"London" and Its Politics

If you cross the Thames on Westminister Bridge from Parliament to the south bank, go down the stairs on the left side, and walk a hundred yards or so you will come upon the text of Blake's great short poem chiseled into the stone pavement. It is a good place to read the poem, in sight of the chartered Thames it speaks of and not far from Blake's home in Lambeth where he wrote it, though if I had been asked I would have suggested a wall near the Tower or the Docks on the north bank, where Blake later set another wanderer, in Jerusalem, through sights and sounds similar to those of London. As it is, to read it at your feet, next to two benches with a view of Parliament and the Ministry of Defense buildings across the river, in a sidewalk mainly trod by tourists who have never heard of Blake and have no time to think about him on their scheduled ways to their chartered buses, is to feel its continuing relevance, its capacity to speak to our current condition, and at the same time to sense its historicity, its intense absorption in the London of 1792. Its reabsorption as a monument in late twentieth-century London has ironies enough-the sidewalk was declared a Silver Jubilee Walkway in 1977-but at least it is grounded, as it were, in a place where it may converse with the city its author loved and hated, where it may be in the root sense of acting and arguing as a citizen of the polis. The political or social bearings of used to seem perfectly obvious-George Orwell could say, there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like 'I wander through each charter'd street' than in three-quarters of Socialist literature'-but in recent years Harold Bloom has argued, with great energy and influence, that the poem's center of gravity lies not in its encounter with London but in its transactions with a precursor text, Ezekiel, which so threatens the competence and confidence of the poet that the poem becomes a confession of its own inadequacy as prophecy. I think this interpretation is badly wrong-headed and the Ezekiel precedent a red herring which draws us out of the poem altogether. I believe I can show this without taking on Bloom's general theory of poetic influence, but

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