SOURCE: Carr, Duane R. “Steinbeck's Blakean Vision in The Grapes of Wrath.” Steinbeck Quarterly 8, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall 1975): 67-73.

In the following essay, Carr uses Jim Casy's speech at Grandpa Joad's graveside as a starting point to analyze instances of allusion to the poetry of William Blake in The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck criticism has come a long way since Edmund Wilson's early judgment of The Grapes of Wrath as principally about animals, not humans,¹ and Stanley Edgar Hyman's rather harsh judgment of Steinbeck as interested only in the study of ecology.² Three critics in particular—Peter Lisca, Warren French, and Joseph Fontenrose—have demonstrated Steinbeck's interest in the growth of the individual man from self-centered isolation to involvement in the human community,³ and Fontenrose notes that “Steinbeck is an heir of the Romantic movement,” not the Naturalistic.⁴ I would like to place Steinbeck even more firmly in the...