consciousness. He breaks open the closed system of classical 
rhetoric at the same time that he cuts into the closed system 
of newspaper somnambulism. Symbolism is a kind of witty jazz, 
a consummation of Ruskin’s aspirations for the grotesque that 
would have shocked him a good deal. But it proved to be the 
only way out of “single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

     Blake had the insights but not the technical resources for 
rendering his vision. Paradoxically, it was not through the book 
but through the development of the mass press, especially the 
telegraph press, that poets found the artistic keys to the world 
of simultaneity, or of modern myth. It was in the format of the 
daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarmé discovered the means of 
rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge 
called the “esemplastic” imagination. (5) For the popular press 
offers no single vision, no point of view, but a mosaic of the