Homer and the Ancient Poets

An enormous bank of blue-grey cloud rolls over a wooded valley. Two minute travellers stand on the cliff above it; five robed figures gather beneath the trees below. Between these separated groups, pale bodies float across a dark opening. William Blake’s Homer and the Ancient Poets makes Limbo a landscape of unequal visibility. Its inhabitants share a world, but cloud, rock and foliage interrupt what they can see of one another. ^[1]

The subject comes from the fourth canto of Dante’s Inferno, where the living poet encounters the great writers of antiquity. Blake’s watercolour, dated 1824–27 in Tate’s collection, holds together the descent into a clouded abyss, the recognition of the ancient poets and a quieter pastoral setting. Reading the canto beside the picture reveals how much action has been gathered into this apparently still scene. It also sharpens a difficult question: how could Blake honour the imaginative power of ancient poetry while attacking its association with conquest? ^[1][2]

Looking down into Limbo

The upper travellers are lightly drawn, almost absorbed into the pale sky. Their smallness makes the precipice seem immense. Below them, cloud descends in rounded, overlapping masses, moving from dark blue at the upper left towards paler forms on the right. The cliff’s long edge and the crowns of the trees carry the eye across the sheet, while the dark wedge containing the floating bodies draws it downwards. The lower poets have more colour and detail than the distant witnesses, but occupy a narrow strip beneath the foliage. ^[1]

Dante begins Canto IV by awakening to thunder at the brink of a valley. The abyss is so deep, dark and clouded that he cannot distinguish anything at its bottom. Virgil turns pale as they prepare to descend. Dante mistakes that pallor for fear; his guide explains that it comes from pity for those below. Blake’s high viewpoint makes looking itself an action whose result remains uncertain. The travellers can face the abyss without possessing a clear view of it. ^[2]

Tate’s catalogue identifies the drawing with several separated passages: lines 8–12, 29–30 and 64–94. Martin Butlin explains that Blake combines the view down into the cloudy abyss with the later sight of the ancient poets by firelight. The tall flame at the far left and the small figures beneath the trees therefore belong to a longer unfolding encounter. The composition gives different stages of the journey room within one continuous setting. ^[1]

The canto later takes the company to a noble castle encircled by seven walls and a stream. After passing through seven gates, they enter a green meadow where distinguished inhabitants speak seldom and gently. Blake’s quiet right-hand landscape can be considered beside this later change of atmosphere, although it does not reproduce the castle’s sevenfold architecture. His open space and pastoral music make a contrast with the dense grove. The drawing lets the reader register different conditions within Limbo without presenting a separate illustration for every successive place. ^[1][2]

That organisation rewards looking across the landscape before concentrating on the famous men. Hayley Flynn’s study of Blake’s Dante illustrations argues that their settings make the journey physically coherent: landscape carries movement and links encounters. Here the vertical distance between cliff and grove makes a passage through the poem visible within a single image. Our eye crosses ground that Dante’s narrative has to traverse. ^[13]

Sighs without bodily torture

Limbo is the first circle of Dante’s Hell, beyond the earlier threshold pictured in The Inscription over the Gate. In Canto IV, the sound that distinguishes this region is sighing. Its multitudes include infants, women and men. They suffer grief without the bodily tortures encountered farther down. Virgil explains that their merits cannot overcome the absence of baptism or, for those who lived before Christianity, their failure to worship God as Dante’s faith requires. Virgil himself belongs among them. ^[2]

His explanation culminates in the condition of desire without hope. This gives the episode its peculiar emotional weight. The inhabitants retain longing and distinction, yet cannot reach the fulfilment available to the saved. Dante grieves because he recognises people of great worth among them. The canto asks its reader to hold admiration and exclusion together; the ancient poets’ presence in Hell does not cancel the respect expressed towards them. ^[2]

The distinction matters when reading Tate’s modern label, which describes the poets as virtuous non-Christians who did not deserve eternal damnation. Dante nevertheless places Limbo within Hell, and Virgil describes its inhabitants as lost. Their special condition involves freedom from physical torment alongside an enduring deprivation. Blake’s pale airborne bodies and the sheltered grove belong to this less violently punitive region. They should not acquire the whirling punishment of the lovers in the following canto merely because both images contain suspended human forms. ^[1][2]

Canto IV also remembers a release from Limbo. In response to Dante’s question, Virgil recalls a victorious figure taking Adam, Abel, Noah, Moses and other biblical figures to blessedness. That account interrupts any impression of the place as a purely classical gathering. Its population and history reach beyond the famous writers at the front of Blake’s scene, and the wider crowd gives the floating forms a basis in Dante’s text. ^[2]

Four poets, a company of six, and Blake’s five

Dante is precise about the writers who approach. There are four: Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. Homer leads, carrying a sword. They welcome Virgil back, recognise the shared title of poet and then greet Dante. When Dante joins them, he becomes the sixth member of the company: four arriving poets, Virgil and himself. The Italian wording explicitly distinguishes the four approaching shades from the six ultimately gathered. ^[2]

Blake’s arrangement changes this arithmetic. Five figures stand together beneath the grove at the lower left, while Dante and Virgil remain above on the cliff. Butlin’s catalogue draws attention to the additional lower figure. It cannot be explained by calling the group Dante’s six poets: the travellers occupy another part of the image, and the number beneath the trees exceeds the four named arrivals. The fifth figure has no securely established personal identity in the evidence supplied by Tate. ^[1]

This is a small discrepancy with large consequences. If every figure is assigned a name too quickly, the picture seems to confirm a narrative that it has actually altered. Keeping the extra figure visible as a question preserves the distinction between Dante’s words and Blake’s arrangement. We can recognise the subject without pretending that every member of the gathering has been identified. ^[1][2]

As Butlin reports, Albert S. Roe proposed that Blake increased the group to five in order to associate the poets with the five senses. In that reading they embody rational, sensory apprehension, separated from divine inspiration. The proposal offers a reason for the number and for the enclosure of the figures under foliage. It remains Roe’s interpretation, transmitted through Butlin’s catalogue, rather than an identity announced by an inscription on the sheet. ^[1]

The sword already belongs to Dante

The weapon offers a firmer connection. Dante’s Homer already carries a sword in Canto IV; Blake did not need to invent one to make the ancient poet martial. In the poem it accompanies Homer’s precedence over the other three writers. His authority is reinforced when Dante compares the supreme poet’s song to an eagle flying above the rest. The sword belongs within a scene of literary honour. ^[2]

Tate’s October 2023 label suggests that Blake’s sword may refer to Homer’s celebration of the Trojan War. Blake’s own writing makes the association with violence especially charged. In the preface to Milton, he attacks the authority of Homer, Ovid, Plato and Cicero when their writings are elevated against biblical inspiration. He calls the Greek and Latin writers “slaves of the Sword”. The phrase challenges an artistic culture whose models he associates with destructive power. ^[1][14]

The surrounding preface gives that accusation a contemporary reach. Blake addresses young men, painters, sculptors and architects, urging them to resist authorities in the army, court and university who suppress imaginative activity while prolonging bodily war. He also attacks fashionable judgement and the financial promotion of supposedly valuable art. Ancient literature enters an argument about how living artists should work and whose approval they should seek. ^[14]

The verse attached to the preface complicates any claim that a sword must always have one meaning for Blake. Its speaker also takes up a sword, alongside a bow, arrows, spear and chariot, in a struggle to build Jerusalem. The verse calls this a mental fight. Blake uses martial language for imaginative resistance while condemning corporeal warfare. The sword in Homer and the Ancient Poets therefore gains force from its narrative and intellectual setting; the object alone does not deliver a complete verdict. ^[14]

What Blake objects to in classical authority

On Homers Poetry develops an argument broader than hostility to one ancient author. Blake questions the special claims made for Homer’s unity, then challenges the treatment of literary character as a matter of moral goodness or badness. A bad horse remains a horse; moral judgement does not determine the particular being or form. Poetry, in this argument, cannot be adequately assessed through abstract rules about unity and morality. ^[15]

The short text ends by blaming the classics, rather than Goths or monks, for Europe’s wars. Its violence of expression can obscure the earlier discussion, but the two belong together. Blake challenges the authority granted to inherited models and critical categories. A culture may claim refinement through its classical learning while continuing to organise itself around war. His target includes the modern uses of antiquity. ^[15]

On Virgil makes the political argument explicit. Blake presents Greece and Rome as powers that consumed and destroyed art while claiming to be its parents. He paraphrases the imperial mission announced in the sixth book of the Aeneid as war and dominion, then contrasts making art with plundering, accumulating, translating, copying, buying, selling and criticising it. This is Blake’s polemical reading of Rome, not a neutral historical account of Roman artistic production. ^[16]

The same text distinguishes mathematical form, associated with reasoning memory, from living form, which Blake connects with eternal existence. Its opposition between Grecian and Gothic gives his criticism an aesthetic vocabulary as well as a political one. Such statements help explain why Roe could read the lower grove as a limit upon perception. They supply a context for that proposal without proving that every tree in this particular sheet carries a fixed symbolic meaning. ^[1][16]

Homer’s imaginative power survives the quarrel

An earlier letter prevents these attacks from becoming a simple account of rejection. Writing to the Reverend John Trusler on 23 August 1799, Blake names Homer among ancient writers whose lack of complete explicitness stimulates the reader’s faculties. He then asks what places Homer, Virgil and Milton so high in art. His answer is their appeal to imagination, understood as spiritual sensation, through which reason is reached indirectly. ^[17]

The letter arises from a disagreement about Blake’s own pictures. Trusler has wanted his ideas elucidated; Blake defends the kind of art that asks its audience to exercise perception. Ancient writers serve his defence of visionary painting. The same letter praises the bodily models supplied by the antique alongside Michelangelo, Raphael and living people. His use of ancient art and his criticism of classical authority belong to a complicated relationship that changes with the argument he is making. ^[17]

This is particularly useful beside Homer and the Ancient Poets. The sheet is itself an invitation to work through incomplete visibility. Its great writers remain recognisable and dignified, yet distant from the airborne forms and separated from their living reader by the structure of the landscape. Blake can grant their art imaginative force while questioning the systems of prestige, knowledge and power surrounding it. That tension gives the gathering more interest than a pictorial dismissal would have. ^{[1][14][15][16][17]}

The grove, the floating figures and the music

The lower trees are drawn leaf by leaf, their crowns interlocking into a roof above the poets. On the right, trunks and foliage are more loosely indicated. Small pastoral figures make music beneath them. The centre opens into a dark channel crossed by floating bodies, several of them gathered in intimate groups. Above it, the rounded clouds appear enormous beside these lightly outlined people. ^[1]

The symbolic reading associated with Roe in Butlin’s catalogue treats the grove as error, preventing the poets seeing flying Daughters of Imagination. It also interprets the pastoral music on the right more favourably than the learned gathering on the left. These readings distinguish different kinds of art and perception within the same landscape. Music gives the right-hand scene a human activity, even where the drawing and colour remain faint. ^[1]

The airborne figures are also the point at which interpretations diverge. Butlin reports David Fuller’s objection to treating them as wholly explained through Blake’s own mythology: they derive from Dante’s text. Canto IV has already supplied a multitude of infants, women and men. This supports a connection with the population of Limbo, although it does not independently assign an exact narrative identity to every suspended body Blake draws. ^[1][2]

According to Butlin, Fuller still accepts that Blake challenges Dante’s admiration for the classical poets’ ethics and philosophy despite their exclusion from Christian salvation. The disagreement concerns how that challenge is pictured and how much of its imagery requires an imported symbolic system. Reading the canto restores the human crowd around the poets; reading Blake’s writings restores the pressure of his argument with classical authority. Both make the landscape more intelligible while leaving its individual figures room to remain uncertain. ^[1][2]

The sheet and its place in the journey

Tate records Homer and the Ancient Poets, accession N03353, as graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, measuring 371 × 528 mm. Butlin’s catalogue identifies it as 812.8 and transcribes the lower-right inscription naming Hell, Canto 4. The reverse bears pencil numbers and a note relating to a page position. These annotations do not independently establish when Blake executed the sheet within the project. The recorded WE watermark supplies no year. ^[1]

The surviving surface holds different degrees of elaboration together. Dense foliage and blue cloud sit beside pale figures and exposed paper. Looking at those variations makes us slow down: the most important subject is not necessarily the darkest or most finished-looking part. The small travellers can govern the viewpoint while scarcely competing with the clouds for attention. ^[1]

The broader Dante illustration project carries the journey onwards through more terrible encounters and eventually towards light. This sheet pauses where Dante can still greet his predecessors as fellow poets. Blake gives that meeting a difficult environment: a sword remains among the laurels, music sounds beyond the grove, and other lives drift through the space between the witnesses and the celebrated men. The honour paid to poetry survives within a world that makes the limits of its authority visible. ^[1][2]