[split] Blake discussion

[busker]

Yeah when your shitty poems are still being refered to after 250 years I think Blake will take it on the chin.

By that yardstick, Arthur Conan Doyle must be the pre-eminent Victorian literary figure, ahead of Browning or Hopkins...

Oh come on, saying Blake is just historical... how edgy :d Without Blake we'd be all sucking our thumbs. And to reduce his paintings to "pictures"? Well, you write anything half as good and paint anything half as good and I'll defer to your genius. But from what I've read of you it's mediocre at best. And you can have an opinion. but it's wrong.

Please explain how the text below is a poem that someone in our day and age can't pastiche.
Let me expound further: you can't pastiche Milton for long. If you do, it becomes high quality poetry. You can't pastiche much of Keats or Tennyson because their craft was at a high level. You can pastiche Shelley, of course, because 90% of what he wrote was rhyming 'mountain' with 'fountain', and you can pastiche Shakespeare because he just made shit up. You can't pastiche Wodehouse. You can't pastiche Dostoevsky, even in translation. Or Chekhov. Or Martin Amiss. Or TS Eliot. You can't pastiche the Psalms or the Book of Job. If you do, then it all becomes quality work in its own right.
But you can pastiche this:

Rintrah roars, and shakes his fires in the burden’d air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

To clarify: I'm not saying that all of Blake is like the above. His 'Songs' are at the highest level.

Wordsworth, on the other hand...

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Blake painted well, but the average mural artist in Australia today is a better craftsman..:also has better tools, of course