack human in the box of ambitious dreams as the monstrous dreams of the metropolitan historicity root up the pastoral landscapes of Britain. Whereas critics engage themselves to explore the relation to the outcome of numerous English cultural dominations within his poetry, this study revisits the selected ‘ecopoetics’ through the lens of Marxism to explore the threats towards the green world, especially, within the city shore on Thames. Blake as a ‘green prophet’ enunciates the rural life that is pulverized by the mobility of the mechanistic forces of city life. These mechanistic forces are manipulated by the power of government, industrial revolution, commerce, and neo-colonialism in every day’s behavior in order to ensure the submissiveness of the working class in 18th century England. Thus, the paper aims to discuss the Marxist narratives of Blake’s ‘ecosophy’ that warns us against the severe repercussion of machines and its tyrannical reverberations over the marginalized in his selected poetry.