The Web of the World

AbstractThis chapter considers the way in which ‘co-inherence’ shapes Williams’ developing perspective on William Blake. The account draws on lecture notes, lectures, and published pieces. Especially significant is the lecture of March 1939, written when Williams was beginning to use the term ‘co-inherence’. Throughout his commentary on Blake, Williams consistently draws attention to the interrelatedness of living things in Blake’s poetry, culminating in the metaphor of a great ‘web’, expressing a wholeness of creation that can be built by the imagination: a ‘co-inherence’ that defeats ‘incoherence’. The necessity of forgiveness, which Williams flags up, takes on a fresh character in the light of co-inherence, since we enter the web of relations through an exchange of forgiveness. Linking imagination and forgiveness with co-inherence leads Williams to believe that Blake’s view of reason is not opposed to Wordsworth’s ‘feeling intellect’. Finally, the context of co-inherence enables Williams to reaffirm Blake’s visionary power.