Blake and Hamann

Abstract This chapter contextualizes Blake’s and Hamann’s radical propositions about language and reason. For them, language is both ‘the mother of reason and revelation’ but ‘also the centre point of the misunderstanding of reason with itself’. In contrast to the emerging Lockean philosophical status quo of the times, they reject any functional account of language, and instead argue that poetry lies at the origin of all creative thinking (‘poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race’). Blake and Hamann create an account of language (the ‘uterus of thought’) that presents poetic expression as the most concentrated and truthful way of generating meaning, not just in the past, but also today. Crucially, for Blake and Hamann, language and reason are inextricably connected, suggesting that thinking itself is poetical. In their exorbitant epistemology and ontology, Blake and Hamann emerge as two major critics of the eighteenth-century linguistic thinking and philosophy.