A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake 9781472467126

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A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake

It is not surprising that visitors to Blake’s cosmology – the most elaborate in the history of British text and design – often demand a map in the form of a reference book. The entries in this volume benefit from the wide range of historical information made available in recent decades regarding the relationship between Blake’s text and design and his biographical, political, social, and religious contexts. Of particular importance, the entries take account of the re-interpretations of Blake with respect to race, gender, and empire in scholarship influenced by the groundbreaking theories that have arisen since the first half of the twentieth century. The intricate fluidity of Blake’s anti-Newtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema. Central to this guide to Blake’s work and ideas is Kathryn S. Freeman’s acknowledgment of the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby readers still come to it. In this innovative work, Freeman aligns herself with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging our own readerly habits of passivity as we experience his created and corporeal worlds. Kathryn S. Freeman is Professor of English at the University of Miami, US.

A Guide to the Cosmology of William Blake Kathryn S. Freeman

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Kathryn S. Freeman The right of Kathryn S. Freeman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Freeman, Kathryn S., 1958– author. Title: A guide to the cosmology of William Blake / by Kathryn S. Freeman. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016032725 | ISBN 9781472467126 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Blake, William, 1757–1827—Philosophy. | Cosmology in literature. Classification: LCC PR4148.P5 F74 2017 | DDC 821/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032725 ISBN: 978-1-4724-6712-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-56475-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of entriesvi List of figuresxi Acknowledgmentsxii Introduction Entries

1 12

A William Blake chronology229 General bibliography231

Entries

 1 Abolition 12  2 Abraham and Isaac13   [The Abstract: see Allegory]  3 Adam 15   [“Ah! Sun-flower”: see “My Pretty Rose Tree”]  4 Ahania 16  5 Albion 17  6 All Religions Are One19   7 Allegory; the abstract 20  8 America: A Prophecy21   9 “Ancient of Days” 23 10 The Ancients 25 [Androgyny: see Sexuality] 11 “The Angel”; angels 26 12 Art; design; Golgonooza 27 13 Atheism 30 14 “Auguries of Innocence” 31 15 Bacon, Sir Francis 32 16 Basire, James 33 17 Beauty 33 18 Berkeley, George 35 19 Beulah 35 20 Bhagavad Gita37 21 Bible; “Bible of Hell” 38 [Binaries: see Contraries] 22 Blair’s The Grave39 23 Blake, Catherine 41 24 Blake, Robert 42 25 “Blind-Man’s Buff” 43 26 “The Blossom” 44 27 Boehme, Jakob 45 28 The Book of Ahania46 29 The Book of Enoch48 30 The Book of Job49

Entries vii 31 The Book of Los50 32 The Book of Thel51 33 The Book of Urizen54 [The Botanic Garden [illustrations]: see Darwin, Erasmus] 34 Brahma 55 35 Bromion 56 36 Burke, Edmund 57 37 Butts, Thomas 59 The Canterbury Pilgrims60 38 39 Cave 61 40 Center 61 41 Child; childhood 64 42 “The Chimney Sweeper” 65 43 Christianity; church 66 44 “The Clod and the Pebble” 68 45 Cloud 69 [Coban: see Hand] 46 Continental Prophecies 71 47 Contraries; binaries; dualism and nondualism 71 48 “The Couch of Death” 73 49 Council of God 74 50 Covering Cherub 75 [Cowper, William (1731–1800): see Spurzheim] 51 “A Cradle Song” 77 52 Cromek, Robert Hartley 78 53 “The Crystal Cabinet” 79 54 Cumberland, George 81 55 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy81 56 Darwin, Erasmus, The Botanic Garden83 57 Deism 84 [Deity: see God] 58 A Descriptive Catalogue85 [Design: see Art] [Devil: see Satan] 59 Dissent; enthusiasm 86 60 “A Divine Image” 88 61 “The Divine Image” 89 [The divine: see God] 62 “A Dream” 90 63 Druid 91 [Dualism and nondualism: see Contraries] 64 “Earth’s Answer” 92 65 “The Ecchoing Green” 93 66 Eden 94 67 Edom 95 [Elynittria: see Palamabron]

viii  Entries   [Emanation: see Female]  68 Energy 96   69 Engraving; illuminated printing; relief etching 97   [Enion: see Tharmas]  70 Enitharmon 98  71 Eno 99   [Enthusiasm: see Dissent]   [Eros: see Sexuality]   72 Eternity; “Eternity” 100  73 Europe: A Prophecy101  74 The Everlasting Gospel103   75 “Fair Elenor” 103  76 Felpham 104   77 Female; Emanation 105   78 Flaxman, John and Ann 107  79 The French Revolution109   80 “Fresh from the Dewy Hill” (“Song”) 110   81 Fuseli, Henry 111  82 Fuzon 111   [Garment: see Loom]   83 Gate imagery 112  84 The Gates of Paradise (For Children); The Gates of Paradise (For the Sexes)114  85 Generation 115  86 The Ghost of Abel116   87 God; deity; the divine 117   [Golgonooza: see Art]  88 Gothic 118   89 Gray, Thomas 119   90 Gwin, King of Norway 121   91 Hand; Hyle; Coban 122  92 Har 123   93 Hayley, William 125   94 “The Human Abstract” 126   [Hyle: see Hand]   [Illluminated printing: see Engraving]  95 Imagination 127  96 Innocence 128   97 Introduction to Songs of Innocence130   98 Introduction to Songs of Experience132  99 An Island in the Moon133 100 Jerusalem [figure] 134 101 Jerusalem135 102 Jesus 137 103 Johnson, Joseph 138 104 King Edward the Third139 105 Lambeth; the Lambeth Prophecies 140

Entries ix 106 Language; text; song; voice 141 107 Laocoӧn [{yah} and his two sons, Satan and Adam] 143 108 Lavater, Johann Caspar 145 [Leutha: see Sexuality] [“The Lilly”: see “My Pretty Rose Tree”] 109 Linnell, John 146 110 “The Little Black Boy” 147 111 “The Little Girl Lost”; “The Little Girl Found” 150 151 112 Locke, John 113 “London” 152 114 Loom; weaving; garment 153 115 Los; Urthona 155 116 Luvah; love 157 117 Lyca 158 118 Madness; “Mad Song” 159 119 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell160 120 “Mary” 162 121 Mathew circle 163 122 Millenarianism 164 123 Milton165 124 Milton, John 169 125 “My Pretty Rose Tree”; “Ah! Sun-flower”; “The Lilly” 170 126 Newton, Sir Isaac 170 [Nondualism: see Contraries] 127 Notebook 172 128 Ololon 172 129 On Homer’s Poetry; On Virgil173 130 Oothoon 174 131 Orc 177 132 Paine, Thomas 178 133 Palamabron; Elynittria 179 134 Palmer, Samuel 179 [Paracelsus: see Platonism] 135 The Pickering Manuscript 180 136 Platonism; Paracelsus; Plotinus 181 [Plotinus: see Platonism] 137 Poetic Genius 182 138 Poetical Sketches183 139 “A Poison Tree” 184 140 Polypus 185 141 Prophecy; Prophetic Books 185 142 Rahab; Tirzah 186 143 Reason 187 [Relief etching: see Engraving] 144 Reuben 188 145 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 189 146 Rintrah 190

x  Entries 147 Robinson, Henry Crabb 191 148 Royal Academy 191 149 Satan; serpent; devil 192 150 Scolfield, John 194 151 Self-annihilation; selfhood; states 195 [Selfhood: see Self-annihilation] [Serpent: see Satan] 152 Sexuality; eros; androgyny; Leutha 196 [Song: see Language] 153 The Song of Los199 154 Songs of Innocence and of Experience201 155 Space and time; vortex 202 156 Spectre 203 157 Spurzheim, J. G.; Cowper, William 204 [States: see Self-annihilation] 158 Stedman, John Gabriel 205 159 Stothard, Thomas 206 160 Swedenborg, Emanuel 206 161 Tatham, Frederick 208 [Text: see Language] 162 Tharmas; Enion 208 163 Thel 209 164 Theotormon 211 165 There Is No Natural Religion211 166 Tiriel212 [Tirzah: see Rahab] 167 “To Nobodaddy” 213 168 “To the Public” 214 169 Trusler, John 214 170 Ulro 215 171 Urizen books 216 172 Urizen 217 [Urthona: see Los] 173 Vala; Vala, or The Four Zoas; veil 218 174 Varley, John; Visionary Heads 220 [Veil: see Vala] 175 Vision 221 [Visionary Heads: see Varley, John] 176 Visions of the Daughters of Albion222 [Voice: see Language] 177 Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] 223 [Vortex: see Space and time] 178 War 224 [Weaving: see Loom] 179 Wollstonecraft, Mary 225 180 Wordsworth, William 226 181 Zoas  227

Figures

 1 Abraham and Isaac14   2 “Ancient of Days” 24   3 “Job and His Daughters” 50  4 Visions of the Daughters of Albion62   5 “Virgin and Child” 63  6 The Book of Thel70  7 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14 76   8 “A Cradle Song” 78   9 “Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car” 82 10 Milton, Plate 36 105 11 Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Satan, Sin, and Death” 113 12 “Aged Ignorance” 114 13 “The Descent of Odin” 120 14 Har in The Song of Los, Plate 7 124 15 Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence131 16 Frontispiece to Songs of Experience132 17 Jerusalem and Hand, Jerusalem135 18 Laocoön144 19 “Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocence148 20 “Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience149 21 Jerusalem, Plate 31 154 22 Milton, Title Page 167 23 Newton171 24 Visions of the Daughters of Albion175 25 Eve Tempted by the Serpent193 26 Visions of the Daughters of Albion 198 Cover:  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 10

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have supported this project over many years: I am indebted to Professor Emeritus Frederick Burwick, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles; Stephen C. Behrendt, George Holmes Distinguished University Professor of English, University of Nebraska; and my colleagues in the English Department at the University of Miami. I am grateful to Ann Donahue for her interest in the project, to Nicole Eno, and to the editors at Taylor and Francis for meticulous review of the manuscript during the editing process. For allowing me to use reproductions from their archives, I wish to thank the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Art Gallery, the Yale British Art Center, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Huntington Library, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Thanks always to my family, including my sisters and especially my son, Jordan, for patience, love, and inspiration. Because they have motivated this guide for twenty-five years, I dedicate it to my students, some of whom have delved with unabashed enthusiasm into the breach of the Blakean cosmos while others, in spite of initial resistance, have had the fortitude to engage with some of the most opaque of Blake’s texts and design to discover, in their own time, that “opposition is true friendship.”

Introduction

William Blake opens an 1800 letter to Thomas Butts, his friend and patron, with a brief paragraph thanking Butts for a recent letter and mentioning that he has not “got any forwarder with . . . [Butts’s] commissions”; what follows is a leap from the world of pecuniary formalities into a seventy-eight-line poem describing Blake’s “first Vision of Light,” in which his eyes “did Expand/Into regions of air” so that he witnessed The Light of the Morning Heavens Mountains adorning In particles bright.1 The readers – Butts himself in 1800 and we, centuries later – are immediately thrust into the challenge this “first” vision offers to the universe of Newtonian time and space: Blake had such visions all his life so that, as his eyes expand beyond the adult concerns of indebtedness to a patron, Blake simultaneously remains William Blake, the poet, painter, and engraver, living temporarily in the cottage of another patron, William Hayley, while he stands out of time “as a Child,” a state in which all he has ever known “bright Shone” before him (Erdman 713, ll. 72–4). Defying the very foundation of Enlightenment subject/object dualism, the vision emerges as Blake’s “Eyes more & more/Like a Sea without shore/Continue Expanding”; even as Blake identifies himself in time and space, before his cottage in “Felpham sweet,” the vision dissolves the boundaries of self and other as well as the divine and the human, the particles of light becoming “a Man/Human formd . . . /Till the Jewels of Light . . . /Appeard as One Man” (Erdman 712–13, ll. 20–1, 35, 45–7, 50–2). Blake is “Amazed & in fear” by this moment, simultaneously in time and out of time, in nature and liberated from the Newtonian laws of nature (Erdman 712, l. 18). Immediately following the verse portion of the letter, Blake returns abruptly to that adult matter of telling his patron and patroness that he has not completed his assigned painting: “Mrs. Butts will I hope Excuse my not having finishd the Portrait. I wait for less hurried moments,” and so Blake thrusts us back

2 Introduction into that world of contraction and the contractual, the pecuniary and the political (Erdman 713). The paradox of being in and out of the universe of time and space locates Blake, ironically, at the historical moment that Enlightenment thought was losing its stranglehold on western epistemology. This period, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the early nineteenth century, was elided a century later by the reductive codification of the literary periods known as Neo-Classicism and Romanticism. Marginalized by this Modernist paradigm, a wealth of writers fell into the space between the neo-classical and the romantic, emerging only over the past thirty years as the ideology behind poetic canonization came to be challenged; these texts, some newly recovered and others newly re-conceptualized, include women writing in a wide spectrum of genres, working-class writers both male and female, and those poets stricken by the rampant spread of “madness” during the late eighteenth century – the likes of Christopher Smart, William Cowper, and Blake.2 The pervasive label of insanity during the turn of the century signifies the advent of an incipient visionary poetics defying Deism’s strictures. Blake’s historical context, the waning Enlightenment era, thus emerges as a crossroads that gave rise to the sanity/lunacy binary against which Blake and his mad contemporaries struggled. Blake connected the label of insanity to the Enlightenment repression of creative energy; in his marginalia on Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity, Blake writes, “Cowper came to me & said. O that I were insane always I will never rest. . . . You retain health & yet are as made as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon, Newton & Locke,” Blake insisting that so many visionary poets were labeled insane because they did not conform to the Deistic separation of the divine, the human, and the phenomenal world (Erdman 663). By contrast to Blake’s depiction of the “aspersion of Madness/Cast on the Inspired,” Blake turns the tables on the claim of madness by suggesting it is the “rational” Newtonian mind that is insane (Erdman 142, Plate 41, l. 8). The irony behind Blake’s dramatic monologue, “The Mad Song,” is that it is spoken by an Enlightenment Deist who is averse to light: perversely, he says, “I turn my back to the east,” since “light doth seize my brain/With frantic pain”; he is trapped in his self – created and claustrophobic world enclosed by a “paved heaven” (Erdman 415, ll. 10, 21). Blake’s criticism of the insanity of dualistic thinking among those writers, artists, and intellectuals lauded in his society reveals the foundation of a nondualism that informs every phase of his evolving cosmology. Blake told his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that Wordsworth’s Excursion gave him a “bowel complaint,”3 the source of this visceral reaction revealed in Blake’s marginalia to his copy of The Excursion: Wordsworth’s lines, “How exquisitely the individual Mind . . . to the external World/Is fitted,” compel Blake to write, “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting &

Introduction 3 fitted I know better & Please your Lordship” (Erdman 667). With this final phrase Blake connects Wordsworth’s elitism to the separation of subject and object implied by the fitting of the mind to the external world. Wordsworth’s rigidly dualistic world creates a perpetual conflict between imagination and nature, subject and object, as Blake continues in another ironic notation: “does not this Fit & is it not Fitting most Exquisitely too” (Erdman 667). Wordsworth, by contrast, regarded the poet of Songs of Innocence and of Experience a fascinating if harmless lunatic; according to Robinson, Wordsworth said, “There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott!”4 Until a younger generation of admiring artists emerged who, in ironic reference to their youth, called themselves “the Ancients,” the British art world was less charmed by Blake’s idiosyncratic painting style and subject matter than his contemporary writers were about his lyrical poetry. His contemporaries such as Gainsborough produced portrait and landscape paintings that Blake disparaged as the productions of a materialist epistemology. Blake raged against the despotism of the Royal Academy, established and directed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, where Blake himself had been a pupil before he left in disgust for reasons made apparent in the margins of his copy of The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds; in his notations Blake links Reynolds’s tyranny over British art to the Deistic repression of vision by Bacon, Newton, and Locke who “mock Inspiration & Vision” that, he continues, “will always Remain my Element my Eternal dwelling place” (Erdman 660–1). Not only was Blake outraged by Reynolds and the members of his “Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves” who “Divided all the English World between them” (Erdman 636); those who patronized Blake often provoked some of his most vitriolic responses. When the Reverend Trusler expressed his disappointed reaction to Blake’s painting that Trusler had commissioned, Blake in turn responded with disdain for the dull mind of one like Trusler who expects the aesthetic experience to be a passive one: “You say that I want somebody to elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care” (Erdman 702). What troubled many of Blake’s contemporaries and apparently led some of his detractors to label him mad was the corporeality of Blake’s spiritual forms, as seen in the negative reviews of Night Thoughts; of Blake’s designs for The Grave, one review criticizes Blake for giving “real bodies” to “spirits,” leading Blake to explain that such “connoisseurs and artists” would “do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues, are all of them representations of spiritual existences of God’s immortal, to the mortal perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble.”5

4 Introduction By contrast to these attacks on Blake’s expression of the visionary, the young “Ancients” who idolized the older Blake gave strong support to Blake’s expression of the visionary. John Varley, a painter and astrologer, was fascinated by Blake’s Visionary Heads, convinced that these portraits of ghostly visitors were connected to the “spirit world of astrology.”6 Nevertheless, even some of Blake’s most devoted followers attributed to him an albeit idealized madness. The Baptist minister John Martin proclaimed that if Blake is cracked, “his is a crack that lets in the Light”, and Edward Fitzgerald stated that Blake was “quite mad: but of a madness that was really the elements of great genius ill sorted: in fact a genius with a screw loose.”7 Blake connected even his innovative engraving technique to his nondual vision and, in turn, to his rebellion against the oppressive “Angels” of Deism, the British government, and the established art world. He describes his relief etching in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (Erdman 39, Plate 14). Given to Blake in a vision by the spirit of his brother, Robert, who had died of consumption at nineteen, this technique of relief etching reflects the connection not only between Blake’s epistemology and his engraving, but among these and his place in his society, which in turn connects him to anyone with vision who was oppressed. *** As the most elaborate cosmology in the history of British text and design, Blake’s mythos has been treated as a kaleidoscope of symbols demanding a map in the form of a reference book. Yet the intricate fluidity of Blake’s antiNewtonian universe eludes the fixity of definitions and schema; as W.J.T. Mitchell cautioned in 1973, Blake’s prophecies resist being codified in an “encyclopedic, schematic system of cross references.”8 The comprehensive dictionaries, encyclopedias, and formalist studies about Blake during the New Critical period, including Foster Damon’s 1947 William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols – the only extant dictionary of elements of Blake’s mythos; Kathleen Raine’s 1968 Blake and Tradition, two volumes that detail Blake’s sources, from the classical to the arcane; Northrop Frye’s 1947 Fearful Symmetry; and Harold Bloom’s 1965 Blake’s Apocalypse, have been useful tools in gathering information on Blake’s corpus over the halfcentury since they were published. Yet not only has a wide range of historical information come to light since then regarding the relationship of Blake’s text and design to his biographical, political, social, and religious context; perhaps more important, critical approaches emerging from the influence of groundbreaking literary theories since the first half of the twentieth century

Introduction 5 have re-interpreted Blake’s relationship to race, gender, and empire. In spite of this accumulation of material and perspectives, Blake scholars have been wary of attempting a reference book for the reasons Mitchell articulates: literary study has shifted away from such formalist impulses.9 Producing a reference book for a writer who urges his reader/viewer not to “cease from Mental Fight” against all forms of authority, even in encyclopedias, dictionaries, and synopses, means having to re-think the purpose of the reference book itself. Central to the rationale of this guide is the paradox of providing orientation in Blake’s universe without disrupting its inherent disorientation of the traditions whereby many reader/viewers still come to it. The Newtonian fixities that Blake raged against remain tenacious even today so that Blake’s cosmology continues to confound dualistic habits of interacting with both his text and design, subverting such binaries as good and evil, the created and the corporeal, the mythical and the historical, and the subject/object dualism that subsumes even the relationship between author and text. The revolutionary urgency that underlies Blake’s texts and designs is that we free ourselves from the “mind-forg’d manacles” – constraints that begin in a materialist subjectivity seeing itself as divided from others, constraints that extend into a world of war and oppression (“London,” Erdman 27, l. 8). This nondualism of Blake’s was not a mere philosophical system; from childhood, Blake conversed with God and angels and the dead, never altering his assertion that the states of life, or Generation as he came to call it, and eternity were not mutually exclusive. Blake inspired the journalist Henry Crabbe Robinson to ask questions about his beliefs, Blake’s answers always confounding the assumptions that would lie behind the question. Thus, when Robinson asked Blake whether Jesus Christ was the only God, Blake answered, “Christ . . . is the only God . . . and so am I and so are you.”10 As he suggests in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake was keenly aware of the insanity of such a relationship with the divine from the perspective of Deism. Just as Robinson interviewed Blake, Blake interviews the biblical prophet Isaiah, asking “how they dared so roundly to assert. That God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood & so be the cause of imposition”; Isaiah responds, “I saw no God. Nor heard any, in a finite organical perception, but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing” (Erdman 38, Plate 12). The very definition of deity is faulty, according to Blake, founded on Deism’s separation of the human and the divine. From his lyrical poems to his most complex Prophetic Books, Blake’s energetic challenge to late Enlightenment tradition continues to reach today’s reader/viewer; whether we project ourselves into the revolutionary era at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, a period of global turmoil with importance for definitions of gender, race, empire, and religion, or whether we are wrestling with our own intellectual habits, or both simultaneously, we are drawn in by another binary dissolved: that between

6 Introduction the simple and the complex underlying the lyrical poems and their accompanying engravings, such as those in Songs of Innocence and of Experience and, conversely, the simple message of nondualism behind the abstruse, epic narratives that make up the Prophetic Books. Just as Blake’s vision expands in the poem at the center of his letter to Butts and then contracts when he returns to the literally prosaic relationship between artist and patron, so too does his poetic style, from aphorisms to the Prophetic Books. The subtitle to the combined Songs of Innocence and of Experience, shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Mind, opens up a spectrum of questions not only about what the terms “innocence” and “experience” mean, but what their contrariness entails and what that preposition “of” means: are these songs about those states or songs by those states embodied by the speakers of the poems? Those speakers may be separate narrators, or they may represent the contrary states within a single human mind. Even within one collection – and sometimes within a single poem – the contrary state is present; there is everywhere in the poetry and design a multiplicity of perspectives that challenge traditional notions of an authorial voice that the reader might passively rely on for moral instruction.11 A seemingly simple poem from Songs of Innocence such as “The Lamb” – derided as “namby pamby” since its earliest circulation12 – bears reading “suspiciously,” a term that has a recent history in literary theory although when applied to Blake the latent subversion of tradition can be traced retrospectively from the Prophetic Books, when the complexity, ambiguity, and paradox rise to the surface, back to the earlier lyrics and shorter narrative poems.13 Through the lens of his pencil note on The Four Zoas manuscript, for instance, Blake hearkens back to those primary Contraries of the Songs, to demand challenging even this binary of innocence and experience: “Unorganized innocence: an impossibility: innocence dwells with wisdom, never with ignorance.” We see both text and design of “The Lamb” confounding the adult reader’s patronizing attitude towards the narrator when the child himself teaches not just his flock of lambs but the reader the connection among self, other, and spirit in its poem’s perfect symmetry. In turn, “The Lamb” is in conversation with “The Tyger,” a poem of Experience that represents its adult speaker as paralyzed by his “mind-forg’d manacles” in a mounting hysteria of rhetorical questions surrounding the “fearful symmetry” of the tyger, whose depiction, in the design, though variously interpreted, is unarguably a very different creature from the tyger the narrator describes in the poem. The conversation among texts and designs across Blake’s career suggests that the conversation among readers – through essays, books, and other modes of scholarly discussion – mirrors the internal one. Blake refers to that conversation that goes on internally and externally as “Intellectual Battle,” to be celebrated as nothing short of an act of heroism, a title reserved before Blake’s time for feats of military prowess.14 Even when the text at hand is more explicitly subversive, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake’s resistance to binaries does not merely

Introduction 7 invert the fundamental dualism of good and evil but challenges the reader/ viewer’s habit of seeking the authority of a traditional narrator, even from one plate to the next. Thus, although it may be tempting to read the catalogue of aphorisms in the “Proverbs of Hell” section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the single voice of defiance against established morality, Blake – from one aphorism to the next – constantly shifts the moral ground that the reader assumes s/he is standing on, challenging any attempt to create a system of binaries out of the voice that emerges which, in fact, is a composite of the voices in hell the narrator claims to have transcribed. This process demands of the reader a constant questioning of the authority s/he may have passively accepted as “the voice of the devil,” a process that would indeed look “to Angels look like torment and insanity” (Erdman 35, Plate 6). As Blake’s cosmology evolves into the Prophetic Books, the various manifestations of what he calls his “Bible of Hell” that he created by night as he engraved his commissioned works by day, Blake’s story of fall and redemption challenges the solidity of Newtonian ideas of time and space in the narrative of Albion, the composite primeval man who falls asleep spiritually, separated from Jerusalem, his female, spiritual center; as Albion’s faculties, in the form of the Zoas, Spectres, and Emanations, devolve into further and further fragmentation that spirals into a universe of cruelty, oppression, and war, Blake challenges the simple/complex binary in a reversal of the aphorisms and short, lyrical poems: the form of the Prophetic Books is convoluted, the underlying message simple: Albion can only awaken when he triumphs over the spiritual binary of immanence and transcendence, recognizing that apocalypse or liberation takes place not at the end of time but within the moment of awareness. His are, after all, the “mind-forg’d manacles” of “London.” *** While early studies and Blake reference books tended to equate Blake with some of his male characters or symbols, more recent criticism has embraced a more nuanced approach to the authorial voice behind the cosmology. Recent studies that re-think Blake’s notion of Contraries have been most striking in this regard, as witnessed by the wide interest in exploring Blake’s revolt against traditional binaries that link epistemology to gender and sexuality. Just as the speaker in Marriage of Heaven and Hell sees himself as bound by the angel/devil binary, so too is Blake’s character Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion bound by the virgin/whore binary as a woman in England, which she in turn links to the oppression of Enlightenment thought: “They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up./ And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle” (Erdman 47, Plate 2, ll. 31–2). Yet the message in both cases is not one of defeat: neither the devil in the hell where he is cast in 1790 England nor Oothoon, simultaneously a British woman, an African slave in America, a Native American, and

8 Introduction America itself in 1793, needs accept the dualism that binds them: from the dualistic perspective of the angels who tyrannize over the “Geniuses” there, hell is an Eden freed from shame and the taint of sin just as Oothoon ultimately rejects the binary imposed by her fiancé, Theotormon, after her rape by Bromion: “And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty! . . . Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! And all the virgin joys/Of life are harlots” (Erdman 49–50, Plate 6, ll. 16–20). In an embrace of sexuality as “free born joy” that is not bound by tradition, Oothoon cries out, “If in the morning sun I find [beauty]: there my eyes are fix’d/In happy copulation” (Erdman 50, Plate 6, l. 23–Plate 7, l. 1). Blake’s remarkable anticipation of twentieth-century feminist psychoanalysis with this depiction of Oothoon’s undifferentiated sexuality can also be seen as a metaphor for a creativity that transcends subject/object dualism. In spite of Oothoon’s capacity to free herself from the virgin/whore duality, the poem ends with the message that she is still fettered to her rapist and rejected by her lover, who remains until the end in a fetal position of selfabsorption. Blake returns to the connection between nondualism and both male and female sexuality in his Prophetic Books to imagine the potential for a society that liberates both the masculine and the feminine from patriarchal oppression. In spite of the bleak message for women whose vision exceeds the confines of patriarchal society that Visions of the Daughters of Albion suggests, Oothoon reappears at the end of Blake’s Prophetic Book, Milton, reaping the harvest of an apocalypse that reveals the complex relationship for Blake among epistemology, art, and female erotic energy. Milton begins with the eponymous hero leaving his comfortable place in a Puritan heaven that Blake calls Beulah, “where all Contrarieties are equally True,” a deadly stasis harboring the angels that Blake scorns and that recurs throughout his poetry (Erdman 129, Plate 30, l. l). Milton descends from Beulah into Generation, the cycle of birth and death, to right the errors of the Enlightenment that, Blake claims, Milton himself has perpetuated. In the first phase of this redemptive descent, Milton emerges with the epiphany that he has returned to Generation To cast off Rational Demonstration . . . To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering . . . To cast aside from poetry, all that is not Inspiration That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness Cast on the Inspired. (Erdman 142, Plate 41, ll. 3–9) Milton has entered Blake’s garden in Felpham, joining not only Blake and Los, the Zoa associated with art and inspiration, but, equally important, in the second half of the epic, the union is complete with Milton’s female portion, Ololon, who must make her own epic descent from Beulah to be released from her oppressed state as a perpetual twelve-year-old virgin.

Introduction 9 Ololon’s metamorphosis suggests that Milton’s misogynistic portrayal of women, whose ideal state of innocence Milton equates with the pre-sexual, is another of the errors that he must correct; the epiphany bringing Albion to the brink of apocalypse, England’s liberation from its “mind-forg’d” entrapment in a Newtonian world that casts vision as insanity, is fourfold: by including with the revelations of Blake, Milton, and Los that of Ololon, Blake suggests that England’s liberation must include the release of female erotic energy from the oppression of patriarchy. Blake underscores this proto-feminist message with the arrival of Oothoon, who “pants in the vales of Lambeth weeping oer her Human Harvest,” in the final lines of the epic to usher in the promise of an apocalypse that is not the end of time but potential in each moment (Erdman 144, Plate 42, l. 32). *** This guide participates in the recent scholarship that has sought to recontextualize Blake in a world whose ambivalences we are more keenly aware of now than the one described by Blake’s first biographer, the Victorian Alexander Gilchrist, who, in 1863, nevertheless “saved Blake from total obscurity” (Holmes 71). The guide aims to situate Blake in the shifting late Enlightenment world paradoxically, however: by seeking to liberate his cosmology from the limitations of the dualistic thinking that still lingers, to situate Blake in an era in which revolt is not limited to the aesthetic, philosophical, social, or political, which, taken singly, cannot account for the more fundamental revolt against Enlightenment dualism. The guide urges the reader to challenge the assumption behind assigning aspects of Blake’s cosmology a static definition. One of the most common of such tendencies, for instance, is the equation between Blake and Los, who appears in Blake’s Prophetic Books as the Zoa connected with imagination and poetry and whose declaration in Blake’s Prophetic Book, Jerusalem, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans/I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” is often quoted as though it were Blake’s motto. However, Blake points to Los’s limitations at this stage of Zoic fragmentation in Jerusalem: Blake himself not only refused to be enslaved by the systems of others, but, unlike Los at this point, Blake refused to be bound by even his own systems. Thus, the character of Los himself evolves from his early appearance in “The Song of Los” through the Prophetic Books; at this stage in the Jerusalem narrative, Los has not yet re-connected with the other Zoas, including Urizen, with whom he must reconcile before Albion can be whole and therefore before Los can build the City of Art, Golgonooza (Erdman 153, Plate 10, ll. 20–1). The impetus behind this guide is therefore to align the process of using it with Blake’s demand that we play an active role in challenging readerly habits of passivity. Blake’s delight in complicating referentiality informs the guide, which is meant to work in tandem with other Blake reference

10 Introduction books and scholarly studies, a sample of which is recommended in the individual bibliographies for every entry so that each reader can use it to refine her/his relationship to Blake’s cosmology, informed by a multiplicity of perspectives. The guide aims to engage the reader/viewer with Blake’s text and design by synthesizing critical perspectives; to detail elements of Blake’s works from the vantage point of the climate in which he lived; to give concise definitions of elements of his mythos in the context of their critical relativity through a range of scholarly approaches in each entry; and to support electronic publications of Blake’s text and design. Working against the grain of the reference book genre, this guide does not pretend to be exhaustive in its treatment of Blake’s corpus or its manifold figures and allusions; the guide rather presses the reader into the service of creating her/his own relationship to the fluidity of Blake’s cosmology. Designed to encourage the reader to interpolate Blake’s text and design from diverse angles, the guide invites the reader to participate in the irreducibility Blake cultivates in his cosmology.

Notes 1 Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1988). All further references to Blake’s works are in the text. Erdman 712, ll. 2, 8, 12–14. 2 Blake did come late into the Romantic canon, the narrow selection of his texts creating a distorted sense of his place in an equally narrow definition of the poetics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. One of the earliest attempts to restore marginalized male poets of the late eighteenth century to the canon was the anthology Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Eds. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr. and Marshall Waingrow. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969). Their General Introduction questions the “usefulness of the well-worn label ‘pre-Romantic’ for these writers” (17). Since that time the question of the larger period labels has been at stake; a more recent anthology of the period that would typically be denoted Romantic is that edited by Ann Mellor and Richard Matlak titled, significantly, British Literature, 1780–1830, because “the term ‘Romanticism’ has become the subject of interrogation by recent new historical, cultural, and feminist critics” (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996, 3). 3 Bentley, G. E., ed. Blake Records (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1969), 326. 4 Robinson tried to distinguish Blakean madness from other forms of lunacy: “not apply to that form of insanity or lunacy called Mono- mania, & may be disregarded in a case like the present in which the subject of the remark was unquestionably what a German wd. call a ‘Verungluckter Genie’ whose theosophic dreams bear a close resemblance to those of Swedenborg; whose genius as an artist was praised by no less men than Flaxman & Fuseli.” Robinson, Henry Crabb. Reminiscences of Blake (1825–7). Ed. Edith J. Morley. (New York: Longmans, 1922). Web. 5 Bentley, G. E. Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2001), 306. 6 Ibid., 369. 7 Ibid., 132–3, 176.

Introduction 11 8 “Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton.” Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem. Eds. Stuart Curran and Joseph Wittrech. (Madison, WI: U Wisconsin Press, 1973), 281. 9 A modest offering of recent companions and guides updates Blake scholarship for the contemporary era, including those published by Cambridge (2003) and Continuum (2007). Jonathan Roberts’s Continuum guide, William Blake’s Poetry, relies on scholarship by G. E. Bentley and others to form a coherent narrative of Blake’s life and works, another form of reference that works against Blake’s insistence on the reader’s engagement on a deeper level that challenges the very notion of readability. Morris Eaves’s essay collection, The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, addresses elements of Blake’s life, art, and poetry from the perspectives of its contributing scholars, in contrast to the intention of this guide, which offers a polyphony of critical views on specific works, elements in those works, and figures – political, religious, and those whose lives intersected with Blake’s – as a means of suggesting avenues for engagement. 10 Bentley, Blake Records, 310. 11 See entries on “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image” as well as “The Little Girl Lost” and “ The Little Girl Found” that detail the ambiguities of voice especially vis-a-vis their place in the Innocence or Experience collection. 12 Harold Bloom refers to this tradition in The Visionary Company (35). 13 The idea of reading “suspiciously” was introduced by Paul Ricoeur, who describes hermeneutics as “animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience.” Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 27. 14 The Four Zoas, Erdman 300, p. 3, l. 3.

Entries

Abolition The subjective gaze with which Blake represents slaves in both text and design has been the focus of a range of scholarship since David Erdman’s groundbreaking work in the field. Blake’s compelling vision has been described as both influenced by and influencing the watershed historical moment of the abolitionist movement. Blake’s participation in the abolitionist movement appears most directly in his illustrations to Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The designs for Stedman’s Narrative have been important for study of the transatlantic link between Blake and the abolitionist movement in the 1860s and 1870s; that they were pirated is proof for Dent and Whittaker of Blake’s reception in nineteenth-century America through the Swedenborgian Society (99). Observing that Blake’s engravings influenced Stedman’s narrative as much as Stedman influenced Blake, Rubenstein and Townsend note that “slavery concerned Blake far more than most topics he was called upon to illustrate. . . . In his poetry he returned to the issue many times and . . . was well informed” (288). Stedman’s narrative may in turn have influenced Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, a poem that decries slavery through the many-layered allegory of Bromion’s rape of Oothoon (62). Erdman suggests that her name itself, with its double o’s, is an Africanized version of the Gaelic original story of Oithona who is also raped but whose fiancé, by contrast to Theotormon, rescues her; as “the soft soul of America,” by contrast to Oithona, Oothoon is the female slave abused not only by her white owner but by the hypocritical piety of the Englishman who has bought into the myth of British imperialism that supported the slave trade. Blake’s poem “The Little Black Boy” in Songs of Innocence represents Blake’s commitment to the abolitionist movement, as scholars such as Lauren Henry have observed, in particular through the influence of Phillis Wheatley on Blake. This poem presents the racial binary that the child has imbibed from the hypocritical piety of his white, Christian owners. His assimilation of the Christian promise of eternal salvation for the slaves who have suffered on earth is further complicated by the boy’s memory of his mother’s early

Abraham and Isaac  13 teaching of an African nondual divinity, her voice subsumed both in the poem and through the child’s conflation, by the whites’ religious justification of slavery. The differences in the illuminations of the final plate (Figures 19 and 20) underscore the contrasting perception – one naïve, one bitterly aware of the hypocrisy – of the Christian promise that race will be eradicated in heaven. From the earliest lyric poems to the Prophetic Books, Blake insists that such emancipation can only come about when each individual casts off the “mind-forg’d manacles” (“London,” Erdman 27, l. 8). Blake’s most moving and subtle depiction of an emancipated slave can be found at the culmination of Vala, or The Four Zoas, in which Albion as the spiritually sleeping England awakens in an apocalypse that is celebrated by a song “Composed by an African Black from the little Earth of Sotha/Aha Aha how came I here so soon in my sweet native land” (Erdman 403, p. 134, ll. 34–5). Here, at the heart of Blake’s most complex depiction of his cosmology, that a freed African slave is the harbinger of the spiritual freedom of humanity stands as powerful testimony to the importance of abolition for Blake.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1963. Print. Bentley, G. E., ed. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bindman, David. “Blake’s Vision of Slavery Revisited.” Huntington Library Quarterly 58, nos. 3 & 4 (1995): 373–82. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. Blake, Politics, and History. New York: Garland, 1998. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Henry, Lauren. “Sunshine and Shady Groves: What Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ Learned from African Writers.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1995): 4–11. Print. Kitson, Peter J. “Romanticism and Colonialism: Races, Places, People, 1785–1800.” Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830. Eds. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 13–34. Print. Richardson, Alan and Hofkosh, Sonia, eds. Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana UP, 1996. Print. Rubenstein, Anne and Camilla Townsend. “Revolted Negroes and the Devilish Principle: William Blake and the Conflicting Visions of Boni’s Wars in Surinam, 1772– 1796.” Blake, Politics, and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 273–98. Print.

Abraham and Isaac Blake ostensibly based this tempera, painted for Thomas Butts, on the biblical story of Abraham’s compliance with Jehovah’s demand that he sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a test of his devotion (Genesis 22). However, Blake’s narrative in the painting departs radically not only from the biblical story, but from traditional artistic depictions of the scene of sacrifice in which Isaac humbly awaits his death at the altar. In Blake’s rendering, by contrast, Isaac does not passively await his sacrifice at the altar (at the right in Blake’s

14  Abraham and Isaac

Figure 1 Abraham and Isaac (1799–1800), water-based tempera, Yale Center for British Art

painting, Figure 1). Instead, Isaac’s energy is vibrant as he appears to pull away towards the left; naked, he removes himself from Abraham’s arm that bears the knife. Isaac points to a ram at the left of the painting in a gesture that, contrary to the biblical story, suggests it is Isaac rather than a literalized Jehovah who instructs Abraham to offer the ram instead. Blake’s Abraham has been described as one of the last of the Druids, in which case Isaac represents the new generation’s demand that the Druid sacrifice of humans be substituted by animal sacrifice, the painting thus representing the story as “a significant stage in man’s spiritual development” (Lister). Not necessarily excluding this interpretation, however, a yet more subversive reading gives deeper implications for Blake’s challenge to the dualistic orthodoxy of the Judeo-Christian separation of the human and divine: the stony, white-bearded Abraham, who resembles Blake’s depictions of other oppressive patriarchal figures including Nobodaddy, the Ancient of Days, and Urizen, looks up as though to an illusory paternal Jehovah rather than down to Isaac who is a variant of the Orc figure in Blake’s mythos, the revolutionary as a perpetual teenage boy locked in struggle against the oppression of his father, Los. The painting would then suggest that Abraham has made the paternalistic God in his image, looking to him for authority rather than being willing to concede that it is Isaac who offers the ram as a substitute. The red sky thus reflects Blake’s “infernal” challenge to the heaven/hell binary of the Bible and its consequent history of oppression and cruelty.

Adam 15

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print.

The Abstract: see Allegory

Adam Among the errors Blake found in Milton’s representation of Genesis is Milton’s belief that sexuality was an outcome of the Fall. Having questioned Blake about this claim, his friend Henry Crabb Robinson writes that for Blake, the Fall “produced only generation & death”; for Blake, Adam was androgynous in prelapserian Eden, as Robinson notes: “And then he went off upon a rambling state of a Union of Sexes in Man as in God – an androgynous state in which I could not follow him” (quoted in Bentley 427–8). In a popular story, long taken as true and perpetuated by Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of Blake, Thomas Butts happened upon William and Catherine Blake in their garden at Felpham reciting Paradise Lost “freed from ‘those troublesome disguises’ which prevailed since the Fall” (xxvi). Although the story of a naked Blake reciting Milton in his garden seemed evidence enough of his madness for Royal Academy students as early as 1815, the story was apparently recognized even then as apocryphal, according to Bentley. Nevertheless, the power of the story is in its metaphor for Blake’s recurring idea of Eden as a paradisiacal state we can return to at any time as it is outside of time and space. Adam appears in the Argument of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as “Red clay,” the literal meaning of “Adam” in Hebrew. Taking Adam out of the creation story of Genesis, Blake tells instead a nonlinear creation story in which Adam is “brought forth” after the “perilous path was planted,” on “bleached bones,” suggesting that each human is potentially originary (Erdman 33, Plate 2, ll. 9–13). That the Argument is framed with Rintrah, the figure of righteous indignation, who “roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air,” suggests the cyclicality of Adam’s transmutations through fallenness and redemption (Erdman 33, Plate 2, ll. 1 and 21). In his earliest linking of his figures and those of the Bible, such as in The Book of Urizen, Blake associates Los with Adam; as Tannenbaum has observed, “God pities Adam because Adam is alone, and Los pities Urizen because Urizen has successfully effected his own isolation from Eternity with Los’s help” (206–7). As Blake’s cosmology expands and complicates in the Prophetic Books, however, Adam becomes a son of Los and Enitharmon (Four Zoas viii, 115). Blake complicates the biblical Adam by portraying him as the Limit of Contraction that Jesus set to buffer the Fall. In his

16  Ahania eponymous Prophetic Book, Milton reaches a significant level of spiritual growth when he understands that Adam and Satan are states rather than individuals (Erdman 132, Plate 32, l. 25).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1945. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

“Ah! Sun-flower”: see “My Pretty Rose Tree”

Ahania As the Emanation of Urizen, Ahania has been equated with pleasure in Blake’s cosmology, suggesting that when she and Urizen divided, leaving Urizen locked in the dualistic world of intellectual tyranny, his capacity for pleasure departed with her. Urizen divides in two in The Book of Ahania because he, as an “Abstract Philosopher,” has to learn that “Enjoyment & not Abstinence is the food of Intellect” (To Cumberland, December 6, 1795, quoted in Damon, 7–8). Blake returns to Ahania’s story in Vala, or The Four Zoas (Night the Second, Third, and Ninth) to elaborate on her division from Urizen in which she recognizes the error of his “coldly intellectual concept of ‘holiness’ ” (Gallant 63). Although she laments to Urizen, in Night the Third, “O I am nothing when I enter into judgment with thee/If thou withdraw thy breath I die & vanish into Hades,” Ahania returns to him in Night the Ninth when he gives up his attempt to control futurity and the other Zoas (Erdman 327, p. 40, ll. 13–14). Some scholars have rightly cautioned against reducing Ahania to a personification of pleasure as “abstraction or projected lust” (Howard 198). Such a caveat supports the more nuanced readings in which Ahania has been described as the “mysterious female who eludes simple allegorical explanation,” representing all that “Urizen, the Old Testament God, desires”; perhaps most compelling among the more recent treatments of Ahania is the feminist perspective that “Ahania is invisible because she is not permitted to manifest herself” (Tannenbaum 242–4). This ontological perspective has significant political ramifications, as Di Salvo notes by tracing Ahania’s exposure of the “corrupt, intellectual foundation of empire” (218). By denying her subjectivity, Urizen exacts the oppression of multitudes, a significant phenomenon in Blake’s depiction of the fragmented state of the universe, one that Urizen needs to reverse for Albion to awaken and become whole.

Albion 17

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake’s Lavaterian Women: Eleanor, Rowena and Ahania.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 44–52. Print. Gallant, Christine. Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Albion The folkloric name of England, Albion appears in early works such as King Edward the Third and becomes central to Blake’s cosmology in the Prophetic Books even though, according to Damon, Blake was not aware that this name for England was the “aboriginal giant who conquered the island and renamed it for himself” (vi, 14). As is the case with all of the elements of Blake’s cosmology, however, interpreting Albion needs to be qualified by contextualizing him vis-à-vis where he appears in Blake’s corpus. The most striking example of this caveat can be seen in comparing the earliest appearance of Albion with the way he evolves in the Prophetic Books. McClenahan observes that Blake feminizes Albion in Poetical Sketches, suggesting “the common association of female with ‘otherness’ in relation to a standard defined by ‘male’ traits or to power structures in which men dominate. . . . The feminine Albion of ‘King John’ is an England that only reform can build” (307). Albion’s relationship to other mythical sleeping kings of England, notably Arthur, has been explored as a synecdochic relationship between myth and history by Adams, who notes that “Blake thought that in our notion of history constituted as external or of time constituted as measured, vision is clouded, so that the true Albion is slain and broken up into pieces, scattered through that cut-up time” (63). Blake portrays Albion in Vala, or The Four Zoas as the “Fallen man” or the “Eternal man” whose sleep is associated with his fragmentation into the four Zoas and further splintering into Emanations and Spectres. Albion’s own Emanation, Jerusalem, is hidden during this sleep, symbolic of the blindness of England to its spiritual identity. Albion’s sleep is filled with nightmares – the fragmentation of his consciousness – even in Night the Eighth when redemption is imminent. The most complex representation of Albion is his

18  Albion awakening in Night the Ninth of Vala, or The Four Zoas to “[b]ehold Jerusalem in whose bosom the Lamb of God/Is seen” (Erdman 391, p. 122, l. 1–2). Focusing on the resurrection of Albion in The Four Zoas, Frosch suggests that the “imagery of Albion’s new body is dynamic to the extent that it is more accurate to describe it as a risen activity than as a risen body,” in which there is no distinction between “perception and creation, activity and receptivity, imagination and sensation. The body has become the soul; the senses have been improved until they can perceive everything” imaginable (83–4). As he wakes in Night the Ninth, each of the Zoas reunites with his Emanation. Albion “walks forth from midst of the fires: the evil is all consum’d” and his “Expanding Eyes” behold the “depths of wondrous worlds” (Erdman 406, p. 138, ll. 22, 25). Albion’s waking recurs in both Milton and Jerusalem; in the former, it is associated with the union of Milton, Ololon, Los, and Blake. With Milton’s final stage of redemption in Blake’s Milton, in liberating himself from the Enlightenment thought that repressed his poetic energy, he can “cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albion’s covering/To take off his filthy garments & clothe him with Imagination” (Erdman 142, Plate 41, ll. 5–6). In Jerusalem, Albion’s fall and resurrection are given greater detail, beginning with his turn away from Jesus out of jealousy over Jerusalem. Di Salvo discusses their reunion as dramatizing “the Fall as a product of their alienation, depicting the human relationship to nature as Albion’s sexual communion with a woman who is an extension of himself”; Blake’s is thus a “humanized world, defined by our relations with it” (167). By contrast to this achievement of a fragile equipoise in Vala, or The Four Zoas, Albion’s rejection of divine vision in Jerusalem intensifies with the creation of Moral Law which consequently leads to greater conflict with Los than in the previous Prophetic Books; Jerusalem’s ending, with Albion sacrificing himself for Jesus and the Zoas re-entering Albion’s bosom, suggests a union of all things that swerves away from the tension Blake achieves in his earlier works through a nondualism that holds Contraries in equipoise rather than resolving them.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. “Synecdoche and Method.” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Eds. Miller, et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. 41–71. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frosch, Thomas R. “The Risen Body.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991. 79–89. Print.

All Religions Are One 19 Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. McClenahan, Catherine. “Albion and the Sexual Machine: Blake, Gender and Politics, 1780–1795.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 301–4. Print. Paley, Morton. “Spectre and Emanation.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–63. Print.

All Religions Are One Etched at about the same time as There Is No Natural Religion (1788), this tractate is thought to be Blake’s first copperplate engraving. Blake’s aphorisms on human nature, the subject of both tractates, were inspired by Blake’s reading of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, published in 1788, although Blake’s opposition to Bacon and Locke is at the core of his argument in both works. Premising All Religions Are One on a universal Poetic Genius common to all religions, Blake lays claim for a faculty that transcends reason and unifies all people in spite of their differences. Thus, the fifth principal of the tractate states, “The Religions of all Nations are derived from each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy” (Erdman 1). Blake’s name does not appear in this tractate. The allusion to Isaiah and John the Baptist on the frontispiece suggests that the author is a prophet of his age, “crying in the Wilderness,” an allusion Howard glosses as “orthodox moralism and materialistic philosophy” (33). Blake begins his lifelong effort to expose the hypocrisy of religious systems that create duality rather than wholeness; he establishes that true divinity “originates within human nature, as it awakens to its visionary capacity” (Johnson and Grant 12). Studies have therefore focused on Blake’s religious radicalism from the time of this early tractate, noting its “antinomian conception” (Makdisi 249).

Bibliography Damon, Foster. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print.

20  Allegory; the abstract

Allegory; the abstract Throughout his writings Blake attacks traditional allegory that was rooted in classicism and flourished during the Middle Ages as a literary device that assigns fixed meanings to static symbols. For Blake, representing abstract ideas through allegorical symbols deprives images of the vitality and vision central to his cosmology. Blake denounces the allegorizing of abstract ideas as fallen art throughout his poetry, from the static personifications of Pity, Mercy, and Humility that thrive on hypocrisy in “The Human Abstract” to the developed cosmology of the Prophetic Books in which, according to the Bard’s Song in Milton, the present state of fallenness began with Los’s refusal of “all Definite Form, the Abstract Horror roofd. stony hard” (Erdman 97, Plate 3, l. 9). In spite of Blake’s rejection of classical and medieval allegory, his reinterpretation of those sources informs his cosmology. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, for instance, both text and design depicting Theotormon’s cave reinterpret Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (The Republic, Book VII). Blake opposes allegory to myth that he associates with the visionary books of the Bible. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake claims that the “Last Judgment is not Fable or Allegory, but Vision” (Erdman 554). Associating allegory with memory rather than imagination, Blake thus suggests that allegory “points away from itself toward something else which is not art, is a profane abomination” (Frye 116). Blake’s Prophetic Books incorporate this association of fallen art with allegory through Urizen’s attempt to control others by creating the Temple of Mystery. In The Four Zoas, the deadliest state of fallenness comes about when the repressive Urizen claims, “The Universal ornament is mine,” thus creating the Tree of Mystery that bears “Allegoric fruit” (Erdman 360, p. 95, l.19; 375, p. 103, 19). In Jerusalem, Blake portrays allegory as an extreme state of “Falshood,” which “Became a Space & an allegory” (Erdman 243, Plate 85, l.1), distinguished from “Divine Analogy” (l. 7). While many of Blake’s radical contemporaries deemed allegory a “corruption of the metaphorical creations of the earliest poets,” Blake’s own myth, according to Mee, subverts allegorical form “as part of a process of contesting the hegemony of Moral Virtues” by which Blake challenges allegory’s “stable relationship between signifier and signified” (13–14). In spite of his hostility to traditional allegory, however, Blake identifies a redeemed “Allegory address’d to the Intellectual powers” as “the most Sublime Poetry” (1803 letter to William Butts, Erdman 730). Miller observes further that, although Blake “tends to discount allegory in his prose, the poetry treats it with strict equivocation”; Blake’s Prophecies “find allegory consistently denigrated as a fallen mode of representation and perception, yet as consistently rehabilitated as a limit upon the Fall and a potential means of regeneration” (162). Blake demonstrates the fluidity of his relationship to tradition, insisting that even a technique such as allegory that had been used to obfuscate vision has the potential for redemption.

America: A Prophecy  21

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. The Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State UP, 1983. Print. Curran, Stuart and J. A. Wittreich, eds. Blake’s Sublime Allegory. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1973. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake and Spenser. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Miller, Dan. “Blake and the Deconstructive Interlude.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 139–67. Print. Otto, Peter. Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print.

America: A Prophecy The title page of this engraved Prophecy gives the year 1793, signaling as the source of this poem’s ambivalent energy its historical context, the Reign of Terror and the inception of Britain’s war against France. America is considered the first of the Continental Prophecies; although Blake wrote The French Revolution two years before, he did not publish that earlier work. Blake’s circulation of America appears to many readers courageous in its support for revolution at a time when it was dangerous to do so, Parliament having passed strict laws against sedition. This Prophecy is the first appearance of Blake’s mythical figure of revolution, Orc, who “precipitates most of the action” (Johnson and Grant 103). America is structured in three parts: two “Preludium” plates followed by a dialogue between Orc, the central character, and Albion’s Guardian Prince or angel (Plates 5–12), “before the poem turns to a mythical version of the events of the American war for independence (Plates 13–18)” (Dorrbecker 27). That Orc, the revolutionary, is chained to a rock has suggested to some that he is a Christ figure or a “new Prometheus” who aspires to become “the saviour of humankind,” yet it is an ambivalent image: even though he is associated with the hero of humanity fettered by his oppressor, Orc’s energy can turn violent, thus connecting him to his oppressor. This likeness manifests at its most disturbing in the Preludium, in which the chained Orc encounters the “shadowy daughter” of Urthona and abruptly, between pages 5 and 6, bursts his chains and rapes her. With “the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of religion/Run[ning] from their fetters” (Erdman 57, Plate 15, ll. 23–24), the poem develops a complex relationship between

22  America: A Prophecy revolution and sexuality, as Bloom notes of the shift from “tremendous image of sexual torment, followed by a fierce image of sexual release” (124). As in the case of Oothoon’s rape in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the “psychosexual” and political levels of rape in America create mutually influential layers of symbolism (Cox 130). In spite of the poem’s undercurrent of dark energy associated with revolution, a number of scholars have tied America to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, suggesting to them therefore a celebration of both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. Others, arguing against a “unilinear reading of the poem,” see the poem as challenging the “1790s discourse of liberty” (Makdisi 31–2). Scholarship has thus ranged in its interpretation of the poem, from seeing it as an early phase of Blake’s warning about the danger inherent in political revolution to advocating both political and intellectual struggle. This early venture into the cosmology that develops through the later Prophetic Books connects the political and the religious through the interactions of Blake’s created figures with animals and the Bible. Although bound physically, therefore, Orc’s spirit transforms into various animals, including the serpent, the lion, and the eagle. Dorrbecker captures this early phase of Blake’s experimentation with challenging the limitations of space and time by describing the historical action as taking place “on the shores of the North American continent and of the British Isles; both are divided by the dark waves of the Atlantic and vast ‘rolling’ clouds above, the latter providing the scenario for much of the mythical dialogues”; the early speech by Washington, envisioning the future enslavement of Americans, is interrupted by the appearance of Albion’s “wrathful Prince” followed by the revolutionary energy of the colonies symbolized by the appearance of Orc, and it ends with Orc proclaiming a new age of liberty, at which point it becomes clear that Orc’s contention is not just with Albion, but with the Jehovah of “the ten commandments, Blake’s Urizen,” and typifies Blake’s reading the Bible “against the grain” (Dorrbecker 31, 35). The poem is proleptic of Blake’s major Prophetic Books; in its revolving around the spiritual sleep of Albion, who embodies England at war within itself, Blake portrays England’s suffering during the war in this earlier poem as the action turns from America to England. The promise of the American Revolution is therefore not fulfilled in America nor in the later works because as Blake’s cosmology develops we come to see how elaborate is the relationship Blake draws between our epistemological limitations and the dire state of political oppression that we cannot be free of until, as he writes in “London,” we are free of the “mind forg’d manacles” (Erdman 27, line 8).

Bibliography Beer, John. Blake’s Humanism. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968. Print. Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print.

“Ancient of Days” 23 Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Damrosch, Leo. Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David. “America: New Expanses.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. Erdman and Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 92–114. Print. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. “From America to the Four Zoas.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 210–30. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Maniquis, Robert M. “Holy Savagery and Wild Justice: English Romanticism and the Terror.” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 365–95. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

“Ancient of Days” This etching, also called “God Creating the Universe,” is one of Blake’s most famous images, appearing at the opening of Europe: A Prophecy. The old man with white beard leaning out of clouds that are etched in strong lines has been likened to a host of patriarchal figures, including Zeus, the Old Testament God, as well as Blake’s Nobodaddy and Urizen (see Figure 2). Although Blake’s contemporary, George Cumberland, interpreted it without irony as a literal illustration of the great figure of Jehovah in Milton’s Paradise Lost (VII, 230–6), Bentley rightly notes that the “benevolence” of this figure is “nowhere visible in Europe (150). The figure, “by his act

Figure 2 “Ancient of Days” (1795), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

The Ancients 25 of creation,” places “a limit or measurement on the world,” probably an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost VII, 225–7 (Lister 75). Blake’s references to Urizen as “Creator of Men” connects him to the Judeo-Christian God, although “very much of this material world,” the implication being that he is a Deist’s God (Hamlyn and Phillips 256). Blake’s image of Newton echoes this Deistic God’s compass measuring out the universe. Thus, this creator’s act of leaning out of stony clouds to divide darkness from what is an infernal red light is filled with irony. For some, however, creation here is “not only an activity of measuring and of division that is directed at the chaos”; instead, the creator and the super-real presence of his bodily action . . . result from an identical act of geometrical construction” (Dorrbecker 162–3). More specifically, “the compasses in God’s hand are less like a mathematical tool and more like a lightning flash, a creative moment”; in this “comic” reading, Blake’s aim is “not simply to destabilize, but also to rebuild (Rawlinson 201). Nevertheless, the figure has common elements to Blake’s image of Newton (Figure 23), including the stony foundation and the hand that becomes a compass, suggesting that this deity is a projection of Enlightenment Deism’s insistence that God is only knowable through rational deduction.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips. William Blake. London: Tate Gallery, 2000. Print. Lister, Raymond. The Paintings of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

The Ancients This group of young artists came to know the older Blake with great love and enthusiasm. John Linnell was the first to meet Blake; he got work for Blake and accompanied him to see prints, drawings, and paintings together. Linnell introduced Blake to John Varley, who shared with Blake nocturnal visitations by the spirits of those long dead. Samuel Palmer, according to his son, claimed that none of the other Ancients “was affected by Blake in the same way, to the same extent, or so permanently [as Palmer was]. No one else ever kissed Blake’s bell-handle before venturing to pull it. None could imagine Palmer arguing with Blake as Richmond did”; George Richmond, nevertheless, described walking home at age sixteen with Blake “as if he were the Prophet Isaiah” (Bentley 402). Others among them included Edward Calvert and Oliver Finch.

26  “The Angel”; angels

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

Androgyny: see Sexuality

“The Angel”; angels In “The Angel,” a Song of Experience, the speaker dreams of being a “maiden Queen” who is “Guarded by an Angel mild” (Erdman 24, ll. 2–3). For Keynes, the speaker “simulates grief to attract pitying attention, and hides her love, so that the Angel flies away. Then her mood changes, and when the Angel returns he finds her hardened by age” (41). Others have engaged as well in psychological readings of the poem. Marsh notes that fear is at the root of evil in most of the poems of Experience and that, in this case, Blake creates a “tale of distorted emotions,” first through the maiden Queen’s trying to get attention, and then becoming cold and hostile to “defend the hidden fact that she has been hurt”; read from this point of view, the poem is an attack on “repression, denial, possessiveness, defensive fears, and all the distortions and unnatural lies they lead to” (63–4). Like the recurring Blakean figure of the Covering Cherub who guards the gates of Eden so that man may not re-enter Paradise, angels block human energy and are therefore anathema to Blake. Raine attributes the source of the Angel in “The Chimney Sweeper” of Innocence, in which “an Angel who had a bright key . . . open’d the coffins & set them all free” (Erdman Complete, Plate 10, ll. 13–14), to be Swedenborg (26); Raine points to the reference in Marriage of Heaven and Hell to Swedenborg conversing “with Angels who are all religious,& conversed not with Devils who all hate religion” (Erdman Complete 43, Plate 22). As Raine suggests through the connection between Swedenborg and the Angel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell develops Blake’s ironic use of the term “angel” for conservatives in general, synonymous later with the Elect. In the fourth “Memorable Fancy” in which Blake and an Angel show each other their perspectives on the “post-revolutionary future,” the Angel is “unwilling to plunge with Blake into the voice of the coming century” (Erdman Prophet 180). More specifically, the Angel “represents the self-righteous side of well meaning, enlightened, conventional wisdom,” whose heaven is “prim and prurient” (Frost 74). Addressing the question of tone, Erdman notes that Blake adopted “a respectful tone toward Angels, in his letters to his conservative friends Flaxman and Butts” (Prophet 383). Perhaps this subservience is what Blake mythologizes with self-loathing as Palamabron, meek and obsequious in his relationship to the Elect as opposed to the defiance of the renegade Rintrah.

Art; design; Golgonooza 27

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frost, Everett C. “The Education of the Prophetic Character: Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a Primer in Visionary Autography.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 67–95. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Art; design; Golgonooza Blake’s marginalia on Reynolds’s Discourses reveals the depth of Blake’s bitterness about the oppression of this director of the Royal Academy of Art who, Blake writes, “was Hired to Depress Art”; along with his “Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves,” Reynolds was “rolling in Riches” while Fuseli, whom Blake admired for his “Visions of Eternity,” was “almost hid” (Erdman 635–6). The literalism of paintings such as Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” embodies what Blake so loathes in the dictates of the Academy: not only does it subscribe to an Enlightenment perception limited to what Blake calls Generation, the realm of time and space, but it celebrates wealth in the portraiture of the upper class, whereas Blake’s own designs emerge from his nondual epistemology that subsumes Generation, celebrating the visionary and the “organized innocence” that transcends social class and decries oppression of the underclass by the wealthy. Blake’s ironic letter responding to a disappointed patron, Reverend Trusler, who found Blake’s painting incomprehensible, articulates Blake’s artistic ideal and the basis of his struggle among his contemporaries: “I really am sorry that you are falln out with the Spiritual World. . . . You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act” (Erdman 702). Blake’s descriptions of his paintings consistently emphasize the relationship between technique and spirituality. In A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake writes, “I intreat . . . that the Spectator will attend to the Hands & Feet to the Lineaments of the Countenances they are all descriptive of Character & not a line is drawn without intention & that most discriminate &

28  Art; design; Golgonooza particular < as Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant, so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark>” (Erdman 560). As Damon warns, “one must read [Blake’s] pictures, symbol by symbol,” crediting Joseph Wicksteed with first understanding the nature of Blake’s symbols, particularly of right and left: “The right hand or foot is the good, the spiritual; the left is the material, the legal, even the wrong”; thus, in Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job, “Satan’s left hand pours the vial of boils (VI) . . . Satan’s left foot shows the cloven hoof (IX). . . . But when the true God descends toward man, he shows his right foot . . ., while Job aspiring also shows his right” (3–4). Scholars range in views of Blake’s aestheticism, from Gilchrist’s claim for Blake’s “nostalgia for an idealized ‘Arcadian’ past” to Swinburne’s “attempt to fill the hermeneutic gap . . . by describing the aporias within Blake’s own work as creations of the human psyche” so that he is “engaging in Romanticism’s struggle between aestheticism and ideology” (Dent and Whittaker 32–3). In spite of the scholarly tradition of reading Blake’s symbolism as idiosyncratic, however, Tannenbaum emphasizes Blake’s “participation in [the] pictorial traditions that are intimately connected with scriptural exegesis” (12). Agreeing with Mitchell’s argument that Blake rejected eighteenthcentury pictorialism, deriving his imagery from that of “sacred literature, in which language becomes vision and the word is made flesh” (24), Tannenbaum identifies Blake’s aesthetic as “always tied to biblical tradition because his theory of art was centered on the Incarnation, the process whereby the Word becomes flesh” (74). Thus, while one end of the spectrum argues against the idea that Blake’s is a neo-classical aesthetic that “reestablishes certain Enlightenment values on romantic grounds” (Eaves 19), others describe Blake as “the equivalent in the visual arts of the eighteenth-century polymath, turning with equal facility from line engraving to etching, from wood engraving to lithography, from water-colour to what he called fresco (actually a form of tempera) and from thence to miniature” (Lister 2). Blake has also been seen as a history painter, described in terms of a split in the eighteenth century between “design” and “invention,” in which a “visually oriented art based on the human body” interacts with a “deeply literary art based on texts which provide the narrative syntax determining the relationship between figures in a design” (Heppner xiii). Erdman, too, discusses Blake in the context of history painting, observing that, although the Descriptive Catalogue and exhibition “are highly idiosyncratic, they are yet recognizable as natural offshoots of the movement to encourage “public patronage” for historical art (444–6). Blake’s engraving technique offers insight into the way his art reflects his nondual epistemology as it evolves from his early apprenticeship to Basire, in which he mastered the conventions of eighteenth-century engraving, to his invention of a style of relief etching that he describes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as infernal in its nondualism: it represents Blake’s assertion that “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be

Art; design; Golgonooza 29 expunged”; he explains that “this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (Erdman 39, Plate 14). Hell as he describes it here is a place not antithetical to Heaven but merely viewed as such from the perspective of Heaven. Paradoxically, it is the very binary of Heaven and Hell that is the pernicious cause of oppression and suffering. Sarah Stein’s reflection on the relationship between text and design in such works as Blake’s Laocoӧn and The Book of Job, in which “text becomes image and image becomes text,” takes the Blakean challenge to the visual binary a step further than previous scholarship has (627). Stein links Blake’s technique to the printing practices of Hebrew micrography to show that “the very opposition between a theological and material understanding of language is a figment of the imagination. Even in the void . . . the material already inhabited the divine and the divine inhabited the material” (640). In the cosmology that evolves in the course of Blake’s Prophetic Books, Los, fragmented from the other Zoas during Albion’s sleep, is trying in vain to build the City of Art, Golgonooza. As a center of redeemed art, however, it can only manifest when Jerusalem returns and Albion awakens. Thus at the opening of Jerusalem, “Around Golgonooza lies the land of death eternal; a Land/Of pain and misery and despair and ever brooding melancholy” (Erdman 157, Plate 13, ll. 30–1). The Four Zoas represents the most complex interplay of Los’s fallen obstruction of the building of Golgonooza and his potential for both embodying and creating redeemed imagination in which “Los performd Wonders of labour/They builded Golgonooza (Erdman 368, p. 87, ll. 5–6).

Bibliography Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Print. Chandler, Eric. “The Anxiety of Production: Blake’s Shift from Collective Hope to Writing Self.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 53–79. Print. Damon, S. Foster. Blake’s Job. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. De Sola Pinto, Vivian, ed. The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. New York: Haskell House, 1968. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. —––—. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gourlay, Alexander. “A Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 272– 87. Print.

30  Atheism Hagstrum, Jean. “Blake and the Sister Arts Tradition.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 82–91. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. McNeil, Helen. “The Formal Art of the Four Zoas.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 373–90. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. Norvig, Gerda. Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake’s Illustrations to the Pilgrim’s Progress. Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1992. Print. Stein, Sarah B. “The Laocoon and the Book of Job as Micrography: The Influence of Miniature Hebrew Illumination on the work of William Blake.” European Romantic Review 24, no. 6 (December 2013): 623–44. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. “Illuminated Printing.” Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 37–62. Print. Wicksteed, Joseph. Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job. New York: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1924. Print.

Atheism Blake declared to Robinson, “Every Thing is Atheism which assumes the reality of the natural and unspiritual world”; in attributing the suppression of Vision to Enlightenment Deism, Blake describes Bacon, Newton, and Locke as “the three great leaders of Atheism, or Satan’s doctrine” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 697). Even Dante does not escape the term from Blake, who tells Robinson that Dante “was an atheist – A mere politician busied abt this world”; that Blake regarded Paradise Lost as evidence of Milton’s Atheism “till in his old age he returned back to God whom he had had in his childhood,” Robinson notes that Blake “meant this charge only in a higher sense And not using the word Atheism in its popular meaning,” though Robinson adds, Blake “wod not allow this – tho’ when he in like manner charged Locke with Atheism and I remarked that Locke wrote on the evidences of Xnity and lived a virtuous life, he had nothing to reply to me nor reiterated the charge of willful deception” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 426). One can infer from Robinson’s recounting of the conversation that Blake did not necessarily concede to his friend on the definition of Atheism, even though Robinson implies that Blake’s silence suggests acquiescence. It is much more in keeping with Blake’s consistent deploring of Enlightenment thought’s rejection of nondualism that

“Auguries of Innocence” 31 Atheism, especially Milton’s in this case, is the “Vacuum” that the Holy Ghost becomes in Paradise Lost, as Blake claims in Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Erdman 35, Plate 6).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

“Auguries of Innocence” This poem’s deceptive simplicity overturns the foundation of Enlightenment thought. Countering Locke’s insistence on the passivity of the mind as a tabula rasa, the poem’s opening lines associate innocence with nondualism: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour (Erdman 493, ll. 1–4) The Newtonian fixities of time and space are overturned in these acts that Blake describes in the Vala, or The Four Zoas manuscript as the paradoxical contrary of “Unorganized Innocence”: not ignorance but wisdom. As Blake writes in A Vision of the Last Judgment, “I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it” (Erdman 566). These acts are not a rejection of the world of phenomena nor of the “vegetative eye”; they constitute a shift in awareness that harnesses the energy of Poetic Genius rather than an insistence on the mind’s passive reception of external stimuli.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

32  Bacon, Sir Francis (1561–1626)

Bacon, Sir Francis (1561–1626) In his annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, Blake wrote that “when very Young . . . I read Locke on Human Understanding & Bacons Advancement of Learning,” adding that he “felt the Same Contempt & Abhorrence then; that I do now. They mock inspiration & Vision” (Erdman 660). Bacon’s rational empiricism is the object of Blake’s condemnation through works including All Religions Are One, There Is No Natural Religion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton. Regarding Bacon and Locke as the founders of Natural Religion, or Deism, Blake opposes his own revealed spirituality to their systems that base the existence of God on sense experience and rational investigation. Bacon represented to Blake “the negating domination of empiricism or antimythical externalization” (Adams 65). In his annotations to Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political, Blake rails against the multiple layers of Bacon’s patriarchal affinities. Thus, in the section “Of a King,” Blake writes “O Contemptible & Abject Slave” alongside Bacon’s claim that “A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour” (Erdman 624). Even more radical, Blake comments, “Contemptible Knave Let the People look to this” on Bacon’s “Of Seditions and Troubles Section,” where Bacon writes, “Lastly, let princes against all events, not be without some great person, one or rather more, of military valour, near unto them, for the repression of seditions in their beginnings” (Erdman 625). The notion of a military state to suppress public protest is anathema to Blake in his repeated outcry against any war except that of the intellect.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. “Synecdoche and Method.” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Eds. Miller, et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. 41–71. Print. Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 620–32. Print. Essick, Robert. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Glausser, Wayne. Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print. Hagstrum, Jean. “William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991. 67–78. Print.

Basire, James (1730–1802) 33

Basire, James (1730–1802) Basire was considered a “distinguished topographical and antiquarian engraver in mid-career” when Blake began his seven-year apprenticeship with him in 1772 (Bentley Stranger 32). Basire’s engraving style was considered old-fashioned, consisting of “sharp, uncompromising parallel incisions of outline and cross-hatching, moulding and following the shape they were representing” (Lister 8). Nevertheless, the apprenticeship remained a lifelong influence on Blake’s engraving style, Blake comparing Basire’s “Inventive Powers” to his contemporary engravers as “awkward imitators” in his Public Address (Erdman 571–2). Basire, who had been commissioned to make engravings of the sepulchral monuments in Westminster Abbey, sent the sixteen-year-old Blake to make sketches. Bentley notes, “Sometimes his dreaming eye saw more palpable shapes from the past,” including “a vision of Christ and the Apostles” (Bentley Blake Records, 16). It was the influence of Basire’s firm method that instilled in Blake the aesthetic of the “bounding line,” which he describes as “the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life . . . : the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art” (Erdman Complete 550).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert. William Blake Printmaker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Beauty As Adams notes, “beauty is not a word Blake often uses,” and, I would add, neither does he use the term “sublime” as his contemporaries used it according to the aesthetic categories debated during his time (123). However, Blake’s view of beauty becomes significant in his commentary on Reynolds’s Discourses that represent the traditional view that “to preserve the most perfect beauty IN ITS MOST PERFECT STATE, you cannot express the passions, all of which produce distortion and deformity, more or less,

34  Beauty in the most beautiful faces”; Blake’s response, in the margins of his copy of Reynolds’s Discourses, is indignant: “What Nonsense Passion & Expression is Beauty Itself – The Face that is Incapable of Passion & Expression is Deformity Itself” (Erdman 653). The disruption of the classical ideal of unity is for Reynolds deformity; as Eaves notes, “Implicit in Reynolds’ notion of the perfect state of perfect beauty is the attitude that passion itself is wrong” (61). Blake, according to Eaves, uses Reynolds against himself by noting that “any authentically characteristical style would violate the most important values in Reynolds’ theory as a whole. An esthetic theory that values uniformity, consistency, and generalization so highly cannot value any very firm sense of individuality without contradiction” (64). While Raine’s study of Blake’s relationship to tradition is helpful in locating the lineage of Blake’s ideal of beauty, such as when she notes that his “first acquaintance with the Platonic theory of art must have come through one of Thomas Taylor’s earliest publications, Plotinus’ Concerning the Beautiful”; yet because Raine claims that Blake learned from Plotinus that the soul’s innate forms reside in the intelligible world, and that sensible things are beautiful through their participation in form, she concludes, reductively, that “the forms we recognize reflected in matter . . . are innate in the soul, or intellect.” Raine thus posits that Blake “adopted in its entirety the Platonic view of form, inseparable from other aspects of that philosophy,”; this unqualified assertion is problematic when she illustrates it with the pivotal moment in The Four Zoas in which Los becomes the embodiment of the artist because he sees that “the specters of the dead can be given life only by participation in intelligible form,” (I. 261–4). However, Los cannot build Golgonooza, the City of Art, on that basis alone, for it is synchronous with the apocalypse in Blake’s cosmology. Perhaps Adams best synthesizes these two vantage points – Blake’s relationship to classical notions of beauty and his reaction to that standard imposed by Reynolds in his own time: “Blake always objects when Reynolds attacks the representation of minute particulars” because he “opposes the Platonized empiricism that Reynolds, not philosophically sophisticated, embraces” (122). Albion’s spiritual resurrection can only come about through the nondual revelation that these forms are no different from the subject who views them.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Berkeley, George (1685–1753) 35

Berkeley, George (1685–1753) Beginning with Gilchrist, many commentators have noted the similarity between Berkeley’s phrase, esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived,” and Blake’s statement, “Mental Things are alone Real what is Calld Corporeal Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place” (Erdman 565). As Bentley notes, however, it is not clear from Gilchrist’s original observation that “Bishop Berkeley was one on the list of Blake’s favourite authors” (191). Raine cautions that, although for Blake, Berkeley shows the “fallacy of supposing that we can ever know more than we already do about the nature of the material universe through additional senses,” there are decided parallels between them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which “the improvement of the senses will result in the perception of an object that shall ‘seem infinite’ ” (II, 108). The fundamental differences between Blake and Berkeley outweigh their similarities: Berkeley claims that there is a reality about things “apart from our perception of them, and, as all reality is mental, this reality must be an idea in the mind of God” (Frye 14); Blake is at the very least “more hostile to empiricism” than Berkeley as Damrosch notes, finding this distinction more significant than that Blake “agrees with Berkeley that whatever we perceive must be distinct and individual” (16, 19). One can emphasize their disparity further yet, with Berkeley’s prior statement diminishing the human at the hands of a consuming God in contrast to Blake’s nondual identification of the divine with human imagination.

Bibliography Ault, Donald, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning “The Four Zoas.” Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1945. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Beulah Of the four realms in Blake’s cosmology, including Eden, Generation, and Ulro, Beulah, the “married land” of the Bible, signifies for many scholars the “mental state of repose and pleasure,” a state anticipated by Har in The Book of Thel (Howard 209). In Book II of Milton Blake gives his most detailed description of Beulah, “a place where Contrarieties are equally

36  Beulah True. . . . It is a pleasant lovely Shadow/Where no dispute can come” (Erdman 129, Plate 30, ll. 1–3). Ololon must leave her comfortable place there at the opening of Book II to make her epic descent into the states of Ulro and Generation, thereby resolving what Blake sees as Milton’s error in having cast out his feminine portion. Several scholars have focused on the paradoxical nature of Beulah. Tracing Blake’s Beulah to Bunyan who in turn echoes Isaiah (62:4) and the Song of Songs in Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, Damrosch emphasizes that, while Bunyan has positive associations with “the married land,” Blake’s Beulah is ambiguous, inferior to Eden, since it “closes itself to imagination” (220–2). Heightening this irony, Otto observes that the relationship between Beulah and Eden is paradoxical, for Beulah gives “form and shape to eternity. Without the work of the passive powers the life of Eden would be completely unbounded and such a life is no life at all” (65). Yet Beulah’s relationship to imagination has been the source of critical debate. Lincoln counters Damrosch’s observation above when he claims that “in Beulah, divine mercy is a “living reality apprehended in . . . three areas of life: intellectual, emotional, sexual. All imaginative creations in the fallen world derive from Beulah” (232). Others have emphasized the relationship between the corporeal and the imaginative in Beulah. Di Salvo, for one, suggests that, in Beulah, “human beings passively enjoy sensuous nature and their own bodies in a respite from the more active pleasures of the imagination” (299). Webster, like Di Salvo, emphasizes the implications for gender and sexuality: Beulah is “not only the world of self-abnegating nurture . . . but also the world of sexual gratification” (221). Ololon’s epic journey to free herself from Beulah, however, is evidence that the “married land” does not equate with sexual energy. After Ololon passes through Generation, joining Milton, Los, and Blake in Felpham, she casts off her identity as a young virgin; thus, with her redemption she embraces her own energy that in turn completes Milton. Her heroic journey is the catalyst to the apocalypse that promises a return to Eden once the error of Milton’s suppression of female energy has been redeemed.

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Bhagavad Gita  37 Fox, Susan. Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Otto, Peter. Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print. Wagenknecht, David. Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973. Print. Webster, Brenda. “Blake, Women, and Sexuality.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 204–24. Print.

Bhagavad Gita Though Blake rarely refers to the Vedas directly in his poetry, many scholars have noted the influence of the translations of the British Orientalists under the direction of William Jones at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries. The most direct reference Blake makes to Orientalism is his description of a now lost drawing titled “The Bramins,” in which Charles Wilkins’s 1785 translation of the Gita appears in Blake’s Descriptive Catalogue with the following description: The subject is, Mr. Wilkin, translating the Geeta; an ideal design, suggested by the first publication of that part of the Hindoo Scriptures, translated by Mr. Wilkin. I understand that my Costume is incorrect, but in this I plead the authority of the ancients, who often deviated from the Habits, to preserve the Manners, as in the instance of Laocoon, who, though a priest, is represented naked. (Erdman 548) It has been suggested that Blake may have met both Jones and Wilkins through James Basire, official engraver to the Society of Antiquity and to the Royal Society to which Wilkins and Jones were elected in 1772 and 1788 (Singh 28). According to Raine, who traces elements of the Bhagavad Gita through several of Blake’s works, “Blake had read Wilkins’ Geeta before 1795, when he wrote The Song of Los. This poem opens with a survey of all the major religions of mankind; Blake would not have written such a commentary had he not read the scriptures of the religions he names: ‘Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East’ [Erdman 67, Plate 3, l. 3]” (Raine 351). Along with Blake’s references to the “philosophers of the east” – from the mouth of Ezekiel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – and, as Raine notes

38  Bible; “Bible of Hell” above, the “Abstract Philosophy” given to “Brama in the East” in The Book of Los, Blake shows at the very least a spiritual kinship with the nondualism of eastern philosophy that makes its way as well into the imagery of his cosmology. Raine suggests, for instance, that the recurring inverted tree in his poetry and design derives from the Banyan tree described in the Gita and other eastern texts (34–5).

Bibliography Blackstone, Bernard. English Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Singh, Charu Sheel. “Bhagavadgita, Typology and William Blake.” The Influence of the Bhagavadgita on Literature Written in English. Ed. T. R. Sharma. Meerut, India: Shalabh Prakashan, 1988. 23–36. Print.

Bible; “Bible of Hell” Blake’s wrestling with the Bible spanned his creative life, from designs such as Saul and the Ghost of Samuel (c. 1775–80) and continuing through the illustrations to Job and that of Genesis (1826–7). Although the Bible provides the stories and imagery, Blake’s renderings are both free and ambivalent. Thus, although in All Religions Are One Blake describes the “Jewish & Christian Testaments” as “An original derivation from the Poetic Genius,” Blake condemns the Old Testament’s political and legalistic oppression (Erdman 1). In his annotations to Watson’s An Apology for the Bible, for instance, Blake claims that “Christ [came] to abolish the Jewish Imposture,” which has been the source of critical discussion of Blake’s attitude towards the Old Testament (Erdman 614). Exploring Blake’s criticism of the “Jewish occupation of Canaan” as a “degeneration of a spiritual ideal into materialist conquest . . . not unlike the wars of trade and dominion of his own Napoleonic era,” Essick also discusses the “negative crime-and-punishment legalism of the Ten Commandments as the antithesis of Christ’s way of overcoming enemies by forgiving them” (13–14). Yet in spite of his “hard line” on the Old Testament, much of it is for Blake “inspired, and useful, poetry” (Heppner 172–3). Blake’s is thus a double view of the Bible as inspired prophecy rising up against oppression, as dramatically represented in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when Isaiah, having been asked by Blake whether he feared recrimination for his visions of God, proclaims, “I saw no God. nor heard any, in

Blair’s The Grave [illustrations] 39 a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing. . . . the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote” (Erdman 38). Blake thus models himself on the biblical prophet when, at the conclusion of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake announces his “Bible of Hell,” a reference to his Prophetic Books, from America to Jerusalem. The “Bible of Hell” has been described as a “counter-myth” to not only the Bible but, by extension, classical antiquity; according to Johnson and Grant, Blake imitates the design of the orthodox Bible by setting up the works that comprise it, including The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, in “double columns, with chapter and verse headings” (140). Lincoln, who studies Blake’s rejection of the Bible’s authenticity, cautions against equating it with Deism, since for Blake, “the biblical account of existence, stretching from creation and fall to the last Judgement, provided the most comprehensive and penetrating vision of human destiny” (10).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. “Blake’s Bible of Hell: Prophecy as Political Program.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 37–52. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Horn, William Dennis. “Blake’s Revisionism: Gnostic Interpretation and Critical Methodology.” Critical Paths. Eds. Dan Miller, et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. 72–98. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

Binaries: see Contraries

Blair’s The Grave [illustrations] Written in the eighteenth-century tradition of “Graveyard Poetry” that gave rise to the Gothic, this popular text was first published in 1743. Although many scholars have dismissed the tradition itself as a “passing fad,” Frye

40 Blair’s The Grave [illustrations] underscores that Blake was drawn to Blair and other “poets of gloom and graveyards” because of their apocalyptic prophecies; the graveyard poems were founded on a belief that “the proper study of mankind is fallen man, and that the man who does not see himself in this perspective does not see himself at all,” a premise that Blake would expand upon in far greater detail in his cosmology: for Blake, fallenness is only one state of four among which the individual moves (168). In The Examiner, Robert Hunt gave a scathing review of Blake’s Exhibition and the Blair illustrations in particular. Hunt ridiculed Blake’s “lunacy” with specific reference to his illustrations of The Grave as “a few wretched pictures” (Bentley 283). Blake recognized that Hunt attacked him because Hunt loathed him as an Enthusiast. Appropriately, then, Blake immortalized Hunt in Jerusalem as Hand, one who obstructs vision. Blake sold his forty watercolors for the text to Cromek, who criticized Blake’s work as having “too much mind and too little of the hand in it to be generally understood” (Bentley 213). Cromek arranged for another engraver, Schiavonetti, to make the plates, leading Blake to rage in his Notebook, Cr – loves artists as he loves his Meat He loves the Art but tis the Art to Cheat * A Petty sneaking Knave I knew O Mr Cr – how do ye do (Erdman 509) It was not just Cromek, however, who had grown critical of Blake during this period, the winter of 1805–6. Flaxman “harboured doubts as to his talents,” and Hayley was “in the process of diverting from Blake” his own commissions (Bentley 221). What Blake perceived as the betrayals of Hayley, Flaxman, and Cromek led him to a decade with no commercial engraving. The Grave was produced with Blake’s designs engraved by Schiavonetti in 1808. Not until 2001 were the watercolors for Blair’s Grave that Blake sold to Cromek rediscovered (Bentley 209).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

Blake, Catherine (1762–1831) 41

Blake, Catherine (1762–1831) What we know about Blake’s wife is that her birth name was recorded as both Butcher and Boucher, that William “made out a formal Marriage Allegation” in 1782 to “Catharine Butcher . . . a Spinster upwards of twenty One years of Age [sic],” and that William and Catherine had no children (quoted in Bentley 25). Beyond these scant facts, however, we also know that Catherine, called Kate, not only “coloured Blake’s designs under his direction,” as Gilchrist notes, but that she “designed and executed her own drawings as well” (quoted in Bentley 321). The painter Seymour Kirkup wrote in 1870 that Catherine, Blake’s “excellent old wife,” was a “sincere believer in all his visions – She told me seriously one day ‘I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company, he is always in Paradise’ ” (quoted in Bentley 294). After William died, Catherine lived first with Linnell and then with Tatham, for whom she served as housekeeper (Essick). Catherine has been subject to myth-making and projection from the likes of James Joyce and a host of literary critics based on such early descriptions of, on the one hand, a marriage defined by arguments between the young couple and, on the other, Gilchrist’s passive, saintly “Mrs. Blake,” who “would look at her husband with an awe-struck countenance, and then at his listener to confirm the fact”; Gilchrist continues, “Not only was she wont to echo what he said, to talk as he talked, on religion and other matters – this may be accounted for by the fact that he had educated her; but she, too, learned to have visions” (quoted in Bentley 321). Some contemporary readers have followed this tradition, linking Catherine, for instance, to the “Clod” in the poem “The Clod and the Pebble,” and concluding that Catherine “existed to satisfy [Blake’s] wants, having apparently no wants of her own” (Greer 78). However, more evenhanded studies of Catherine Blake have emerged recently, including those of Joseph Viscomi, Mark Crosby, Angus Whitehead, and Joel Gwynne. In spite of Catherine’s limited education in her early life, these sources have helped not only to restore her relevance to Blake’s bookmaking projects but to establish her as an artist and radical thinker in her own right. Bentley takes this more active political representation of Catherine even further, describing her “violent radicalism” during the Blakes’s later years; a letter to George Cumberland by his son who, having visited the Blakes, quotes Catherine as saying that “if this Country des go to War our K – g ought to loose [sic] his head”; the elder Cumberland responded, “You have a free estimate of Blake – & his devilish Works – he is a little Cracked, but very honest – as to his wife she is maddest of the Two” (320). In spite of the suggestion this anecdote raises that Catherine was capable of her own political opinions – perhaps, by some accounts, even stronger than those of her husband – others including Bruder and Damrosch have reopened the question of the female in Blake’s cosmology vis-a-vis his relationship with Catherine. They emphasize the importance of returning to the text and

42  Blake, Robert (1762–87) design itself for a more evenhanded discussion of Blake’s representation of the female, sexuality, and marriage beyond his biography.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. Bruder, Helen and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Butlin, Martin. Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981. Print. Crosby, Mark and Angus Whitehead. “Georgian Superwoman or ‘the Maddest of the Two’? Recovering the Historical Catherine Blake, 1762–1831.” ReEnvisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 83–107. Print. Essick, Robert. “Blake, Catherine Sophia (1762–1831).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/64608. Web. Greer, Germaine, “’No Earthly Parents I Confess’: The Clod, the Pebble and Catherine Blake.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 78–90. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Whitehead, Angus and Joel Gwynne. “The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake.” Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 193–210. Print. Wilson, Mona. The Life of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Print.

Blake, Robert (1762–87) Although he was called Robert, Blake’s “favorite brother” was actually named Richard (Bentley Records 10). Blake taught Robert to draw, giving him the notebook that Blake continued to use after Robert’s death. Two anecdotes about their relationship dramatize its intensity, the first being an argument that erupted between William and Catherine over her apparent harsh words towards Robert. After Blake demanded to Catherine, “Kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon directly, or you never see my face again,” Catherine said, “Robert, I beg your pardon, I am in the wrong”; Robert responded, “Young woman, you lie . . . ! I am in the wrong!” (Gilchrist 51). Unfortunately, the anecdote has been used to support claims for Blake’s misogyny, claims that have spilled over into assumptions that Blake’s male characters who are oppressors of their female counterparts are puppets

“Blind-Man’s Buff” 43 for Blake. Whatever tone the argument between husband and wife took, whatever context caused William to erupt in Robert’s defense, biography should not determine textual interpretation. The second anecdote by contrast is important to Blake’s art. Robert’s death in February 1787, at the age of nineteen by tuberculosis, is described by Blake’s friend Linnell: “At the solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping his hands for joy’ – a truly Blake-like detail” (Gilchrist 51). Blake wrote to William Hayley in 1800, “I lost a brother & with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit. & See him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate” (Erdman 705). Blake described Robert’s spirit coming to him and revealing the secret of relief etching; Lister suggests that Blake’s “first essay in the technique . . . from one of Robert’s drawings . . . symbolized for him the revealing vision” (65).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. ——— and Donald K. Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1945. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Ward, Aileen. “Who Was Robert Blake?” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly XXVIII (1995): 84–9. Print.

“Blind-Man’s Buff” This early poem, included in Poetical Sketches, describes what is apparently a light-hearted game ending with the injury of the child in the role of the blind man who is tripped by another player. Although the poem has been seen as “both an enigma and an embarrassment to Blake scholars” (Gleckner 24), the “moral about the need for laws to guard against such dastardly behavior” gives it a satirical weight that has earned it critical attention (Wright 41). Comparing the poem’s satire to that of An Island in the Moon, Gleckner contrasts the “wit, farcicality, and nonsense” of Island as a vehicle for Blake’s “commentary on various forms of imaginative blindness,” to the “authorial moral taglines, and the narrow earnestness of the game-players”

44  “The Blossom” that “usurp” wit in this poem (Gleckner 25). Wright, however, suggests that this is not necessarily a weakness that the poem suggests through the game that life needs to be governed by “wholesome laws . . . to keep fair play,” in Gleckner’s words; for, she observes, “it is perhaps the point” of the poem to identify “the origin of the ‘nation’ in a moment of rustic play, reinforcing the positive view of the so-called noble savage, but also suggesting that laws are the mark of a fallen society rather than a civilized one”; Blake, for Wright, “identifies legislation not as the epitome of social organization but as the sign of its failure” (42). Other readers have focused instead on the early aestheticism of the poem, claiming that it exemplifies “Blake’s ability to make something lively out of an old form, here a winter pastoral that echoes Shakespeare and the genial manner of Goldsmith” (Bloom 12). Rawlinson elaborates on this praise of Blake’s early poetic experimentation, pointing out that it represents “a symbolic celebration of renewed life,” in its “ritualized reversal of normal world order that allowed the re-establishment of social ties through play” (78–9). These various perspectives are not necessarily exclusive of each other, however: the poem’s use of multiple points of view and the simultaneous operation of conflicting levels of seriousness and play point towards Blake’s later wielding of these elements in his mature cosmology.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

“The Blossom” This poem in Songs of Innocence is the companion poem to “The Sick Rose.” It illustrates the ways the Songs of Innocence and of Experience collection as a whole evades a simple binary between the states of innocence and experience. Although this poem appears “to have but slight meaning,” according to Keynes, it expresses “the consummation of love by the act of generation” (Plate 11). Yet one can see a deeper complication of point of view: rather than conflate the Blossom with the speaker as Keynes does by describing “the blossom of the maiden’s bosom,” the poem’s third person narrator tells of “A happy Blossom” who observes the Sparrow that the speaker is addressing.

Boehme, Jakob (1575–1624) 45 The paradox that undermines the duality of innocence and experience is suggested by the fact that the Sparrow, the audience of the poem, is associated with the phallic “swift . . . arrow” but also seeks “your” cradle which, grammatically, must be that of the Sparrow who is being addressed in the first stanzas, not that of the Blossom. The second stanza then intensifies the emotionally complicated state that the speaker witnesses, now of the Robin, with the repeated “sobbing sobbing” of the Robin. While Keynes assumes this emotional outburst must be the “happiness of experience” for the Robin, I would underscore the deeply ambivalent state of the figures in the Innocence collection, from the Introduction’s visionary child who “weeps with joy” to hear the Piper’s song.

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1963. Print. Bruder, Helen and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Boehme, Jakob (1575–1624) Boehme, a shoemaker from Gorlitz, was a member of an unorthodox circle who discussed Kabbalistic, Gnostic, alchemical, and other mystical ideas. He published his own theosophical system later in life. Although the “Behmenists,” as his followers were called, believed in the “doctrine of Contraries,” scholars argue over how indebted Blake’s ideas are to those of Boehme. On the one hand, “Blake . . . was no disciple of Boehme . . . but used the works of previous theosophists with complete independence of spirit” (Thompson 45). More specifically, “the guilty conscience, which Blake set out to exorcise, is for Boehme the essential means of reunion with God” (Damrosch 252). On the other hand, Blake’s typology (“prefigurative language”) “emanates from Boehme,” to whom Korshin traces “the origins of natural typology” (4); Korshin points to the notion in Jerusalem that “the divine Arts of Imagination. . . ., the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal bodies are no more” (Erdman 231, Plate 77). Blake’s satire of Swedenborg in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is accomplished in part through setting up Boehme and Paraselsus as the standard of the visionary against which Swedenborg is measured and falls short (Eaves et al. 128).

46  The Book of Ahania In spite of his high regard for Boehme, however, Blake resists allegiance to a single precursor. In this way, scholarly attempts to attribute to Boehme’s influence Blake’s resistance to dualism should at least be qualified, as is the case with the claim that “since Blake like Boehme seeks to reduce dualism to monism, he is immensely attracted to [his] symbolism” (Damrosch 190). In the same way, Blake’s subverting the dualism of the sexes has also been traced to Boehme. On Blake’s notion, in The Book of Urizen, that “All Eternity shudder’d at sight/Of the first female now separate” (Erdman 78, Plate 18, 9–10), Kathleen Raine notes that Blake is “very close to Boehme, who held that the division of the sexes comes about only in the third Principle, in Adam’s ‘deep sleep’ ” (I, 214). While the influence is certainly possible, Blake’s nondualism has a particular anti-Enlightenment impetus that distinguishes it from that of Boehme.

Bibliography Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Korshin, Paul. Typologies in England, 1650–1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

The Book of Ahania This book continues where The Book of Urizen leaves off regarding Fuzon’s rebellion against Urizen. Ahania’s narrative focuses on the “corruption of this reforming hero[, Moses,] into the moral lawgiver,” carrying out the “familiar pattern of rebellion returning to religious oppression” (Mee 190). For Johnson and Grant, this “sequel to the Genesis book” of Blake’s “Bible of Hell” is an Exodus in which Urizen plays Moses the lawgiver and Fuzon, Urizen’s son who represents Urizen’s “pent up rage,” is the “rebel leader of an enslaved people”; although he resembles Orc, Fuzon’s rebellion is “pure defiance” (160). By contrast to Fuzon, Orc revolts against Urizen in America because he has a vision of a better world when Urizenic law is defeated. David Worrall notes that, like the other two works comprising the Urizen Books, The Book of Urizen and The Book of Los, Ahania expresses Blake’s “skepticism about his age’s politicization of scriptural authority” (153).

The Book of Ahania  47 The war in heaven resulting from Fuzon’s rebellion against his father in Ahania recalls the celestial battle in Milton’s Paradise Lost. As a result of Fuzon’s attempted patricide, Urizen separates from Ahania, his Emanation who, Johnson and Grant suggest, is modeled on Athena as the “gentle and graceful side of reason” and who is the victim of the conflict, “bereft of both son and husband (160–1). Worrall describes Ahania as the “history of the power of revenge over the power of forgiveness” (154). The poem’s concerns with the political and the religious are subsumed by Urizen’s repressive anti-sexuality, “The cold loins of Urizen dividing” (Erdman 84, Plate 2, 29). For Howard, the splitting of Urizen from Ahania “forms an analogy for the rejection of any dangerous feelings, such as the sexual impulse. . . . The isolation that results, and is desired, cannot breed anything but further abstractions, which are represented in the self-generated, onanistic outpourings” (197–8). The universe Urizen creates with his rejection of Ahania gives rise to the Tree of Mystery, extending the central metaphor of “A Poison Tree” in The Songs of Experience and looking ahead to the state of Ulro as it manifests in the Prophetic Books as the repression of energy that is for Blake the only evil: For when Urizen shrunk away From Eternals, he sat on a rock Barren; a rock which himself From redounding fancies had petrified Many tears fell on the rock, Many sparks of vegetation; Soon short the pained root Of Mystery under his heel: It grew a thick tree. (Erdman 86, Plate 3, ll. 55–63) Mee notes that the Tree of Mystery, where Urizen sacrifices Fuzon, “takes on significance regarding Blake’s position vis-à-vis the French Revolution since “the tree as a symbol of the state became an important and contested image in the 1790s” (100). According to Tannenbaum, Blake “creates the illusion of a unified and flattened fiction surface” in the first four chapters of this Prophecy, “only to disrupt that surface at the end of each chapter by describing the sudden intrusion of the fiction upon the reader’s reality” while the final chapter “abandons parody for pure prophetic song, commenting upon the process taking place in the first four chapters” (249).

48  The Book of Enoch [illustrations]

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

The Book of Enoch [illustrations] This apocryphal text, composed in the first century B.C., was translated into English in 1821 by Richard Laurence. It describes a race of giants born of the union between “heavenly males with earthly females,” combining “the supernatural-erotic and the apocalyptic” (Paley 267–8). In a series of illustrations, six of which are known, Blake describes Enoch as “the father of the arts” (Paley 269) who, for Blake, “had become a central emblem of the true art which represented . . . the only true means by which human history could be redeemed” (Beer 177). In the first, “The Descent of the Angels to one of the Daughters of Men,” Blake presents the daughter as a seductress, according to Paley (278), although Beer, who connects the visual motifs of the Enoch drawings to Blake’s Milton, emphasizes the seduction of the “daughters of men” by “Watchers,” or sons of God (168). For Beer, the discovery of the manuscript was important for artists and writers of the nineteenth century because it offered “an account of evil as brought about not by disobedience to the law but through an intermingling of the divine with the human in a daemonic form” (164). Bentley connects Blake’s interest in The Book of Enoch to his composition of Europe and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Blake describes “the giant antediluvians chained to earth who are our energies” (429).

Bibliography Beer, John. “Blake’s Changing View of History: The Impact of the Book of Enoch.” Historicizing Blake. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 159–78. Print. Bentley, G. E., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Paley, Morton. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print.

The Book of Job [illustrations] 49

The Book of Job [illustrations] Following The Gates of Paradise (1793) and The Grave (1808), Blake’s illustrations to The Book of Job (1825), commissioned by John Linnell, were his most successful attempt to produce a book without his own text. Blake had a prolonged interest in Job’s trials, demonstrated through the drawings, paintings, engravings, and commentary that began about 1785. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake compares Paradise Lost to the Book of Job. The implications of the engravings for Blake’s aesthetics have polarized criticism. While Essick regards Blake’s interpretation “only to the letter, rather than the spirit, of God’s laws” falling under a “false conception of God and into the hands of Satan” (267), for Paley, Blake was “at the height of his artistic power” with the Job engravings, one of its unique qualities being its inscription of biblical texts “above and below the double ruled border that frames the main image” of each engraving (224). Not only has criticism ranged in its interpretations of the series itself but more largely with implications for Blake’s relationship to the Bible. Frye observes that Blake saw The Book of Job as a “microcosm of the whole biblical story,” Job occupying the place of Adam, and Job’s wife becoming “Eve or Rachel who must form a part of his redemption”; by restoring Job to prosperity, Frye concludes, the story epitomizes the biblical apocalypse (221–2). For Damon, however, Blake wrote The Book of Job to “attack the vulgar error that misfortunes are punishment for sin”: Job’s disasters rouse him from his “complacent submissiveness to tradition, and start him on his search for the true God,” the drama, he emphasizes, taking place within Job’s soul, so that his wife is his Emanation and his children are “his creations. . . . His devil is the Accuser within him, and even his God is his own creation, his own ideal” (3, 7). Like Damon, Paley regards the text as a “psychomachia in which all events take place within a single self – Job’s wife would then be his Emanation, his accusers his superego, and his losses confined to his own psyche”; this observation is significant for feminist studies of Blake, for “in no other late work of Blake’s do women have so important and so positive a role” (Paley 236–7, 260). In “Job and His Daughters” (Figure 3, following), Job echoes such patriarchal figures as Abraham in Abraham and Isaac (Figure 1), the “Ancient of Days” (Figure 2), and Urizen in various designs including his appearance as Moses in Milton, blocking the eponymous hero’s path to inspiration with the ten commandments that Milton must break through. Job’s outstretched arms, whose length is exaggerated with index fingers pointed outwards, form a covering over his daughters; in this sense he echoes the Covering Cherub that recurs throughout Blake’s cosmology, a figure whose apparent protectiveness is simultaneously an agent that blocks access to Eden.

50  The Book of Los

Figure 3 “Job and His Daughters” (1799–1800), water-based tempera, National Gallery of Art

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Damon, S. Foster. Blake’s Job. New York: Dutton & Co., 1969. Print. Essick, Robert. “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 251–71. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Rosenfeld. 1969. 221–34. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Paley, Morton. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print. Wicksteed, Joseph. Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924. Print.

The Book of Los Although both The Book of Los and The Song of Los are dated 1795, the events related in the former take place earlier than in the Song of Los. The Book of Los tells the story of Los’s creation and birth from “Eno aged

The Book of Thel  51 Mother/Who the chariot of Leutha guides” (Erdman 90, Plate 3, ll. 1–2). Out of Los’s creation that suggests the channeling of eros into revolutionary energy comes his relationship with the repressive Urizen to whom he is chained. Readers disagree about this poem’s relationship to the earlier Continental Prophecies regarding their radicalism. Some see it as a retreat from the political apocalypse of America, for instance, pointing out that labeling this work as “political quietism” dismisses Blake’s subversion of the biblical to the “political subject of those earlier poems” (Tannenbaum 209, 210). For others, this poem depicts Los’s prophetic power; Mee suggests that Blake inverts the role of the biblical prophets who attempt to “bring back the children of Israel to a worship of the one, true God”; its narrative, Mee suggests, is “one of the continual reapplication of prophetic energy to redeem itself from becoming what it struggles against” (201, 204). Los’s created religion suggests a compromise between the visionary and the Urizenic power of reason, “a Human Illusion/In darkness and deep clouds involvd” (Erdman 94, Plate 5, ll. 56–7). The evolution of the Zoas in the later Prophetic Books intensifies and complicates both Los’s conflict and his compromise with Urizen, whose repression of erotic energy has yet larger ramifications for the fallen human psyche and its political and social reverberations throughout human history.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1982. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

The Book of Thel This first narrative poem of Blake’s is contemporaneous with Songs of Innocence, printed in 1789. Thel, the youngest of several shepherdesses in the Vale of Har, is ambivalent about her placid existence; simultaneously restless and anxious about any other state than the one she knows, she wishes to “fade away” (Erdman 4, Plate 3, l. 3). In her search for identity, she encounters and converses with four beings, each of whose frustrated interrogation by Thel triggers the appearance of the next, from the Lilly of the Valley to the Cloud, the Worm, and, finally, the Clod of Clay.

52  The Book of Thel The work begins with an epigraph called “Thel’s Motto” that frames the poem within Thel’s subjectivity with a series of what appear rhetorical questions but to which Thel will eagerly seek answers in the poem: Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole: Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? (Erdman 3, Plate 1) These questions bespeak the frustration of Thel’s paralyzed state: she is both a virgin curious about sexual experience, as the “rod” and “bowl” of the latter two lines suggest in their erotizing of the biblical allusion, yet the questioning has a subsuming epistemological level, in which the sharpsighted Eagle cannot know what exists under the ground nor can the blind mole although it lives there, unsolvable riddles from Thel’s point of view that connect the squelching of eros in the state of Har with the repressiveness of Enlightenment dualism. The questions Thel asks at the opening of the poem reflect a subjectivity that projects her state of “unorganized innocence”: the recoiling from experience – life and death, or what Blake comes to call Generation in the Prophetic Books. Yet Thel’s resistance to her insubstantial state in Har leads her to probe that which she so fears. That Thel’s opening lines wish for both death and “the voice” of one who walks in the garden allude to Genesis, suggesting “a transcendent spirit who might free Thel from mutability – or at least form the enervating melancholy caused by her consciousness of decay” (Eaves et al. 75). However, Thel’s imagined Eden is tinged with irony since she is too restless for this prelapserian innocence. Thus when the Lilly, hearing Thel’s lament, attempts to answer her questions, Thel cannot relate to the Lilly’s self-effacing promise that even the lowliest creatures will be granted eternity since Thel does not have the Lilly’s self-denying sense of purpose. The Lilly then directs Thel to the Cloud, whose response to Thel’s question about his own evanescence echoes the Lilly’s. However, the Cloud is not only depicted as an adult male in the design but also invokes for the first time in Blake’s corpus Luvah, here as the god of love to whom the Cloud prays, later in the Prophetic Books who becomes the Zoa associated with both eros and the compassion of Jesus. When Thel tells the Cloud she fears she will only be food for worms, the Cloud sends her to the Worm, who turns out, to Thel’s astonishment, to be a helpless infant. That Thel is even surprised at the infantile creature suggests her association with a Satanic, phallic worm. Being in Har, where all phenomena are diminished, Thel takes pity on the worm, and when she says he needs to be cherished “with mothers smiles,” the archetypal mother, the Clod of Clay appears (Erdman 5, Plate 4, l. 6). Echoing the earlier figures, the Clod of

The Book of Thel  53 Clay tells Thel that “each being finds a purpose by serving others” (Eaves et al. 75). When Thel responds that she can only foresee her “cold bed” of the grave, the Clod of Clay invites her into her “home,” or earth itself. Many have noted the shift in tone at the opening of the poem’s final section (8, 1); it has been described as a turn from the pastoral to the eighteenthcentury “Graveyard Poetry” of Blair and Young. For Blake, though, this home in the earth is a precursor to the Generation of the Prophetic Books, for it is life as well as death. Thus, when Thel comes to her own grave, it is not only her death that terrifies her, but hearing her voice crying out a counterpoint to the opening questions of the poem, this time about the destructiveness of the senses. When she hears this monologue, ending with that most generative of questions about the barriers to sexual gratification, “Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!/Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” it is ultimately sexuality that sends her fleeing back to Har (Erdman 6, Plate 6, l. 19–20). Early readings of the poem identified it as influenced by Milton’s Comus, in its theme of sending a young virgin on a journey, although refuting Milton’s advocacy of chastity (Damon 76); other early readings underscored the biblical allusions in the figures’ advocacy of self-sacrifice and faith. However, more recent metatextual readings suggest that Thel is visiting “the virgin plots or plates of her book, calligraphed with the author-artist’s etching “ground” in an early step toward revealing her (textual) body” (Hilton 198). Others have gone further in the challenge to the anthropomorphism of previous readings, suggesting that the text itself raises the question of such projection, “the human tendency to consider non-human creatures in terms of institutional or governmental categories” (Hutchings 81). Criticism of Thel herself has changed in recent years from an earlier severity towards Thel’s “hell” as “one of her own making” to later descriptions of Thel as attempting to free herself of the “limited world,” in spite of a general agreement that her retreat at the end is a result of her failure (Hutchings 84). Thus, while earlier readers argued that “behind Blake’s moral tone [is] the implicit degradation and forced submission of the woman” (Webster 211), more recently, the “relational universe” that Thel inhabits has been described as “allowing no space or moment in which the entity may crystallize as a stable ‘being’ on a hierarchical chain” (Hutchings 89).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

54  The Book of Urizen Damon, S. Foster. “Blake and Milton.” The Divine Vision. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Gollancz, 1957. 89–96. Print. Den Otter, A. G. “The Question and the Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 4 (1991): 633–55. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1982. Print. Ferber, Michael. “In Defense of Clods.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 51–66. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake and Spenser. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Print. Hilton, Nelson. “Blake’s Early Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.191–209. Print. Hutchings, Kevin. Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics. Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print. Levinson, Marjorie. “ ‘The Book of Thel’ by William Blake: A Critical Reading.” ELH 47 (1980): 287–303. Print. Webster, Brenda. “Blake, Women, and Sexuality.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 204–24. Print.

The Book of Urizen This first volume of Blake’s “Bible of Hell” alludes to the Book of Genesis, while its sequel, The Book of Ahania, is Blake’s version of Exodus. The Book of Urizen, then, is about origin, creation as a simultaneous fall in which Urizen sets in motion a sequence of dualities including the separation of “Self from Others, Mind from Matter, Finite from Infinite, and Subjective from Objective,” implying that “the world has gone wrong from the beginning and has remained so” (Johnson and Grant 140–1). For most commentators, Urizen is concerned with “undermining scriptural authority” (Mee 172). Some have pointed to its two stories of universal creation, those of Urizen and Los, including two “authorial viewpoints” of those creations; Los becomes self-divided, first from his Emanation, Enitharmon, then from his child, Orc, the object of his jealousy. Los is introduced in chapter 3, later as a visionary and an artisan separated from Urizen, whose name suggests his role as “Your Reason.” When Urizen wakes, he weaves the Net of Religion, using his “laws of prudence” believed to be ‘eternal laws of God’ ” (Worrall 22). Blake’s formal parody of the Bible in this poem has been demonstrated through the “division of the poem into chapters and numbered sections [that] not only parodies biblical organization, but breaks apart the narrative line” (Wright 51). The biblical Genesis as a whole, it has been further shown, is inverted “through dual creation accounts of Genesis,” paralleling Urizen and Los to Elohim and Jahweh by “invoking the first and last books of the Bible, respectively” (Tannenbaum 201, 204).

Brahma 55 Arguing that the poem’s target is Milton rather than the Bible, however, others point to its subversion of epic conventions, including the muses of the poem: we “might expect [them] to be disinterested observers . . . [but they] are clearly actors in the poem, tormented by the visions they narrate” (Mitchell 347). By contrast to those that see only irony in the poem, Makdisi states that, “even in the darkest and bleakest moments of . . . revelation,” the poem reaches towards “the eternal, a state in which thought and life, body and mind, are unified and coextensive, strengthening and reaffirming each other” (262). The debate reflects a larger one regarding the relationship between Contraries that evolves throughout Blake’s career.

Bibliography Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s the Book of Urizen.” The Visionary Hand. Ed. Robert Essick. Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1973. 337–80. Print. Ostriker, Alicia. Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison, WI: Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1965. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

The Botanic Garden [illustrations]: see Darwin, Erasmus

Brahma In The Song of Los, Blake writes, “black grew the sunny African/When Rintrah gave Abstract Philosophy to Brama in the East” (Erdman 67, Plate 3, l. 11). Although there are few references to eastern philosophy in Blake’s works, this explicit invocation of the Hindu god has supported the view of several scholars not only of Blake’s awareness of the Vedas, first translated and introduced to Europe by the British Orientalists including Charles Wilkins and Sir William Jones, but of Blake’s interest in what these Vedic figures represent for his cosmology. Such evidence may be scant, but one intriguing clue to Blake’s interest in Orientalism is his description of the now lost portrait he painted of Charles Wilkins, the first translator of the

56  Bromion Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit to English. That Blake in The Song of Los imagines Brahma introduced to “abstract philosophy” by Rintrah, Blake’s embodiment of prophecy and righteous indignation in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the later Prophetic Books, suggests his challenge to “the primacy of the Judaeo-Christian tradition” (Mee 127). Building on the observation of an implicit subversion of western theology in Blake’s reference to eastern philosophy, one can see this 1795 reference to Brahma as a bridge between Ezekiel’s claim, “The philosophy of the east taught the first principles of human perception,” in the 1790 Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the major Prophecies. The nondualism that pervades Blake’s cosmology bringing together art, prophecy, and social protest (Erdman 39, Plate 12).

Bibliography Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Nanavutty, Piloo. “William Blake and Hindu Creation Myths.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Victor Gollancz, 1957. 165–82. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Singh, Charu Sheel. “Bhagavadgita, Typology and William Blake.” The Influence of the Bhagavadgita on Literature Written in English. Ed. T. R. Sharma. Meerut. India: Shalabh Prakashan, 1988. 23–36. Print.

Bromion The rapist in Visions of the Daughters of Albion whose name suggests the Greek “roarer,” Bromion embodies exploitation that is simultaneously economic, social, religious, and sexual. Bromion is colonialist and slave owner who boasts of mastery over America, embodied in the poem by Oothoon; his multiple layers of signification suggest to some scholars that “he seems driven more by anger and the desire for domination over Oothoon and Theotormon than by sexual lust (Eaves et al. 227). Bromion’s predatory sexuality, however – not only the rape itself but also his physical and metaphorical branding Oothoon a harlot and his subsequent offer of her to Theotormon as now worth more since she is pregnant – has demanded to recent scholars that his sexual exploitation

Burke, Edmund (1729–97) 57 be underscored: the rape occurs after Oothoon has visited Leutha’s vale, celebrating her sexuality. The juxtaposition of the scene of Oothoon’s autoeroticism and the rape is made particularly poignant in “the Argument” narrated by Oothoon: I plucked Leutha’s flower, And I rose up from the vale; But the terrible thunders tore My virgin mantle in twain (Erdman 45, Plate iii). The sequence appears to be confused with a causal relationship for the naïve Oothoon, who questions her own sexuality in a series of monologues directed at the unheeding Theotormon that ultimately lead her to reject the patriarchal binary for women as either virgin or harlot. Troubled by Blake’s characterization of this rapist, some readers consider it a contradiction to his powerful portrayal of Oothoon’s vision of liberation. However, this tension in the poem reveals not a conflict for Blake biographically, but rather through Bromion’s simultaneous representation of the violent exploitation of women, the inhumanity of slavery, and the oppression of colonialism, Blake’s indictment of the predations of patriarchal oppression.

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Damrosch, Leo. Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

Burke, Edmund (1729–97) Burke’s political, aesthetic, and epistemological relationship to England meant that Blake wrestled with him on many levels: while Burke supported the American Revolution, he opposed the French Revolution; while he was born in Ireland, he became a conservative member of the British

58  Burke, Edmund (1729–97) Parliament; and his philosophical writing on the sublime and the beautiful was founded on a gender binary and a more general dualism that ran counter to Blake’s nondualism. Burke wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, not only to decry the early phase of the Revolution but to condemn Dissenters who celebrated it, in particular Richard Price, whose praise for the removal of the king and queen from Versailles in his 1789 A Discourse on the Love of Our Country Burke read with grave concern over its impact on the British. Burke was thus a central object of Blake’s attack during his early years, most notably as the central opponent in Blake’s The French Revolution. Burke’s definition of the sublime in his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry emphasizes “terror, obscurity, and darkness,” which leads Richey to speculate that Burke may be linked to Blake’s early anti-medievalism, the aesthetics of the Gothic tradition opposing the neo-classical tradition; even more important, “Burke’s Gothicized conception of the sublime ran completely counter to the Greek celebration of the human form” (39). For some, Blake depicts this criticism of Burke through the Tree of Mystery. According to Mee, Burke manipulated the symbol of the English oak, presenting “what he believed to be the unique liberties of the English constitution as the fruit of a great tree which had been following a course of steady and natural growth” (101). Others have noted subtler likenesses: for Williams, in spite of Blake and Burke inhabiting “different ends of the political spectrum,” the lines become blurred when one sees Burke’s emphasis on both “action” and “permanence,” creating a “dialectic of change and continuity” (104, 108). Although Ferber acknowledges that both Burke and Blake are “alert . . . to the destructive effects of the capitalist system,” Blake, he emphasizes, remains “loosely in the camp of the Dissenters Burke attacks” (101). Bruder claims that the apparently antithetical positions of Blake and the Dissenters are similar in their “utterly sexualized” representation of women, in Burke’s case, through his depiction of Marie Antoinette, the “perfect sexualized victim,” (167); such a reductive statement, however, underscores the need to distinguish Blake from his characters, especially predatory males such as Bromion who often sexualize women in ways that run counter to the sexually liberated vision of such characters as Oothoon who nevertheless remains victimized by her patriarchal society. One should qualify such comparisons by noting that Blake’s predatory males are not mouthpieces for him, while Burke’s sexualized aesthetics and political theorizing are written in Burke’s own voice. In this way, Blake should not be confused for Bromion or the later Zoas since his female characters are often either heroic or visionary while trapped in a patriarchal world, much like the one that Burke helped perpetuate.

Butts, Thomas (1757–1845) 59

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Ferber, Michael. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Butts, Thomas (1757–1845) Thomas and his wife, Betsy Butts, became friends of William and Catherine Blake. Thomas, a clerk in the office of the commissary general of Musters, bought Blake’s books and drawings “at a rate that must have strained his income”; Betsy ran a girls’ boarding school decorated with Blake’s drawings and where, Bentley speculates, Blake may have taught (90). By contrast to Blake’s more strained relationships with other patrons, a letter from Blake to Butts shows the trust Blake had in sharing with Butts his prophetic visions: To my Friend Butts I write My first Vision of Light . . . I stood in the Streams Of Heavens bright beams And Saw Felpham sweet Beneath my bright feet . . . I saw you & your wife By the fountains of Life Such a vision to me Appeard on the Sea (Erdman 712–13, ll. 1–2, 33–6, 75–8) Although Blake wrote this letter to reciprocate for “encouraging Verses” Butts had sent to Blake, it is no mere flattery with which one might expect an artist to approach a patron: it displays all the most important elements of Blake’s nondual relationship with nature, describing a moment of epiphany in which he becomes aware of the divine as the scintillating energy that comprises the world of phenomena. That he includes Butts and his wife testifies to the closeness he felt to them (Erdman 711). Nevertheless,

60  The Canterbury Pilgrims although the moment this poem represents is the state Blake calls Eden in his Prophetic Books, he and Butts simultaneously exist in Generation as patron and artist, and so the letter goes on to talk about business: “Mrs. Butts will I hope Excuse my not having finishd the Portrait. I wait for less hurried moments,” poignantly juxtaposed to a moment of eternity is this awareness of the limitations of dwelling in Generation (Erdman 713).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

The Canterbury Pilgrims Engraved in 1810, this work is accompanied by two Prospectuses in which Blake explains his attitude towards the “great Masters in Painting and Designing, whose method, alone can delineate Character as it is in this Picture, where all the Lineaments are distinct”; Blake describes the designs at length in A Descriptive Catalogue (Erdman 532–40, 567). The commission for the designs and engraving has perplexed scholars: in 1806, Robert Hartley Cromeck commissioned Thomas Stothard to paint the Pilgrims, either before or after asking Blake to, depending on whose side of the story one believes, for both “Stothard and Blake had made drawings for Chaucer before Cromek approached them”; adding another complication, Linnell claimed that “William Bromley had been secretly commissioned by Cromek to engrave Blake’s plate” (Bentley Stranger 297, 298). Blake claimed that his own engraving was nothing like the “dumb dollies” of Stothard’s version (Erdman 539). Although The Canterbury Pilgrims is one of Blake’s “finest plates and one of his most popular,” it never achieved “the scale of popularity of Stothard’s” (Bentley Blake Records 321). It has been noted by several scholars that the Plowman resembles Blake himself, suggesting that Blake identified with him as the only peasant among the travelers to Canterbury, “the poorest and most oppressed of the pilgrims, a hard-working, honest, modest, generous, pious man who got little money or respect for his labors” (Gourlay 117–18).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print.

Cave 61 Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gourlay, Alexander. “ ‘Idolatry or Politics’: Blake’s Chaucer, the Gods of Priam, and the Powers of 1809.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 97–147. Print. Kiralis, Karl. “William Blake as Intellectual and Spiritual Guide to Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims.” Blake Studies I (1969): 139–90. Print. Ward, Aileen. “Canterbury Revisited: The Blake-Cromek Controversy.” BIQ 22 (1988–89): 80–92. Print.

Cave Caves recur throughout Blake’s poetry and designs, often linked to graves, seen in such images as Blake’s engraving for Blaire’s The Grave as well as Blake’s description of Thel’s descent into the pit where she hears her own voice from her grave. However, the cave is not only “the womb [from] which man enters life” or even “the grave in which he dies to eternity,” as Raine suggests (86). In their stony composition, Blakean caves suggest the Enlightenment’s illusion of a concrete universe. The cave is a repeated image of the illusion of entrapment in one’s own created bondage, the “mind-forg’d manacles” of “London” ultimately contracting the universe into the “paved heaven” of the Deists satirized in “The Mad Song” (Erdman 27, l. 8; 415, l. 10). In Figure 4, the design depicting Bromion’s cave in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, despite the sun emerging from behind clouds as a potential sign of hopefulness, the three figures are facing inward, their vision dark, circular, and stagnant. Yet an image of hope later in the poem depicts the three on the margin of the ocean, no longer in the cave; that it is apparently Oothoon and Bromion who look up to see the Daughters of Albion flying freely above them suggests that at least they, if not Theotormon, have the potential for a life of redemption outside the figurative cave.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Volume I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Center The recurrence of centers in the spatial imagery of Blake’s cosmology is an important motif in his representation of nondualism. Centers are forgotten or considered missing in the delusion of separation. This fragmented state, fallenness in Blake’s cosmology, is associated with Albion’s sleep, both cause and effect of his illusion that Jerusalem, his Emanation, has gone missing.

Figure 4 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Plate 1 (1793), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

Center 63 The suggestion here is that England has cast out its spiritual center and can only awaken when they are reunited. The paradox of this message as it unfolds in Vala, or The Four Zoas, however, is that she was never really missing; through the perspective of Night the Ninth of that Prophetic Book, fallenness is seen to be an illusion, Eden being that state of equipoise that can only come about when all the facets of being are oriented around the center. Raine suggests that Blake’s source for his use of centers is Plato’s Republic, in which center points unite “both the axes and bounding surfaces of spheres,” although his “opening of centers,” Raine claims, is taken more directly from Boehme (II, 152). Blake’s Daughters of Beulah, Raine points out, “open spatiality from the point, multitude from unity, by giving birth” (154). Yet Blake complicates the imagery of his precursors: he creates an interplay between the center and the vortex, one that often suggests a stabile core amid chaos: “None can tell how from so small a center comes such sweets /Forgetting that with that Center Eternity expands/Its ever during doors,” he writes in Milton (Erdman 131, Plate 31, ll. 47–9). Thus, with Jerusalem herself appearing to be lost throughout the nightmare of Albion’s sleep, the Zoas war with each other, staking out their

Figure 5 “Virgin and Child” (1825), tempera, Yale Center for British Art

64  Child; childhood own separate dominions; Albion’s awakening comes about when he realizes Jerusalem has always been at the center of his being while she in turn embodies divinity at her core. The culminating moment of apocalypse is the reintegration of the center with the fragmentary in Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas: “Behold Jerusalem in whose bosom the Lamb of God/Is seen tho slain before her Gates he self renewd remains/Eternal” (Erdman 391, p. 122, l. 1). In his designs as well, Blake uses the image of the center to represent the eternal possibility for Eden within the human. In his 1825 tempera painting “Virgin and Child” (Figure 5), Blake positions Jesus at Mary’s center, suggesting that he emerges from her heart, giving new meaning to the notion of a virgin birth. Blake expresses this centrality of the divine in All Religions Are One and again in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; there he recounts the history of religion that culminates in the collective amnesia in which “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (Erdman 39, Plate 12).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Child; childhood Blake’s 1800 verse letter to his friend and patron, Thomas Butts, describes a vision in which Blake, Catherine, Butts, and his wife are transformed into children in order to behold the divinity of which they are a part; as the vision fades, Blake writes, “I remand as a Child/All I ever had known/ Before me bright Shone” (Erdman 713, ll. 72–4). Yet childhood as synonymous for Blake with innocence may be a state of either naiveté or wisdom, as he describes in a pencil note on The Four Zoas manuscript: “Unorganized Innocence, An Impossibility/Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with ignorance” (Erdman 838, n. 19). Many of the poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience show the shifting states that are often not parallel to chronological age; thus, the nostalgia of the “old folk” in the “Ecchoing Green” contrasts the youthful spontaneity of the child narrator. When studying Blake’s representation of children, critics have focused primarily on either the desire by various figures in his works to return to innocence or the patriarchal oppression of children. Not only does Blake represent the British government and the church as complicit in the enslavement of children, as seen in such poems as “The Chimney Sweeper” and “Holy Thursday” but, as Di Salvo observes, the family’s “assault upon

“The Chimney Sweeper” 65 its children” is symbolized by “infant sacrifice,” as in “The Little Boy Lost” (330–1). The connection among religious, political, and familial oppression is taken further yet with the notion that the reader needs to “unlearn” that which “stands in the way of our reading his work with all the freshness of a child,” as Makdisi suggests, for the child’s “ ‘rouzing’ faculties are uninhibited by paradigms of reading and by literary, aesthetic, and political conventions” (163, 318). One can see in Blake’s images of children the ambiguity of the youth/age binary, especially evident in figures such as the speaker of “The Lamb” who calls himself a child, yet the design is less clear in making him appear older. Another remarkable example is found in Blake’s painting of Jesus and Mary (Figure 5, prior), in which Jesus is hardly the iconic baby cradled in Mary’s arms; instead, in Blake’s rendering her arms are outstretched in apparent astonishment; his body is muscular and his face decidedly adult. All these details point to the organized innocence that Blake identifies as the divinity of childhood attainable even in adulthood.

Bibliography Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

“The Chimney Sweeper” The companion poems bearing this title in Songs of Innocence and of Experience portray the squalid conditions of child laborers and, with their multiple points of view, demonstrate the blurred lines between the two states. The Innocence version is narrated by an anonymous sweeper, sold very young. He tells the story of the younger child, Tom Dacre, who is comforted by the promise of an afterlife through a dream of heaven in which “an Angel who had a bright key” opened their “coffins & set them all free” (Erdman 10, ll. 13–14). That the chimneys are visually echoed by the coffins points to the dream’s irony, underscored by the older boy’s narration. However, that there are three voices, including the authorial that is suggested by the

66  Christianity; church difference between them and by the accompanying design, complicates the notion of a unified “Innocence.” While there is no doubt that contrast of point of view between the two poems suggests the cruelty and injustice that most readers take from the pair of poems, Blake complicates point of view still more problematically than might be suggested by the binary of Innocence and Experience. The pair of poems has drawn not only socio-political commentary but psychological approaches as well, one focusing on the Innocence narrator’s inability to cope with his mother’s death: “the rationalized correctness of his universe, through the agency of the restored and greatly improved father who sold him, is so comprehensive as to overcome not only the loss of his earthly father but the loss of his mother as well” (Marsh 19). The Experience version generates a yet more complex psychology than that of the Innocence version since the sweep’s perspective in Experience has passed to a stage in which he has attained what may be described as “organized innocence” that achieves vision in a world of oppression.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Pagliaro, Harold. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

Christianity; church As a Dissenter, Blake rejected all churches that thrust their dogma on the oppressed; Damon notes that it is only the “Church Universal” that Blake accepts, whose doctrine is the “Everlasting Gospel, its congregation the Brotherhood of Man, its symbol the Woman in the Wilderness, its architecture Gothic” (Damon 82). Yet even such a claim must be qualified since Blake challenged any systematic approach to vision. Blake’s view of the Church of England has been shown to revolve around his sense that “he saw religious error so profoundly ingrained in the human psyche that disestablishment of one corrupt form of it would not begin to effect the radical change that was needed” (Ryan 153). Blake refers to dogmatic Christianity as the “twenty-seven churches,” obstructing human union with the divine (see Milton Plate 37, ll. 35–43 and Jerusalem Plate 75, ll. 10–26). Frye elaborates this analysis of the “antithesis

Christianity; church 67 between the imaginative and the legal and historical conceptions of its god. The aggregate of the former is the real Word of god; the aggregate of the latter takes the form of the twenty-seven ‘Churches’ ” (333). For Blake, the church “descends into mystery . . . because its faith is based on a limited vision of the natural world, which obscures the vision of Jesus” (Lincoln 226). Raine suggests that the source for Blake’s identification of the church with the Covering Cherub is a combination of Boehme and Swedenborg, noting that “the ‘churches of stone’ usurp the internal church in the hearts of men, and this is the cherub. . . . Boehme describes seven Churches, or phases of the cherub, which span time from the beginning to the end” (329). Perhaps Blake’s most famous indictment of the church is the collective depiction of oppression and hypocrisy among church officials in many of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, including “The Chimney Sweeper” poems, the “Holy Thursday” poems, and the poem that influenced so many subsequent writers, “London,” in which “the Chimney Sweepers cry/Every blackning Church appalls” (Erdman 27, ll. 9–10). In those two lines, as the Church blackens the children literally with the soot from the chimneys it blackens its own potential for a connection to the divine; that the cry of the children “appalls” the Church introduces the double image of the ghastly white in the etymology of the word to contrast the blackness of soot and immorality of the Church, as well as the righteous indignation of those horrified, or appalled, by the tyranny of the Church. It is this association of the voice of religious dogma with oppression that qualifies any interpretation of the Bard as authorial in the Introduction to Songs of Experience since his warning of doom and the need to repent echo the evangelical voices that would repress energy, the only sin for Blake, as he states in his marginalia to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man: “He who hinders another omits his own duty . . . Murder is Hindering Another . . . whatever is Negative is Vice” (Erdman 601). Blake’s strong assertion here alone puts him at odds with such a figure as the “Bard” who calls upon the “lapsed Soul” to repent (Erdman 18, l. 6).

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print.

68  “The Clod and the Pebble”

“The Clod and the Pebble” This poem from Songs of Experience contains within it two contrary states; written after The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, it shares with the earlier text an interest in the “dialectics” of the Clod’s unselfish love and the Pebble’s “waters of materialism” (Keynes 32). Raine suggests that the Hell and Heaven of the poem derive from Swedenborg’s contraries; for Raine, the character of the Clod can be traced from the matron Clay in The Book of Thel developing into Enion “the Earth Mother” in the Prophetic Books (28). Locating the authorial voice of this poem has thus been its greatest challenge, making it a striking example of “the importance of perspective in both volumes” so that “the spiritual state of each speaker, or singer, colors his or her perceptions” (Johnson and Grant 8). Some readers dismiss the altruism of the malleable Clod as mere lackluster passivity since it apparently lacks that signal heroic characteristic of Blakean poetics: energy. For others, the Pebble is the more to blame; as Cox notes, if one maintains independence, “loving freely” s/he should not “become a hardened Pebble” (107). Regardless of which of these two attitudes one favors, the perspectives of the two eponymous speakers are “equally weighted,” the poem devoting six lines to each and forming a “mirror-image of the other” (Marsh 174). The poem’s message thus seems to be that the self-sacrificing Clod and the self-serving Pebble are not choices, but are rather reflections of each other and perhaps even creations of each other. This mutual dependence is itself a commentary on the nature of what might be called today dysfunctional human relationships that Blake explores more deeply as his cosmology develops through the Prophetic Books.

Bibliography Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Ferber, Michael. “In Defense of Clods.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 51–66. Print. Hagstrum, Jean. “William Blake’s ‘the Clod and the Pebble.’ ” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Carroll Camden. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. 381–88. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Cloud 69

Cloud Through cloud imagery, Blake’s poetry and design incorporate that which appears amorphous in the quest for knowing, although to differing effect depending on whose subjectivity is represented. One of the earliest manifestations of the image is in The Book of Thel, in which the Lilly of the Valley recommends to Thel that she speak with the Cloud about her concern that she will merely fade away rather than serve a purpose in Har. But, as the design for this interaction shows (Figure 6), the Cloud is not the misty figure Thel assumes he will be but rather a fully formed man who prays to Luvah as God of Love. Recent feminist scholarship has noted that the Cloud is the only “adult male” in Har and that, unlike the other figures Thel meets, he is not “self-effacing, pale or earth-bound,” for he tells of “an eternal life of endless happy copulation”; while Bruder departs from other readers of the poem in finding his bliss “exploitative” I suggest that, by recontextualizing his apparent identity through the subjectivity of Thel, the Cloud represents her own wishfulness for the eros she projects onto him (48). By contrast to this Cloud, the motif in America is the “primal matter used in shaping life”; clouds here “represent the delusion that materiality is everything,” and each of the three sections of the poem, the Preface, Preludium, and Prophecy, has a perspective that corresponds to its particular vision (Howard 132–2). According to Raine, this Swedenborgian symbol of the “ambiant sphere” is seen most tellingly in “The Little Black Boy,” in which the black and white clouds are transformed from Swedenborg’s “etheric bodies” to the physical ones of the children for, she notes, in Blake’s symbolism, “a cloud is always the body, which will ‘vanish’ when the soul has learned to look upon the face of God unveiled” (10). However, as with the commentary on The Book of Thel, prior, this reading of the cloud motif also needs to be qualified by acknowledging the subjectivity that perceives it as an object that is vanishing since, in spite of the evolution of Blake’s cosmology, he is consistent in his emphasis not only that we are states rather than individuals, but that we project what we see as reality onto that which we choose or choose not to perceive.

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Coban: see Hand

Figure 6 The Book of Thel (1789), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

Continental Prophecies 71

Continental Prophecies Written during the years following the French Revolution, these works include America: A Prophecy, Europe: A Prophecy, and The Song of Los. The three Prophecies have been described as constituting a myth derived from many sources with “historical, political, and psychological meanings” (Paley 63). All three “conclude at virtually the same [millennial] moment” in which Urizen’s “patriarchal oppression” is dismantled (Behrendt 112). The focus of much of the criticism of these poems has been on their contradictory meanings of oppression and energy that for many readers amounts to their indeterminacy in asserting whether revolution is redemptive or threatening. Dorrbecker suggests that the Continental Prophecies are connected not only through the “tradition of biblical prophecy, British and American history, or mythographic literature, but also the scientific discourse of eighteenth-century astronomy,” Blake locating the “struggle between state and church powers of oppression and the attempt of humanity to free itself from these physical as well as mental chains in the ‘clouds’ and in interplanetary or interstellar space” (20–1). As with the cloud imagery in other Blake poems, this collection of poems tells a story of the projection of indeterminacy that may account for the contradictoriness noted earlier. Blake develops this chaos of competing stories of a fallen world of fragmentation in the longer Prophetic Books in which the relationship between fallenness and redemption is filtered through a prismatic array of points of view.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Paley, Morton. Energy and Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Print.

Contraries; binaries; dualism and nondualism The relationship between dualism and nondualism is the central paradox of Blake’s vocation as both writer and artist; its most familiar articulation can be found in the subtitle to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience,

72  Contraries; binaries; dualism and nondualism “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”; however, it comes to its fullest realization in Vala, or The Four Zoas, in which Blake structures his epic around the nonlinear relationship between the redeemed and the fallen, states that are polysemous rather than bound by time and space (Erdman 7). Many have described a redemptive pattern in the relationship between the contrary states of innocence and experience while Pagliaro describes “the psychology” beneath the movement from one contrary state to the other “and beyond,” namely, the innocence that Blake distinguishes from naiveté and whose wisdom is contingent on having dwelled in the realm of experience. As Blake writes in a pencil note in the margin of the Vala, or The Four Zoas manuscript, “unorganized Innocence, An Impossibility/Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with Ignorance” (Erdman 838, n. 19). Yet others caution that reading this deeper level of innocence in the Songs is a distortion, maintaining that it comes from the hindsight of the Prophetic Books. As so many of the entries in this Guide seek to show, however, this nondual impulse – the polysemousness of states that belie our identity as individuals – is foundational to Blake’s vision throughout his life even though he does not render it in its fullness until the Prophetic Books; indeed, Blake continued working through the nondual relationship of innocence and experience throughout his career. The often-cited statement in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Without Contraries is no progression,” has itself been the subject of much critical debate (Erdman 34). While some readers trace a dialectic of Contraries in Blake’s later works back to Poetical Sketches (Gleckner), others counter that Blake “repudiated the earlier doctrine,” reducing Contraries, instead, to negations” (Damrosch 176). In Jerusalem, however, Blake has Los explicitly state that “Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist/but Negations Exist not” (Erdman 162, Plate 17, 11.33–4). Still others have more directly denied that Blake’s Contraries are dialectical for, according to Shaviro, the “strife of Contraries is . . . necessarily articulated in language which is itself contradictory” (231–2). Regardless of in which period of Blake’s career Contraries appear, they reflect his insistence that the tension between them must be maintained; this, the “marriage” of heaven and hell, is hardly a blending of states as he represents it visually and textually, but rather one in which “Opposition is true Friendship” (Erdman 42, Plate 20). In this way, “nondualism” is the term this Guide prefers since it does not seek to whitewash the Contraries but rather holds them in a state of tension. The binary that has been of greatest recent interest has been that of sexual difference. Colebrooke, arguing that the problem for Blake with Natural Religion is its erasure of difference “outside the one law of calculation,” notes that for Blake “redemption occurs when the feminine is neither a difference in degree (the generic male – female) nor radically other” (20). Jennifer Michael has recently shown that the struggle in our time to free

“The Couch of Death” 73 ourselves from the gender binaries is hauntingly anticipated by Blake with the lines from “A Little Girl Lost”: Children of the future Age, Reading this indignant page; Know that in a former time, Love! Sweet Love! Was thought a crime. (Erdman 29, Plate 51, ll. 1–4)

Bibliography Colebrooke, Claire. “Blake, Literary History and Sexual Difference.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 16–25. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Framing Eve: Reading Blake’s Illustrations.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 159-69. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print. Shaviro, Steven. “ ‘Striving with Systems’: Blake and the Politics of Difference.” Boundary 2, 10, no. 3 (1982): 229–50. Print.

“The Couch of Death” Although some readers may agree that this prose poem included in Poetical Sketches is “best forgotten” (Wagenknecht 147), many have noted its significance as a harbinger of Songs of Innocence, in which innocence is perpetually renewed (Gleckner 121–2), while for others it is a harbinger of the Prophetic Books (Bloom 13). Synthesizing these critical perspectives, Erdman notes that, although the reader’s attention is on the specific characters, “we are aware of the larger society of villagers”; he observes that “individual innocence” is recovered and thus “paradise regained” (Erdman Prophet 78). The poem reveals the early Blake both drawing on tradition, here with the emotionalism of the Gothic tradition, and at the same time revealing his inventiveness with lines such as “Like the sound of a broken pipe, the aged woman raised her voice” (Erdman Complete, 441–2). The Prophecies, from Europe to Milton and Jerusalem, are replete with references to the Couch of Death that take the image deeper into its implications for Blake’s nondual cosmology. The Bard thus sings at the opening of

74  Council of God Milton, “all Eden descended into Palamabrons tent/Among Albions Druids & Bards, in the caves beneath Albions/Death Couch, in the caverns of death” (Erdman Complete 102, Plate 9, ll. 1–3). To the “Angels” in Milton’s created heaven, the Bard here describes the sleeping Albion as lulled into a comfortable sleep-like death to let them know the error of their oppressive and illusory dualisms of life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil. Milton recognizes from the Bard’s Song that he must arise from his own comfortable place in heaven to reincarnate, passing through the states of Ulro and Generation so that Albion can arise from this Couch of Death to reunite with Jerusalem and in this wholeness attain Eden.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Wagenknecht, David. Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973. Print.

Council of God The function of this group in the Prophecies has been a source of critical controversy, particularly in Vala, or The Four Zoas. Some have suggested that it reveals Blake’s orthodoxy, identifying it as the Divine Family and the Communion of Saints, “that aggregate of Christian thought, the Body of Christ, consisting of all the Elect, dead or alive” (Damon 105). By contrast, others have argued that the Council challenges “Milton’s hierarchical view of heaven,” operating instead as a “divine power to function with both the authority of a democratic council and the loving intimacy of a personal savior,” and in so doing, it resolves the problem of Night the Ninth of The Four Zoas (Lincoln 230). However, it is a mistake to equate any of Blake’s speakers with his authorial voice. When the Council is seen as a projection of fallen consciousness, it thus takes on the irony of so many of Blake’s figures of authority. It is the Daughters of Beulah who describe the Council of God. The Daughters themselves, as the orthodox figures who wish for a saving grace, should not be mistaken as a mouthpiece for Blake. In this way the Council can be seen as a tool of Blake’s irony rather than literally providential. Thus, a moment in Vala, or The Four Zoas, in which “all in Great Eternity Met in the Council of God . . . /Upon the Limit of Contraction to create the fallen Man,” can

Covering Cherub 75 be read as the paradox in which the Daughters of Beulah form the Covering Cherub, “hov’ring over the Sleeper” and creating the illusion of fallenness that for Blake comes about with the externalization of divinity in the form of the Council of God (Erdman 371, p. 99, ll. 1–2).

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print.

Covering Cherub According to Blake’s revision of Milton’s Paradise Lost, ministering angels of a patriarchal God are human creations whose function is to block humans from Paradise. In Blake’s most personal of the Prophetic Books, Milton, the moment of revelation comes when Blake realizes that Milton “was the Covering cherub & within him Satan/And Rahab, in an outside which is fallacious! (Erdman 137, Plate 36, ll. 8–9). Raine traces Blake’s use of the phrase to Boehme, whose “cherub is death, and his sword is judgment” (331). Others trace it directly to Ezekiel: “Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire” (28:14). The phrase appears in several works from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Erdman 34, Plate 3) to Jerusalem (Erdman 249, Plate 89, l. 44). Regardless of Blake’s source, however, his association of the Covering Cherub with Satan makes the allusion ironic. Frye equates it with Selfhood or the “desire to assert rather than create” (137). It furthermore conceals the “truth (Jerusalem) within a false container (the Covering Cherub)” (Essick 96). Seen as an important obstacle for Milton, who “in his orthodoxy had been one with the Covering Cherub,” it is the “barrier between creative desire and artistic completion” (Bloom 396, 390). Blake’s Covering Cherub depicted on Plate 14 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Figure 7) exemplifies Blake’s use of this text’s ironic challenge to the traditional binary of good and evil: the speaker is the Engraver who learns from his visit to Hell that “the cherub with his flaming sword is

76  Covering Cherub

Figure 7 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14, Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection

hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. And holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt” (Erdman 39). The Cherub in the design not only covers the sleeper but apparently traps him in fire, suggesting the way in which orthodox views of virtue keep the human in his death-like sleep whereas, once the Cherub has left his guardpost, the human will be released from the bondage of duality, an image and idea that Blake develops through the Prophetic Books.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

“A Cradle Song” 77 Paley, Morton. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Cowper, William (1731–1800): see Spurzheim

“A Cradle Song” The tone of this poem in Songs of Innocence is that of a lullaby, the “dreamy tangles of the falling vegetation decorating the margins of the first plate” suggesting the first line: “Sweet dreams form a shade” (Keynes 16). As straightforward as this poem appears, however, Keynes raises the question of the design’s “hard outlines” in describing the mother’s chair and child’s cot in the second plate (see Figure 8); they may signal the replacement of the child by the infant Jesus, “the child’s pillow . . . so arranged as to form a conspicuous halo around its head” (Keynes 17). The repetition of “beguiles” that ends the third and fourth stanzas suggests a yet more complex reading: Who is beguiling whom, and what is connoted by the word? One must look first for the closest singular noun to the singular “beguiles,” which turns out to be “night.” Put together, then, there is an intrusion of the realm of experience in spite of the mother’s efforts to shield her child, as is the case from the earliest of Blake’s poems, such as those in the Poetical Sketches collection including “To the Evening Star,” in which night encroaches bringing with it a sinister world in which “the wolf rages wild,” to the most complex of his Prophetic Books (Erdman 410, l. 11). Even in this poem, Blake extends the complication of subject and object by connecting the sleeping baby to the “Holy image” of “Thy maker” who “wept for me/Wept for me for thee for all”; Keynes’s observation of the design, that “it is surely not by chance that the child’s pillow is so arranged as to form a conspicuous halo around its head,” should not be mistaken for an idealization but rather regarded in the context of the “beguiling” usually reserved for Satanic seduction of the innocent (Keynes, Plate 17). This design echoes the Covering Cherub that separates the human and divine. That the mother’s love thus projects onto the child the “holy image,” concentrated in the halo-like pillow, may paradoxically be the beguiling that religion itself has taught. Blake repeats this pattern in the design accompanying the Introduction to Experience; there, Blake adds the halo to the visionary child of the Introduction to Innocence. The child is now bound to the Bard, no longer able to fly freely even though he has had now has wings, having become a static religious icon as opposed to a living energy (Figures 15 and 16).

78  Cromek, Robert Hartley (1770–1812)

Figure 8 “A Cradle Song” (1789), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. “Blake’s Self-Annihilation’: Aspect of Its Function in the Songs, with a Glance at Its History.” English (Summer 1981): 117–47. Print.

Cromek, Robert Hartley (1770–1812) Cromek, an engraver-turned-picture-publisher, betrayed Blake after having approached him to publish engravings for Blair’s The Grave and then for The Canterbury Pilgrims. Cromek commissioned Luigi Schiavonetti to engrave Blake’s designs for the Blair commission and then gave the

“The Crystal Cabinet” 79 Canterbury commission to Thomas Stothard. Blake “erupted in fury,” not only at the discovery of Cromek’s betrayal, but at his “old friend Stothard” who made a design of “the same subject, style, and dimensions as his own which Cromek was publishing,” leading Blake to satirize Cromek and Stothard as “Bob Screwmuch” and “Stewhard” respectively (Bentley Stranger 300). Some scholars lend credence to Stothard’s version of the story, suggesting that Blake, who had complained that the publisher of the Blair project, “demanded extravagant payment for extra-contractual efforts” and “vituperated against the Stothard picture”; however, according to Gourlay, “nowhere does it suggest that Blake had accused Stothard or Cromek of stealing the subject” (101). For Makdisi, Cromek’s rejection of Blake was apparently due to Blake’s having “flouted engraving conventions, though he did so for reasons that were motivated at least as much by political and conceptual considerations as they were by aesthetic ones” (151). Among the Satiric Verses, Blake includes aphorisms immortalizing his bitterness towards Cromek: “Cr––– loves artists as he loves his Meat/He loves the Art but tis the Art to Cheat”; “A Petty sneaking Knave I knew/O Mr Cr––– how do ye do” (Erdman 509). Not until 2001 were the watercolors for Blair’s The Grave that Blake sold to Cromek rediscovered (Bentley Blake Records 209).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gourlay, Alexander. “ ‘Idolatry or Politics’: Blake’s Chaucer, the Gods of Priam, and the Powers of 1809.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 97–147. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print.

“The Crystal Cabinet” For some feminist critics, this poem illustrates Blake’s myth of male-female conflict. The poem uses “sexually symbolic props of females who imprison males” (Ostriker 100). Its pattern of “assault and retaliation” reverses the role of the Maiden who, at the opening, pursues and captures the male speaker “until he becomes possessive in turn” (Chayes 230). Others offer a more complex psychology behind this relationship, however, by pointing out that “there is no suggestion that he seeks to evade capture or to resist her” (Bloom 327).

80  “The Crystal Cabinet” The poem has also been read as an allegory of Blake’s journey from London to Felpham: the “World” to which the speaker is taken is “another London” to which he and the maiden come from Felpham, represented as “the Wild,” with hope of returning to the “pleasant aspect of his Lambeth days” (Erdman Prophet 395). The poem’s ending offers a dramatic reversal that forces the reader back through the poem since the speaker becomes A weeping Babe upon the wild And Weeping Woman pale reclind And in the outward Air again I filld with woes the passing Wind (Erdman Complete 488) These final lines subvert the traditional binary of the female maiden and what the reader assumes is the male subject whose point of view the poem gives, thus throwing into question any reading of the poem that claims the poem perpetuates the traditional gender binary. The speaker is transformed in this jewel-encrusted container that suggests an idealized coffin in an equally idealized death from one “England” and its cities and landscapes to another, so that all binaries are complicated by this magic box that, when “burst,” liberates the speaker from the contracted identity s/he had assumed before. When that identity is shed, so is the old England that is a projection of the subject.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Chayes, Irene. “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 214–43. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Ostriker, Alicia. “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. 1991. 90–110. Print.

Cumberland, George (1754–1848) 81

Cumberland, George (1754–1848) Blake met and befriended the radical Cumberland, who was by day a clerk in an insurance office and “thereafter an artist, author, and inventor,” at the Royal Academy; Cumberland “often praised Blake in print, learned engraving from him, corresponded with him as late as the year Blake died, and found customers for his books and prints” (Bentley 58). Matthews has recently drawn upon Blake’s friendship with Cumberland and others to describe the culture of dissent that influenced Blake regarding a defense of female sexuality. Citing Blake’s 1827 letter to Cumberland, including the lines, “since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree,” Matthews makes the case for a community of men who supported diversity that includes female sexuality (Erdman 783). She emphasizes the importance of “Blake’s excitement at reading George Cumberland’s unpublished 1798 novel, The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar since the novel describes a sexual utopia with parallels in Blake’s own writing” (11).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy [illustrations] Commissioned by John Linnell in 1824 to illustrate The Divine Comedy of Dante, the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Blake planned to illustrate the entire work, leaving 102 unfinished watercolors and having begun engraving seven. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake ranks Dante with Shakespeare; nevertheless, Blake told his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that he regarded Dante as an atheist, a “mere politician busied about this world” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 426). Although many scholars have regarded some of his most powerful illustrations to be those for the Paradiso, of the three sections of the poem – the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso – Blake’s focus was on the Inferno. Of particular interest to Blake was the Ugolino episode of the Inferno of which he made several designs and to which he refers at the top of Plate 16 of the 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the 1793 The Gates of Paradise (For Children); both images have been seen to treat Ugolino as a

82  Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy [illustrations] “victim of clerical and political tyranny, Bastilled in the Hunger Tower like more recent victims” (Paley 105–6). In spite of Blake’s abhorrence of Dante’s politics as well as his “atheism,” Robinson claimed that Blake did not necessarily approach his illustrations “in a spirit of resentment” (Paley 115). Yet there is critical dispute over how much the illustrations reflect Blake’s own views and therefore subvert Dante’s. One of the most widely discussed of Blake’s illustrations is “Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car” in the Purgatorio series, in which the gryphon symbolizes Christ and Beatrice the Church, the three maidens as Faith (center), Hope (at far left), and Charity (to the right of Hope) (see Figure 9). The illustration is most often read as critical of Dante’s text, as Hamlyn and Phillips point out, supporting the claim  by noting that “whereas Dante describes Beatrice with a laurel wreath, Blake shows her with a golden crown” (94). Paley too suggests that this illustration is meant to undermine Dante, pointing out the use of clouds throughout the Purgatorio section and here specifically to suggest an impediment to vision (159). Yet in spite of Blake’s criticism of Dante’s use of religious allegory, in Blake’s illustration from the Paradiso, “Dante Adoring Christ,” Beatrice is absent, suggesting that “at last Dante approaches Christ without mediation” (Bentley Stranger 423).

Figure 9 “Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car” (1824–7), The Tate Art Gallery

Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802), The Botanic Garden [illustrations] 83

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips. William Blake. London: Tate Publishing, 2000. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Paley, Morton. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print.

Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802), The Botanic Garden [illustrations] Grandfather of Charles Darwin, this scientific poet integrated contemporary biology with mythology in his Botanic Garden (1791). Not only did Blake illustrate this two-part poem after drawings by Fuseli, but The Botanic Garden may have been the inspiration for such works as The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion whose “language of flowers” celebrates human sexuality (Bentley 137). Blake’s illustrations for the two parts of The Botanic Garden, namely “The Economy of Vegetation” and “The Loves of Plants,” have been linked most directly to the “Botanic Goddess’s train of nymphs, Gnomes, and Sylphs” in Jerusalem (Roe 168–9): There is the Cave; the Rock; the Tree; the Lake of Udan Adan; The Forest, and the Marsh, and the Pits of bitumen deadly: The Rocks of solid fire: the Ice valleys: the Plains Of burning sand: the rivers, cataract & Lakes of Fire The Islands of the fiery Lakes: the Trees of Malice: Revenge: And black Anxiety; and the Cities of the Salamandrine men (Erdman 157, Plate 13, ll. 38–43) Darwin’s importance for Blake has thus been supported through the similarities in use of personifications to describe natural processes and a mutual desire to “undermine the authority of orthodox Christianity” (Mee 148, 152). Nevertheless, others dismiss Darwin’s influence on Blake. These readers stress their class disparity in general and Darwin’s defense of the factory system and industrialization, societal forces that were anathema to Blake.

84  Deism

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Hilton, Nelson. “The Spectre of Darwin.” Review of the Garland Facsimiles of the Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. BIQ 15 (1981). 37–48. Print. McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Roe, Albert. “The Thunder of Egypt.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. 158–95. Print.

Deism Deism, or Natural Religion, is anathema to Blake because, as the authorized interpretation of Christianity in Blake’s England, it rejects revelation and prophecy. Deism reflects the hallmark of Enlightenment thought in its foundational dualism that separates the human from nature and from the divine. Yet, in spite of Blake’s ubiquitous attacks on Deism, it has been noted that Blake “defended Thomas Paine’s Deistic critique of the Bible . . . when it was attacked by a bishop” (Ryan 164–5). Blake’s tractate There Is No Natural Religion is his earliest written attack on the Deists. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake returns to Deism at several points in this spiritual manifesto. His ambivalence towards Milton in this work, one that he develops in the eponymous Prophetic Book, attributes the flaw of the great poet to reducing Jesus to the embodiment of Reason and eliminating the Holy Ghost: “The Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy – ghost, Vacuum! (Erdman 35, Plate 5); in another plate, when he traces the history of religion from one of poetic inspiration to the formation of priesthood, he sees Deism as its nadir in its rejection of inspiration: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). In Jerusalem, Blake devotes his only prose chapter to the Deists. He opposes the vegetative stasis of Deism to his own belief in human identity as a fluid movement through states, a continually changing selfhood: Man is born a Spectre or Satan & is altogether an Evil & requires a New Selfhood continually & must continually be changed into his direct Contrary. But your Greek Philosophy (which is a remnant of Druidism) teaches that Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to Man. (Erdman 200, Plate 52)

A Descriptive Catalogue  85 Mocking the voice of the Deists, Blake chastises them in the subsequent chapter for ridiculing Christ in the name of reason: “Come hither into the Desart & turn these stones to bread,” the Deists say, dismissing Christ’s vision as “a World of Phantasy” (Erdman 204, Plate 54, ll. 21, 23). Blake attacks Bacon, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau as the greatest perpetrators of what he sees as the error of Enlightenment materialism. The Deist in Jerusalem is thus a composite of these figures of Enlightenment science: “Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!/who teach Doubt & Experiment & my two Wings Voltaire: Rousseau” (Erdman 203, Plate 54, 16–18). Blake’s argument with Enlightenment thought is tied closely to his protofeminism: as Oothoon begins her journey of self-discovery in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, she questions the Deistic epistemology, represented by Bromion’s cave, that has governed her life as it has Theotormon’s: “They told me that the night & day were all that I could see;/They told me that I had five senses to inclose up up./And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle” (Erdman 47, Plate 2, ll. 30–2).

Bibliography Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning “the Four Zoas.” Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

Deity: see God

A Descriptive Catalogue Blake’s commentary on his 1809 “Exhibition, of Paintings in Fresco, Poetical and Historical Inventions” that took place at his brother James’s shop in Golden Square “was included in the half-crown price of admission” (Erdman 881). Besides his illustrations for Gray’s The Bard and for Chaucer and The Canterbury Pilgrims, among others, Blake describes Greek sculptures as copies from “Asiatic originals, excepting ‘the Torso’ as the one possible surviving original”; Blake has been seen, nevertheless, to subvert the originals’ authority, “leaving their exact nature indeterminate” and claiming that their meaning depends upon “words implicitly contained within them” (Heppner 75).

86  Dissent; enthusiasm One of the most intriguing elements of the Catalogue is the reference in his description of the lost painting, The Ancient Britons, to the fragmented Albion that is the heart of his cosmology: the “three general classes of men who are represented by the most Beautiful, the most Strong, and the most Ugly, could not be represented by any historical facts but those of our own country . . . without violating costume”; Blake equates “the Strong man” with the “human sublime,” the “Beautiful man” with the “human pathetic,” and the “Ugly man” with “human reason” (Erdman 542–3). The only known review of the exhibition, by Robert Hunt in The Examiner, dismisses Blake as mad, railing against the “malady” in which “ebullitions of a distempered brain . . . mistaken for the sallies of genius” make it necessary “to arrest its progress. Such is the case of the productions and admirers of WILLIAM BLAKE, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement” (quoted in Bentley 281–2).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gourlay, Alexander. “ ‘Idolatry or Politics’: Blake’s Chaucer, the Gods of Priam, and the Powers of 1809.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 97–147. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print.

Design: see Art Devil: see Satan

Dissent; enthusiasm The radical Protestant sects known collectively as Dissenters shared with Blake such political ideals as liberty, reform of Parliament, and support for the French Revolution. There has nevertheless been a disparity among scholars regarding how involved Blake was in the movement and how much it influenced his writing. Some have situated Blake in his historical context by linking the “atmosphere of religious crisis” in Blake’s poetry to the “increasing demand by Protestant Dissenters for removal of the civil disabilities,” suggesting that he borrowed “the rhetorical style of the antinomians” (Ryan 151).

Dissent; enthusiasm 87 Yet it has been noted that, to Dissenters, Blake must have “seemed muddled and quaint” while to Blake the Dissenters would have appeared “weak and compromising, bound too tightly to the premises of ‘sensation’ and ‘natural religion’ ” (Ferber 14). Indeed, Blake’s radicalism has been noted to go beyond the more “respectable rationalist discourse” of such famous dissenters as Richard Price, who used the prophetic language of the Bible to justify the Revolution, Blake replacing the “received prophetic canon” with his own “visionary experience” (Mee 20). According to E. P. Thompson, members of the antinomian sect of Ranters founded in the seventeenth century by Ludowick Muggleton and John Reeve repudiated organized religion, celebrating, instead, individual experiences of inspiration and prophecy. The Muggletonians were one of many radical Protestant, millenarian groups, including Ranters and Behmenists (disciples of Boehme), with a strong following in the eighteenth century. Thompson’s position, that Muggletonian views are echoed throughout Blake’s works – including the indwelling divinity of humanity and the satanic nature of reason – has influenced much recent scholarship, in particular his theory that Blake’s mother, Catherine Harmitage, may have been the daughter of a leading London Muggletonian, thus explaining the echoes of its doctrine in his works. Worrall, for instance, noting that “the idiom of Muggleton is the idiom of Blake” due to his mother’s influence, cites the “well turned epigram (a great characteristic of Blake’s Notebook)” through which “the Muggletonians declared reason to be in constant conflict with faith’s simple innocence” and the belief that “Christ’s humanity was God’s spiritual form on earth” (13). However, more recently others including Keri Davies have argued against this maternal connection to the Muggletonians, suggesting that the connection would more likely have been to the Moravians. Blake’s contemporaries often labeled him as an Enthusiast, a term used in the eighteenth century for a radical Dissenter. The term suggests the religious ecstasy of its etymology, “filled with God,” anathema to Deists who claimed the Creator is only knowable through deductive reason. Blake referred to himself as an “Enthusiastic hope-fostered visionary”; Enthusiasts believed that “Christ came to release man from the Covenant of the law” and that Church and State were “tyrannical attempts to bind to Satan’s Kingdom the souls which Christ had come to free” (Bentley Stranger 8). From a New Historicist perspective, Blakean enthusiasm was yet more radical than the millenarianism of Dissenters such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley: “Whereas the latter pair sought to use the Bible to justify the French Revolution,” Blake went further by choosing to “supplement and even replace the received prophetic canon with [his] own visionary experience” (Mee 20).

88  “A Divine Image”

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Davies, Keri. “Jonathan Spilsbury and the Last Moravians.” Blake: Illustrated Quarterly 40, no. 3 (Winter 2006–07): 100–09. Print. Ferber, Michael. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Print. Glausser, Wayne. Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. McCalman, Iaian. “The Infidel as Prophet: William Reid and Blakean Radicalism.” Historicizing Blake. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 24–42. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

The divine: see God The Divine Comedy illustrations: see Dante

“A Divine Image” This poem exists only as an uncolored print made after Blake’s death. Keynes suggests that, judging from its title, it would appear to be a contrary to “The Divine Image” of Innocence. From that orientation the poem would suggest “the disillusioning discovery that human nature in its most evil moments can exhibit the very opposite of the attributes described in Innocence” (Keynes, Supplementary Plate). If the design supports this reading of Blake’s “extreme violence” of feeling, as Keynes proposes, interpreting the plate’s figure as the creator Zoa, Los, the savagery may have caused Blake to abandon the poem and its design. While this hypothesis may be possible, the poem’s relationship to “The Divine Image” speaks to the fluidity of Blake’s notion of how innocence and experience interact, another sign of the nondualism that works against these traditional binaries of creation/destruction and innocence/ experience. Within the poem itself, this resistance to binaries is seen as the way the images seep into one another by the second stanza as well as

“The Divine Image” 89 within single lines: “Cruelty” and “Human Heart,” as well as “Terror” and “Human Form Divine,” would appear antithetical: Cruelty has a Human Heart And Jealousy a Human Face Terror, the Human Form Divine And Secrecy, the Human Dress (Erdman 32) By the second stanza, the abstract idea of each line in the first stanza is replaced by a yet more graphic image of the forge shifting from a means of creation to one of consumption and therefore destruction.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. NY: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Keynes, Geoffrey. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. NY: Orion, 1967. Print.

“The Divine Image” This poem in the Songs of Innocence collection is a companion to “The Human Abstract” of Songs of Experience. Its singsong voice suggests a deceptively simple didacticism similar to that of “The Lamb,” as of a child who has learned his Sunday school lesson and repeats it without questioning the identity or authority of “all” who, he claims, pray to “Mercy Pity Peace and Love . . . in their distress”: For Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is god our father dear: And Mercy Pity Peace and Love, Is Man his child and care. (Erdman 12, ll. 5–8) By contrast to this speaker, that of “The Human Abstract” takes these empty signifiers as such, revealing the danger of platitudes (Erdman 12, ll. 1–2). Emphasizing the pedagogical motif in this Song of Innocence, Behrendt suggests a less cynical reading, namely, that the learning process here is that of the “concept of the four abstractions” in which “the speaker now applies those abstractions alike to an entirely unknown and abstract entity, God, and to a known and determinate one, Man,” resulting in a

90  “A Dream” “figure that combines the two in the image of ‘the human form divine’ ” (59–60). For others, yet another approach is possible: the poem can be seen to create a bridge into the Songs of Experience, whose characters “of their own accord address or . . . are made to address the forces of death in the world outside them” (Pagliaro 11). What should be underscored about this multiplicity of interpretations is that the effect of the paired poems in the two collections, here and in the case of others such as “The Chimney Sweeper” poems, is that their voices represent states rather than individuals; these states view and even inform each other as well as the world they represent through the filter of their own subjectivity.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Pagliaro, Harold. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

The divine: see God

“A Dream” This poem, included in Songs of Innocence, is narrated by one who claims to be “Angel-guarded,” recounting a dream of an “emmet,” or ant, lost and concerned about her children (Erdman 16). Just as the narrator expresses his pity for the emmet, a glow-worm appears along with a beetle to guide her home. On the simplest level, one can interpret the poem as a reassurance of “divine compassion” that manifests through even “the humble messenger” (Keynes, Plate 26). While most readers thus see this Song of Innocence as a straightforward representation of “simple faith,” Linkin regards it as Blake’s subversion of the “domestic ideal” in which the “surprising inversion of a popular narrative of idealized maternity” implies that “the domestic ideology is nothing more than a fantasy of Generation”; she cites Blake’s “deliberately allusive language” that allows a “conflation of harlot and wife” (Linkin 325, 332). What should likewise be emphasized is that even within Songs of Innocence the human mind can “weave a shade” in its psychological complexity, in this case through the simple emmet’s voice that challenges the narrator’s pious sense of protection by the Angels: O my children! do they cry Do they hear their father sigh.

Druid 91 Now they look abroad to see, Now return and weep for me. (Erdman 16, ll. 9–12) The narrator’s pity as a self-proclaimed superior being is ultimately made foolish as the insects communicate their interdependence in spite of the narrator’s helpless voyeurism.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake and Spenser. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Transfigured Maternity in Blake’s Songs of Innocence: Inverting the ‘Maternity Plot’ in ‘a Dream.’ ” Blake, Politics, and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 325–38. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

Druid Blake suggests throughout his corpus that the ancestors of the English were the founders of what is most repressive both in history and among his contemporaries. In Milton, all things began in “Albions ancient Druid rocky shore” (Erdman 100). In that Prophetic Book and in Jerusalem, Blake associates the Druids with “groves and temples, their corruption of the original religion and universal sodality into sacrifice” (Whittaker 137). For Bloom, “Druidic sacrifice is natural religion in its least disguised form” (164). Tracing Blake’s opposition between the “inspired bard” and “deluding priest” of Druidism, Mee argues that “antiquarian accounts of bards and druids inform the struggle between the liberating agency of Los and the repressive system of Urizen” which he traces to the Welsh tradition (90–1). Whittaker emphasizes that the term “Druid” embodied for Blake the culture of the “ ‘perfidious Albion’ of the Napoleonic wars” (137). That Blake describes the Druid foundation of England as a “rocky shore,” however, is an important element to the role Druidism plays in Blake’s cosmology, since the image echoed in texts and designs, from Bromion’s cave in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (Figure 4) to his depictions of Newton (Figure 23) and the Ancient of Days (Figure 2) as the projected patriarchal God of Natural Religion.

92  “Earth’s Answer” By the time the Druids reappear in Jerusalem, Blake portrays them as the cause of the misogynistic double standard that plagued Oothoon in Visions: “When the druids demanded Chastity from woman . . . all was lost./How can the Female be Chaste o thou stupid Druid” (Erdman 214, Plate 63, l. 26). Blake here speaks through the voice of Los who is closest in this Prophetic Book than in any of the others to a persona for Blake.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print.

Dualism and nondualism: see Contraries

“Earth’s Answer” This poem responds directly to the Introduction to the Song of Experience collection in which a narrator tells Earth to heed the voice of the evangelical Bard who warns the “lapsed Soul” that the end of the world is near (Erdman 18). “Earth’s Answer” has been described as a “spiritual paradox,” showing the “need to order worldly life and the reduction of life implicit in a confined ordering” (Pagliaro 35). The poem has also been seen to blame both the “punishing God of Genesis, and Earth herself” for “this hopeless state of affairs” (Marsh 28). Behrendt offers a significant means of gleaning Blake’s voice behind both poems when he observes that the final stanza describes Earth’s failure to “understand that she possesses the power to free herself” (70): Break this heavy chain, That does freeze my bones around Selfish! vain! Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound. (Erdman 19, ll. 21–5) Just as the speaker of “London” decries the “mind-forg’d manacles,” this speaker, Earth herself, sees no possible liberation from her “grey despair” as

“The Ecchoing Green” 93 she absorbs the dark message of the Bard in the Introduction to Experience (Erdman 27, l. 8; 18, l. 5).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Pagliaro, Harold. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

“The Ecchoing Green” This Song of Innocence is anticipated in the “Song” from the Poetical Sketches: “I love the laughing vale/I love the echoing hill” (Keynes, Plate 6–7). More complex than the earlier poem, however, this poem’s “visionary possibility” has been “connected to carnival, rather than just to an act of imagination which, on its own, may not escape the limitations of conventional aesthetics” (Rawlinson 175). God’s protection has also been paralleled to the parental protection of the children in the poem (Howard 48). It is important, however, to distinguish Blake’s authorial voice from the nostalgia that masquerades as wisdom in many of the adult voices in the Innocence collection; in this case, having a child’s point of view on the “old folk” underscores the lapse between innocence and the illusion of loss that gives rise to nostalgia: They laugh at our play, And soon they all say. Such such were the joys. When we all girls & boys, In our youth-time were seen, On the Ecchoing Green. (Erdman 8, Plates 6–7, ll. 16–21) The echo of the children’s song has a double valence: for the innocent it is the nondual resonance that dissolves the boundaries between the binaries of subject and object, of innocence and experience; the echoing voice of the old folk, by contrast, suggests the vacuity of nostalgia for those deluded into thinking innocence disappears with the end of childhood.

94  Eden

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Plates 6 & 7. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

Eden One of four states in Blake’s cosmology, along with Beulah, Generation, and Ulro, Eden is the redemption that is potential in the “Pulsation of the Artery” (Erdman 127, Plate 29, l. 3). Throughout his writings Blake is adamant (pun intended) that in spite of the story of Genesis in which Adam and Eve are evicted from the Garden of Eden, the notion of a Covering Cherub placed at the gate of Eden by God to keep humans from re-entering is an illusion. Blake represents the state of Eden most fully in Night the Ninth of Vala, or The Four Zoas. Its structural relationship to the first eight Nights of the Prophetic Book reinforces the nonlinear relationship between the fallen state and the redeemed since Night the Ninth is the paradoxical center of the poem around which the fragmentation of the Nights leading up to it revolve. Further, it is Vala, the figure representing nature in her eponymous poem, who leads the way into the redeemed state of Eden, as Blake describes it through imagery of the garden: Alas am I but as a flower then will I sit down Then will I weep then Ill complain & sigh for immortality And chide my maker thee O Sun that raisedst me to fall So saying she sat down & wept beneath the apple trees. (Erdman 396, p. 127, ll. 16–19) Vala’s despair over her belief that she is fallen from innocence gives way to an epiphany of nondual vision in which her soul emerges as her eternal Self. She liberates herself from subject-object duality in a moment that reverses the course of fallenness: “I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds that glitter in the sun/I will call & who shall answer me I will sing who shall reply/For from my pleasant hills behold the living living springs” (Erdman 397, p. 128, ll. 9–11). That she hears her own voice echo back from what appeared a separate material universe is the catalyst that allows the

Edom 95 composite fragments of Albion to reunite in an apocalyptic fire that destroys not nature but the illusion of separateness. Bentley’s revised Blake Records discredits a popular story, long taken as true and perpetuated by Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of Blake, in which Thomas Butts happened upon William and Catherine Blake in their garden at Felpham reciting Paradise Lost “freed from ‘those troublesome disguises’ which prevailed since the Fall” (xxvi). Although the story of a naked Blake reciting Milton in his garden seemed evidence enough of his madness for Royal Academy students as early as 1815, the story was apparently recognized even then as apocryphal, according to Bentley. Nevertheless, the power of the story is in its metaphor for Blake’s recurring idea of Eden, a paradisiacal state we can return to at any time since it is both outside of and coexistent with time and space. Perhaps this is the reason why Tracy Chevalier, the author of the novel Burning Bright, who, in spite of being aware of the scholarly debunking of the Adam and Eve story, “decided not to give up the anecdote” since “there is something about Blake that makes people want to tell and believe such stories” (13).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Chevalier, Tracy. “Peeking over the Garden Wall.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 12–15. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in The Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1945. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

Edom The advent of the “dominion of Edom” in Marriage of Heaven and Hell has been linked to the reclaiming of Esau’s birthright “of which he was defrauded” by Jacob, or Israel (Gourlay 274). Blake’s “infernal reading” of Isaiah 34 and 35 has generated scholarship that contrasts the biblical to the Blakean Edom, the former as a life of bitterness so that Edom’s name is “anathema,” linked to the Antichrist, whereas for Blake, Edom’s name becomes “apocalyptic,” an interpretation Blake develops further in America (Tannenbaum 127–9, 131).

96  Energy According to Raine, Blake borrowed this reading from Swedenborg; yet while it may be true that “the reinstating of Edom . . . meant for Blake, as it did for Swedenborg, a reinstatement of the bodily man in the Divine Humanity of Jesus,” the irony of Blake’s juxtaposition of claiming Swedenborg to be “the Angel sitting at the tomb” with the proclamation, “Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise,” is a clear indictment of Swedenborg in attempting to keep Blake from re-entering Eden (Raine 338; Erdman 34, Plate 3).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gourlay, Alexander. “A Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 272–87. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

Elynittria: see Palamabron Emanation: see Female

Energy In his marginalia to Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man, Blake articulates most explicitly his unconditional belief that energy is the only moral good and that, therefore, the only evil is the hindering of another’s energy, which Blake refers to as one’s “propensity” (Erdman 601). Such an unwavering belief makes him the most radical among his contemporaries since it in turn challenges the dualistic foundation of western paradigms of ethics and theology. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake proclaims that “all Bibles or sacred codes” have been responsible for errors including the notion that “God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies,” whereas the contrary is the only truth: that “Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Erdman 34, Plate 4). This is perhaps Blake’s clearest statement of nondualism, for it is energy itself that permeates the illusion of separateness. Blake suggests that it is the devil’s revolutionary energy in Paradise Lost that connects him with Milton, for he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell . . . because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (Erdman 35, Plate 6). In this “voice of the Devil,” Blake concludes “Energy is Eternal Delight” (Erdman 34, Plate 4).

Engraving; illuminated printing; relief etching 97 As Blake’s cosmology develops from the Lambeth Prophecies to the later Prophetic Books, Orc embodies revolutionary energy in his struggle against the oppression of his father, Los. In Europe, Orc “beheld the morning in the east/Shot from the heights of Enitharmon;/And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury” (Erdman 66, Plate 14, l. 37–Plate 15, l. 2). Many of Blake’s works show paralysis and stagnation as the inverse of energy; The Book of Thel is one of the earliest of such examples, with Thel restless in Har but ambivalent about moving into the realm of Generation that seems only to equate energy with suffering, as she hears from her own voice in the grave she visits at the end of the poem. Imagery in both text and design emphasizes the obstruction of energy, especially seen in images of the cave in which characters are trapped in the illusion of bondage (see Figure 4).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Paley, Morton. Energy and Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.

Engraving; illuminated printing; relief etching Blake’s medium of engraving became a means to overturn the dualism implicit in traditional art’s depiction of good and evil. Blake explains the spiritual significance of his “infernal method” of engraving in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The Whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite. And holy . . . by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (Erdman 39, Plate 14). Blake’s method of engraving, learned when he was an apprentice to James Basire, was an advance over the standard technique during his time. As Viscomi explains, “the design’s outline was traced with a needle through an acid-resistant ‘ground’ covering the copper plate and then etched with acid” after which the engraver “went over these slightly incised lines with burins,” engraving the plate’s surface and “uniting all parts in a web of crosshatched lines”; Viscomi regards the engravings for The Book of Job as the “masterpiece of his lifetime as an engraver”: without Blake’s first etching them and with “tone subordinate to line and texture,” Blake emulated “the ancient engravers,” producing a “modern result: original artistic expression in a graphic medium whose materiality and natural language were fully exploited” (37; see Figure 3). Blake’s method of relief etching and the experiments

98  Enitharmon in engraving were the “springboard of all his other excursions into the visual arts” (Lister 34). The printed image “mirrors the plate image” in Blake’s technique, necessitating that he write backwards, which, as Viscomi notes, “was not difficult,” although “mastering the ‘ink’ and giving small letters the proper slant were, at least initially” (43, 47). Blake taught his wife, Catherine, to illuminate his prints, a task she shared with him.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, CT: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. “Illuminated Printing.” Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 37–62. Print. Phillips, Michael. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/william-blakeprinting-process. Web.

Enion: see Tharmas

Enitharmon Before she and Los fragmented, they were one Zoa, Urthona. Unlike the other three Emanations, however, Blake describes Enitharmon in Jerusalem as “a vegetated mortal Wife of Los” rather than an “evanescent shade” (Erdman 158, Plate 14, ll. 12–13). Indeed, she has been identified with Catherine Blake based on Blake’s letters, and, like Catherine, she illuminates Los’s designs in Vala, or The Four Zoas (Erdman 370, p. 98, l. 36). Of her many offspring with Los, the first is Orc, suggesting to Damon that “all true artists are revolutionists” (124). For many scholars, Enitharmon represents pity cast out by Los when he gave form to Urizen. Otto notes that, as consort to Urizen, Emanation of Los, and daughter of Tharmas, Enitharmon is “the body of the fallen world/Albion, the space in which Los/loss comes into existence” (85). Enitharmon has been seen to evoke Marie Antoinette in Europe even as she “inhabits another time as well as another place,” her dream a “recapitulation of the most ancient moment, the laying of the foundation of her own being” (Ferber 223, 228). Enitharmon’s “Song of Death” to Los in The Four Zoas is a falsehood that claims Albion’s sleep occurred at a specific moment in history, in which “Luvah and Vala woke & flew up from the Human Heart/Into the Brain” (Erdman 73, p. 10, ll. 11–12). Blake sets this deception, among other such

Eno 99 distortions in the fallen world, against the larger, subsuming perspective of the Prophetic Book itself whose nonlinear structure tells of Albion’s sleep as a state that coexists with the wakefulness of an integrated consciousness, the paradox of a nondualism that subsumes duality all binaries.

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Eno Glossing her name as an anagram of “eon,” Damon identifies her as the mother of poetry who has “the ability of seeing eternity in all things” (125). She is the aged mother whose lament opens both The Book of Los and Vala, or The Four Zoas, the latter of which introduces Blake’s anti-war epic: The Song of the Aged Mother which shook the heavens with wrath Hearing the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse Marshalld in order for the day of Intellectual battle (Erdman 300, p. 3, ll. 1–3) As a daughter of Beulah, she functions as both muse and mythical mother who announces that the epic simultaneously collapses and expands time and space: the very announcement is the first challenge in the “Intellectual battle” that pits enlightenment Deism against the redemption of eternity. Indeed, Eno takes “a Moment of Time” and draws it “out to Seven thousand years” (Erdman 304, p. 9, ll. 9–10), as noted by Otto, a rare case in Blake’s mythos in which a character is not merely projecting onto others: she gives Los and Enitharmon a time and space in which to live, thus providing “limits within which [the world] can take shape,” so that one can “live in an inverted world” where “Law emanates from a supersensible realm” (77).

100  Eternity; “Eternity”

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Enthusiasm: see Dissent Eros: see Sexuality

Eternity; “Eternity” In his short poem “Eternity,” included in Songs and Ballads, Blake writes: He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise (Erdman 470) The paradox of the state in which one “kisses the joy as it flies” is that letting go of any attempt to hold onto transient joy makes way for the experience of eternity whereas the illusion of being trapped in the dualistic world of time and space, or Generation, leads one to cling to it and thereby destroy it. Blake describes eternity, or Eden, as a state that coexists with rather than replaces Generation. This relationship can be traced from the deceptively simple “Auguries of Innocence,” in which the reader is urged to “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour,” to the most complex representations of that paradoxical coexistence in the Prophetic Books, culminating with Jerusalem: What is above is Within, for every-thing in Eternity is translucent The Circumference still expands going forward to Eternity. And the Center has Eternal States! (Erdman 225, Plate 71, ll. 6–8) Blake’s cosmology can thus be described as the paradoxical story of the quest for eternity in time and space.

Europe: A Prophecy  101

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print.

Europe: A Prophecy Included in the Continental Prophecies, Europe “places contemporary revolutions in a context of 1,800 years, beginning with the birth of a ‘secret child’ in the year one” (Dorrbecker 15). Erdman, commenting on the poem’s obscurity, notes that nowhere is Blake’s symbolism “more cryptic; nowhere do so many new characters appear in such fleeting contexts; nowhere is there such sly shifting from one level of discourse to another, such difficulty with ambiguities of punctuation and sudden changes of pace” (211). The poem looks at history through “dream-time,” specifically the 1,800-year dream of Enitharmon that examines the “rise and fall of the tyranny that had been established in the Old World by the unholy trinity of reason [represented by Newtonian science], religion [represented by the Angel], and the moral law” (Dorrbecker 142). The “Preludium” continues the theme of “America, “reworking . . . themes one finds in the “Song of Liberty” [and] The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (Dorrbecker 143). While Mee connects the nameless female to Jerusalem “as a grieving widow or lamenting woman” (30), Dorrbecker attributes her “mixed emotions” as the “seeming futility of the Incarnation of Christ” whereas her “visionary joy would express her confidence in the child’s second coming as Orc” (144). Enitharmon appears here for the first time as the wife of Los. Some feminist criticism has seen the “benighted” Enitharmon’s “dream of agency . . . as misinformed and as short-lived as the most pitiful exercise of cunning female power, the feminine as inescapably trapped in the ideological circle of late eighteenth-century England” (Williams 82). This very point can be used to support Blake’s advocacy of Wollstonecraft’s rejection of such feminine wiles rather than to claim Blake is a perpetuator of the misogynistic representation of female manipulation. This proto-feminist stance of Blake’s can be supported further in Europe regarding the chaining of Orc to the tree by Los and Enitharmon, as Cox claims: “In Europe, sexual duality emerges in an opposition between Orc, who is the desire or delight of sexual energy taken to its revolutionary extreme, and Enitharmon, who is the sexual delight that people feel in perverting and suppressing genuine sexual delight” (Cox 137). There has been critical debate regarding Blake’s attitude behind the poem’s representation of revolution. For some, Enitharmon’s sleep symbolizes the

102  Europe: A Prophecy “complex of beliefs and attitudes” that caused Europe’s failure to transcend “its fallen condition: the religion of chastity, the concept of chivalry that arose from that religion, the militaristic concept of atonement, and the deification of Nature”; for this side of the debate, the sterility of society under Urizen’s rule, the state that evolves in the Prophetic Books into Ulro, can no longer contain “the flames of Orc” (Tannenbaum 170). Arguing against the idea that Blake idealizes revolution in the poem, Dorrbecker describes it as representing “Blake’s own fears regarding the prospects for a British revolution”; although Los is traditionally described as the “revolutionary poet-prophet,” Dorrbecker writes, the “strife of blood” that takes place when Los makes war on his sons challenges this view, Los and his sons instead representing “aggressive British politics toward France, rather than the counter-culture of British radicalism” (149, 152). Perhaps Richey’s suggestion that the poem’s revolutionary agenda is ambivalent is the most suitable position; he notes that, although Europe is more pessimistic than America, it nevertheless does not represent Blake’s “repudiation of the revolutionary movement,” Blake trying to “accommodate the changing historical context and to put the best face possible on the increasingly bleak conditions in France”; once Blake returns to the present day in the second half of the poem, there are “glimmers of light as Orc reappears to herald the potentially apocalyptic French Revolution” (64, 71, 73).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. “From America to the Four Zoas.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 210–30. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

The Everlasting Gospel  103

The Everlasting Gospel Erdman explains the textual history of this work in which “nine widely scattered entries” in Blake’s Notebook and “three sections in a separate scrap of paper” are considered to be parts of a “single but unfinished” poem (874). According to Mary Lynn Johnson, this text is “Blake’s “emphatically negative” first time addressing the question of the Virgin Birth, through the “rhetorical question . . . ‘Was Jesus Born of a Virgin Pure/with narrow Soul & looks demure’ ” (156). Blake’s hypothetical suggestion in one of the Notebook sections, “If [Jesus] intended to take on Sin/The Mother should an Harlot been /Just such a one as Magdalen,” is for Johnson a precursor to the later Prophecies’ link between the Virgin and imagery of the Whore of Babylon (Erdman 877). This observation can be connected, in turn, to the virgin/whore binary that Blake reviles in Visions of the Daughters of Albion through Oothoon’s tragic vision of her entrapment in a patriarchal society that only offers the reductive binary in spite of her nondual experience of her own sexuality.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “The Death and Assumption of Blake’s Mary: Anomalous Subjects in the Biblical Watercolour Series for Thomas Butts.” Re-Envisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 144–59. Print.

“Fair Elenor” Included in the Poetical Sketches, this imitation of the “exclamatory Gothic,” a sub-genre of the ballad, is among Blake’s earliest poems. Although it is usually dismissed as one of “the least accomplished” poems in the collection, Gleckner exonerates Blake’s attempt at reviving the “genuineness” of the Gothic ballad that Blake found missing from the “sentimental drivel that passed for balladic poetry among his contemporaries” (16–17). In this respect, there may be an element of irony with the return of the melodramatic “Fancy” so that Elenor “thinks of bones,/And grinning skulls, and corruptible death” (Erdman 411, ll. 13–14). Perhaps the most enthusiastic of its readers, Frye notes that it is a “raucous but interesting piece of Gothic horror . . . complete with charnel houses and echoes from Hamlet” in which “Blake falls into the slow beats appropriate for making one’s flesh creep and begins to show something of his power in

104  Felpham handling accents in a long line” (183). By contrast, Erdman dismisses it as one of the “idylls of the untroubled life” (Prophet 18).

Bibliography Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake’s Lavaterian Women: Eleanor, Rowena and Ahania.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 44–52. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

Felpham William Hayley invited Blake and Catherine to move to his cottage at Felpham in Sussex where they lived between 1800 and 1803. It was here that, while Blake engraved illustrations for Hayley’s own books and painted portrait miniatures of Hayley’s friends by day, Blake wrote his “Bible of Hell,” the Prophetic Books, by night. If there were any doubt in Blake’s mind about his decision to return to London in 1803, the Scolfield incident that year left no uncertainty. Milton, the most personal of Blake’s Prophecies, describes the multiple, coexisting states he occupied during his stay at Felpham. On the most profound level, Blake writes, it was not Hayley who brought him here, but rather “Los [who] joined with me he took me in his firy whirlwind . . ./from Lambeths shades/He set me down in Felphams Vale” (Erdman 137, Plate 36, ll. 21–3; see Figure 10). Felpham thus becomes a locus of a nondual coexistence between Blake’s integrated “Visions” and his frustration, bitterness, and anger over his dependence on Hayley, not only for physical sustenance but for the political protection that exonerated Blake from Scolfield’s charge of treason.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Ellis, Edwin John and William Butler Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake. 3 Vols. London: B. Quaritch, 1893. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Female; Emanation 105

Figure 10 Milton, Plate 36 (1811), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Collection

Female; Emanation A pattern among the strongest of Blake’s female figures is a heroic confrontation of the binaries that obstruct their path towards liberation, from figures such as Mary in her eponymous poem to Vala and the Emanations. However, not all the female figures in Blake’s corpus have the capacity to take on patriarchy, as seen in the figure of Thel. The vexed issue of Blake’s representation of the female has covered a spectrum of critical perspectives, from the advent of feminist Blake criticism in the 1980s to the increasingly more nuanced recent criticism defending Blake against charges of misogyny. The earlier criticism was founded largely on misleading claims that Blake’s male characters were a mouthpiece for misogynistic views, an argument that has been addressed in a wide range of scholarly views. This more recent criticism has emphasized an increasingly rich subjectivity among the female figures in Blake’s text and design. Among the most recent scholars re-thinking Blake’s representation of the feminine, Bruder emphasizes that the earlier claim to Blake’s misogyny creates a “distorted sense of Blake’s historical context” (Daughters 12). By contrast, she asserts that Blake “constructs a notion of femininity centered

106  Female; Emanation upon the concept of dissent”; most important, Bruder notes that Blake is of value in feminism “because he took sexual power seriously,” engaging with “contemporary discourses and contexts” that “exercised or resisted” sexual power; Bruder credits Chayes for offering the first “even-handed account of Blake’s treatment of sexual love and sexual violence” (Daughters 36, 22). Other recent criticism, such as that of McClenahan, has likewise emphasized that Blake’s female characters reflect his historical context, Blake’s “perspective on gender reflect[ing] a process of education through practice common to the early 1790s” so that he “shifts the sex of characters who exemplify revolution” (“Albion” 308). Dorrbecker too argues against the criticism of Blake as misogynist by linking Blake’s representation of women to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, offering a subjectivity that is nevertheless far from idealized: “As Blake’s heroine in Europe, Enitharmon is made to play a thankless role. . . .’ as a mythic prototype embodying a similar craving for power and ‘empire’ as many of Wollstonecraft’s negative examples” (157). Suggesting Blake’s ambivalence, Ferber notes that “one of the functions of females in Blake (though not Oothoon) is to create space between moments of time. Such space-making has its positive aspect – places to rest between rounds of intellectual combat – but it also retards the movement and completion of time to its apocalyptic finale” (225–6). For Blake, there is an inextricable connection between Enlightenment thought and misogyny, as he shows most dramatically through Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion; his is a proto-feminism more radical than Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman since he takes his critique of patriarchy to the very foundation of western thought, whereas Vindication of the Rights of Woman asks simply that woman be given the opportunity to assimilate into that patriarchal world. Oothoon, more akin to Wollstonecraft herself than the polemical self she fashions in Vindications, thus has the vision to see the bondage created by the “mindforg’d manacles” – in the phrase from “London” – that is Theotormon’s repressive, patriarchal Deism, but the poem’s tragedy is that, as liberated as her vision becomes, she cannot transcend her world in its present state. Nevertheless, “soft Oothoon” reappears at the end of Milton to help usher in the “Human Harvest” (Erdman 144, Plate 42, ll. 32–3); this promise of redemption for all of humanity can only come about after Ololon’s sloughing off of her identification with the twelve-year-old-virgin by which Milton had objectified and therefore cast her out: “The Virgin divided . . . & with a shriek/Dolorous that ran thro all Creation . . ./Away from Ololon she divided & fled into the depths/Of Milton’s Shadow” (Erdman 143, Plate 42, ll. 3–6). While the liberation of the female can only come about with the release of the collective mind from its bondage of dualism, paradoxically the release of the female from her own bondage is the catalyst to the redemption of humanity.

Flaxman, John and Ann 107

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Chayes, Irene. “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 214–43. Print. Colebrooke, Claire. “Blake, Literary History and Sexual Difference.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 16–25. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books, Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. Fox, Susan. “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 507–19. Print. Jackson, H. J. Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 23 (1990): 184–94. Print. McClenahan, Catherine L. “Albion and the Sexual Machine: Blake, Gender and Politics, 1780–1795.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 301–4. Print. ———. “No Face Like the Human Divine? Women and Gender in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript.” Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Eds. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. 189–207. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Tayler, Irene. “The Woman Scaly.” Bulletin of the Midwest MLA 6 (1973): 74–87. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Flaxman, John and Ann John and Ann Flaxman were close friends of the Blakes, he a sculptor who became professor of painting at the Royal Academy. Like Blake, he had a “romantic taste for medieval art, English history, and unorthodox Christianity”; even though both struggled against the “prevailing materialism,”

108  Flaxman, John and Ann Flaxman accepted the patronage of the “pioneering capitalist and potter,” Josiah Wedgwood (Bindman 87–8). Bentley suggests that Flaxman may have been thinking of the “lack of smoothness” of such plates as Blake’s “Death’s Door” when Flaxman “lamented Blake’s lack of ‘attention to his worldly concerns’ ” (219). By 1805, Flaxman’s criticism of Blake’s “abstracted habits . . . at variance with the usual modes of human life,” along with Blake’s betrayal by Hayley and Cromek, created a rift that resulted in ten years during which Blake made no commercial engravings (Bentley 221). The underlying tension in this friendship is perhaps nowhere more revealing than in Blake’s 1800 letter to Flaxman, ostensibly an expression of gratitude to Flaxman for introducing him to Hayley, who had invited Blake to live in Felpham in exchange for Hayley’s commissioning Blake’s engravings of his poetry. Yet it is hard not to see irony in Blake’s fulsome praise of Flaxman when Blake writes, “I bless thee O Father of Heaven & Earth that ever I saw Flaxmans face/Angels stand round my Spirit in Heaven . . . Flaxman was taken to Italy” (Erdman 707). In this no doubt mock-obsequious display of gratitude, Blake suggests the attitude of his own character Palamabron towards the Elect in Blake’s myth of fallenness. Even before Hayley’s rescue of a humiliated Blake from the false charge of treason by Scolfield, Blake was ambivalent towards Hayley, a patron who represented an oppressive conventionality and whose bidding to which Blake felt compelled to acquiesce. Blake alludes to Flaxman’s great success as an artist, with the patronage Blake never had that sent Flaxman to Italy. Yet no sooner does he play the part of Palamabron in this letter than he takes on his role as Rintrah, the prophet of righteous indignation, describing the visions of Ezra, Isaiah, Milton, and Shakespeare as “terrors appeard in the Heavens above/ And in Hell beneath & a mighty & awful change threatened the Earth/The American War began All its dark horrors passed before my face/Across the Atlantic to France”; he concludes by acknowledging the impossibility of being Rintrah without also being Palamabron: “Seeing such visions I could not subsist on the Earth/But by my conjunction with Flaxman” (Erdman 707–8). Ann Flaxman was herself a patron to Blake. As Bruder notes, not only did she commission “those 116 exquisite watercolour ‘Drawings . . .’ designed . . . to illuminate the poems of Thomas Gray,” but infused in them a feminine aesthetic (1).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bindman, David. “Blake as a Painter.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 85–109. Print. Bruder, Helen. “ ‘The Bread of sweet Thought & the Wine of Delight’: Gender, Aesthetics and Blake’s ‘Dear Friend Mrs Anna Flaxman.’ ” Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 1–11. Print.

The French Revolution  109 Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

The French Revolution This 1791 poem is one of the Lambeth Prophecies. Although it was set in type that year by Joseph Johnson, it was never published. Comparing it to other “similar visions of revolution” of Blake’s, Bloom notes that it is unique in having “no overt references to any symbolism not fully presented by its own text” (60). The poem’s engagement with Burke has been a focus of criticism, one point of comparison being that, as opposed to Burke’s representation of the French Revolution as a breakdown of social order, Blake’s revolution represents a return to organized innocence. For Aers, this poem’s early “two-class model” contrasts with the more complex representations of revolution to come in the Prophetic Books as it “moves swiftly from this dismal vision” of oppression to “one of gentle collaboration in which the vicious past is totally transcended” (248, 249). In this poem, Blake experimented with extending the catalogue technique, “joining it with that of symbolism,” as exemplified by the opening description of the towers of the Bastille, in which the catalogue allows Blake “to represent seven categories of crime attributed to tyranny” (Howard 56). It has also been seen as a “remarkable propaganda poem” that nevertheless reveals “inconsistencies of attitude and imagery” because of Blake’s attraction to the “dramatic energy that he imagines the old regime can still summon up”; thus, the narrative is “a contest, not between desire and repression of desire, but between desire and desire” (Cox 78–9). Halloran argues that, rather than the poem being “an experiment that failed,” it needs to be regarded as a “visual and dramatic prophecy” modeled on the Book of Revelation” (30, 31). While the poem is more firmly entrenched in its historical context than any of Blake’s other works, it looks ahead to the fuller cosmology of the Prophetic Books even as it echoes many of the motifs in Blake’s earlier poems. One is reminded, for instance, of Thel’s horror when she hears her voice from the grave crying out in anguish over the suffering of her life; in The French Revolution, the King and Nobles “look into [the] graves” of the “spirits of ancient Kings” who are “The nerves of five thousand years ancestry”; the ghosts of those ancient kings warn them, “Hide from the living. . . . ! Hide in the nether earth . . . ! The prisoners have burst their dens” (Erdman 289, pp. 4–5, ll. 70–8).

Bibliography Aers, David. “Representations of Revolution: From the French Revolution to the Four Zoas.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 244–70. Print.

110  “Fresh from the Dewy Hill” (“Song”) Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Halloran, William F. “The French Revolution: Revelation’s New Form.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. Erdman and Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 30–56. Print. Hilton, Nelson. “Blake’s Early Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.191–209. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print.

“Fresh from the Dewy Hill” (“Song”) This early poem, included in Blake’s Poetical Sketches, has received less critical attention than the poems on the seasons included in that collection. As Michael observes, the poetic voice “appropriates the power of movement from the personified season” (207). Gleckner notes that the poem is indebted to Milton’s “Nativity Ode,” citing such lines as “Each field seems an Eden, and each calm retreat” (Erdman 416, l. 15). Michael, however, observes that the differences between this poem and Milton’s are more striking than the similarities because of the speaker’s sexual empowerment (208). One can see, as is the case with the other poems in the collection, a nascent expression of nondualism between the states of eroticism and purity developed in the more mature poems in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and evolving with the developing cosmology of the narrative poems: “Each field seems Eden, and each calm retreat;/Each village seems the haunt of holy feet” (Erdman 416, ll. 15–16).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gleckner, Robert F. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Blake’s Feet: Toward a Poetics of Incarnation.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 205–24. Print. Tolley, Michael J. “Blake’s Songs of Spring.” William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Eds. Morton Paley and Michael Phillips. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973. 96–128. Print.

Fuseli, Henry (1741–1825) 111

Fuseli, Henry (1741–1825) Fuseli was a Swiss artist who had been a schoolmate of Lavater in Zurich; he moved to London, where he spent most of his life. Although he was a keeper and professor at the Royal Academy, Blake regarded him rightfully as a fellow renegade in a world where “Reynolds & Gainsborough Blotted & Blurred one against the other & Divided all the English World between them Fuseli Indignant hid himself – I [was] hid” (Erdman 636). Fuseli’s most famous painting, “The Nightmare,” was the “dominant artistic presence for Blake in the 1790s”; Fuseli taught Blake to reveal the body as a “coiled spring that can retreat into itself . . . or can extend itself fully in exultation” (Bindman 91–3). Like Blake, Fuseli’s influences were Milton, Shakespeare, the eighteenth-century “Graveyard Poets,” and the Bible. He too was a writer as well as a painter and, like Blake, “detested drawing from life” (Ackroyd 104).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Bindman, David. “Blake as a Painter.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 85–109. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Fuzon Fuzon is the rebel whose struggle against Urizen at the end of The Book of Urizen places him in the role of Christ as “national liberator” when he is crucified (Mee 190). The first part of The Book of Ahania continues the story of Fuzon’s rebellion, although critics disagree about the nature of Fuzon’s role. While Frye interprets Fuzon’s rebellion as compromised, equating it with Orc’s “fiery energy,” Mee points out that Fuzon, whose failure is “contingent on a failure of revolutionary commitment,” is inherently different from Orc and therefore not an indication of Blake’s “disillusion with radical change” (190–2). Nevertheless, as Mee points out, Fuzon’s success in deposing Urizen at the end of The Book of Ahania “only marks a continuation of the Urizenic world order” since Blake identifies Fuzon with Urizen (194). By contrast, Tannenbaum finds Fuzon a “remote and pathetic character” who, unlike Orc, represents the “passion for justice . . . that quickly expends its vitality as it takes the form of doctrines, laws, and codes of living”; with his declaration, “I am God. . . . eldest of things!” (Erdman 86, Plate 3, l. 38),

112  Gate imagery Fuzon, as revolution itself, becomes like the “tyranny that it so strenuously opposes” (226). This spectrum of interpretations speaks to Blake’s resistance to placing a character in the classical role of a hero who single-handedly takes down the tyrant. In comparison to the crises that make up the Prophetic Books, one can see that the very ambiguity of Fuzon’s role in The Book of Ahania, particularly, has the potential merely to duplicate Urizen’s, as his own speech reveals: “Shall we worship this Demon of smoke . . . this abstract nonentity/This cloudy God seated on waters?” after which “The Globe of wrath shaking on high/Roaring with fury, he threw/The howling Globe: burning it flew Lengthening into a hungry beam” (Erdman 84, Plate 2, ll. 10–19).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

Garment: see Loom

Gate imagery As portals between states through which individuals have the potential to move, gates recur throughout Blake’s poetry, designs, and prose. In the last days of his life, he wrote to Cumberland, “I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays” (quoted in Bentley 457). Blake’s re-mythologizing of the biblical story of the closing of Eden’s gate after Adam and Eve’s expulsion runs throughout his writing and design. Exploring the motif in great detail, Raine notes that it culminates into the closing of Albion’s western gate that is associated with Tharmas, the “Zoa of sensory life”; the other three gates, she adds, “reason, feeling and poetic vision,” are open gates, which is “not to say that these faculties cannot often mislead man; but . . . we take them to be of mental nature . . . whereas the world revealed to us by the senses we take to be exterior to ourselves . . . as by a closed gate” (II, 269). Blakean gates suggest the potential freedom from the binaries of his Enlightenment world. As seen in The Gates of Paradise (For Children) and The Gates

Gate imagery 113 of Paradise (For the Sexes), gates are often linked to the potential liberation of female sexuality from the virgin/whore binary. One can extend to this larger sense of potential liberation from the innocence/experience binary Raine’s tracing Enitharmon’s “gate of birth” in The Four Zoas back to Paradise Lost and the “unbarring of the Gates of Hell to Satan by his daughter Sin” (235). Blake’s painting (Figure 11) illustrates this moment in Milton’s epic.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Figure 11 Illustration to Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Satan, Sin, and Death” (1804), Huntington Library

114  The Gates of Paradise

The Gates of Paradise (For Children); The Gates of Paradise (For the Sexes) The 1793 picture book, For Children, is a set of eighteen small designs. As Bentley suggests, it is related to the Renaissance emblem books, which “combine on one page a riddling title, an enigmatic design, and a set of verses explaining in heartily moral terms the meaning of the design” (140). For the Sexes, probably written in 1825, is a revised version of For Children. Less obscure than the earlier work’s “precious little explanation of the designs,” it is considered improved by Blake’s addition of “The Keys of the Gates” (Bentley 141). The designs echo themes in many of Blake’s works, including, as the title suggests, the gates of Eden, guarded against human re-entry by the Covering Cherub, and “unorganized innocence”; in the case of “Aged Ignorance,” clipping the wings of youthful energy is the image of an old man who is a variant of Nobodaddy, a Urizenic figure of patriarchy, here with glasses that suggest his weak vision (Figure 12).

Figure 12 “Aged Ignorance” (1793), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

Generation 115

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Bruder, Helen and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Generation As one of four states that Blake develops in the full cosmology of the Prophetic Books, Generation evolved from the realm of experience in Blake’s earlier works including The Songs of Innocence and of Experience. While Blake even then problematized the innocence and experience binary, his notion of nondual states becomes yet more complex in the distinction among Generation, Beulah, Eden, and Ulro. As Otto notes, Generation is a realm in which “spring leads to winter, and male and female powers are locked in endless combat,” as in Vala, or The Four Zoas, in which the characters “labour to exchange the sexual torment of Generation for the security of a lifeless, rational world” which Blake calls Ulro (62). Raine explains that the “soul’s sufferings in the world, the cruel laws to which [the soul] is here subjected, and her inextinguishable longing for eternity are the theme of all the poems,” embodied by Lyca in “Little Girl Lost” who is about to “wake to the sleep” of Generation (I, 149, 137). As the realm that Thel ambivalently enters in The Book of Thel, Generation is life and death, in contrast to the fragile Har she inhabits at the opening of the poem. Raine suggests that the generated body is called a “grave” in the poem because “in it the soul is dead from eternity, or a “bed,” as the place of the soul’s sleep” (I, 109). Most important about Thel’s opportunity to hear her own voice from the grave is that she is able to get a glimpse of Generation – life and death – causing her to flee back to Har in terror. Raine links Lyca and Thel to Oothoon of Visions of the Daughters of Albion through the descent into Generation; while Thel “fears to descend” and Lyca falls asleep, Oothoon “brings into the cave the memories and values of eternity,” thus knowing that “physical forms are embodiments of spiritual essences” (I, 166). One can extend the relationship between Generation and the female to Milton, Book II, in which Ololon must descend from Beulah into Generation to cast off her identity as a twelve-year-old virgin. Just before this moment of Ololon’s epiphany, “Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration,” at which point “the Virgin divided. . . ./Away from Ololon . . . & fled into the depths/Of Miltons Shadow as a dove upon the story Sea” (Erdman 143, Plate 41, l. 28–Plate 42, l. 6).

116  The Ghost of Abel

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

The Ghost of Abel This prose drama on two plates is Blake’s last illuminated book (1822). He addressed it to Lord Byron, Blake’s only direct reference to a living poet. While the play is clearly a response to Byron’s Cain: A Mystery, whether Blake is defending or criticizing Byron’s play has been a matter of critical debate. Paley suggests that Blake was trying to “convert the author of Cain to the forgiveness of sins” (204, 207), while Whittaker argues that, “for Blake, Cain was not simply a Byronic rebel but . . . part of a radical millenarian tradition which presented him as the progenitor of tyrants” (174). Blake explores the themes of revenge and salvation through the biblical story of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel (Genesis 4). Although it is Blake’s shortest book, it has common concerns with the Prophetic Books including death, doubt, and redemption. As in the preceding works, Satan as Accuser is annihilated in an apocalypse that marks the transition from one age to the next. The final events of the drama “reverse the teleological order of the Bible” so that creation is preceded by judgment and redemption, representing a “return to an original and undivided state of divine humanity, as in Milton and Jerusalem” (Essick and Viscomi 221). In contrast to the earlier works, Blake chooses to present the drama realistically, the play opening with Cain fleeing after his parents discover the body of Abel. In spite of this realism, however, as Essick and Viscomi have noted, this is the only illuminated book to cast a ghost in a major role (221). The drama has been seen as “a vindication of Jehovah, who asks no sacrifice” whereas the ghost of Abel is Satan, “demanding vengeance and refusing forgiveness” (Raine 315, n. 53). Another perspective describes Blake’s attempt to “reconcile seemingly opposed aspects of the divine” whose “major theme is the unity of Jehovah and Jesus” (Paley 201, 219).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

God; deity; the divine 117 Essick, Robert. “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 251–71. Print. ——— and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Paley, Morton. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print.

God; deity; the divine From his early tractates, All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion, to the full cosmology of his Prophetic Books, Blake insists that the God of systematic religion, particularly that of Deism, is a projection of patriarchal oppression. Variants of this human projection of a punishing God abound in images of Jehovah as Nobodaddy, an unforgiving old man with a white beard, an Ancient of Days looking down on humanity from the stony clouds of a Deistic heaven. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake describes the error humanity has enacted in casting God out of the human, “[t]ill a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. . . . And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). Thus, for Blake, finding “the true God is also finding . . . one’s own true individuality” (Damon 7). Blake contrasts the vengeful, patriarchal God of the Old Testament with the merciful father described by Jesus; Damon, however, suggests that Blake assigns the “evil deeds of the original Jehovah to an inferior deity: Urizen or even Satan” to avoid casting direct blame on Jehovah for evil (205). The contrast between The Ghost of Abel and the preceding works supports Damon’s claim since Jehovah, who had been seen as a repressive creator, is here forgiving and merciful, the role Blake had earlier assigned only to Jesus. While Blake’s polemic against Deism gives rise to negative images of a God projected as separate and oppressive, he represents the Divine, by contrast, as nondual, simultaneously imminent and transcendent, dissolving differences between the absolute and the limited. This Divine dwells in the human heart as a source of ethics founded on the respect for energy; it is thus through “Minute Particulars” that we “do good to one another” and

118  Gothic in the redeemed state “Contract or Expand Space at will” (Erdman 205, Plate 55, ll. 51, 44, 60)

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Damon, S. Foster. Blake’s Job. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969. Print. ———. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Golgonooza: see Art

Gothic Forming a lifelong influence on his artistic and poetic style, Blake’s apprenticeship as an engraver took him to the Gothic architecture of London’s Westminster Abbey. The Gothic influence on his art has been seen through his depiction of space as “a movable environment that each perceiving center creates and carries around with it” (Heppner 209). Blake claimed that “Gothic is Living Form,” setting it against Grecian “Reasoning Memory” (On Virgil, Erdman 270). Blake’s depiction of the medieval Gothic became increasingly more negative during the early 1790s, however. As Richey observes, “While he had before invoked the Middle Ages to comment on the politics of his own time,” the Gothic came to be “an emblem of the tyranny, superstition, and injustice of the ancient regime” (39). Although the Gothic style of figures on tombs recur frequently in Blake’s designs, such as in the 1808 illustrations for Blair’s The Grave, Bentley points out that it is not due to an obsession with death but rather that it “echoes . . .the highest forms of art” (42). Blake has been seen to complicate the literary and artistic forms of the Gothic. “Fair Elenor” shows Blake’s earliest experimentation using Gothic machinery to convey a complex psychological state, in spite of the poem’s perhaps ironic insistence that “no fancy, but reality/Distract her” (Erdman

Gray, Thomas (1716–71) 119 411, ll. 17–18). Dent and Whittaker emphasize the radical socio-political implications of the Gothic, claiming that it represents freedom from the “conformity demanded by capitalist labour systems” as Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job suggest (20).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print.

Gray, Thomas (1716–71) As an admirer of Gray’s poetry, Blake illustrated “The Bard” and, in 1785, exhibited it at the Royal Academy. In 1796, John Flaxman, having seen Blake’s watercolors for Young’s Night Thoughts, commissioned Blake to illustrate a “similar suite of designs from the poems of Gray” as a gift for his wife, Ann, on her birthday (Bentley 176). Although Bentley claims that Blake’s designs for Gray’s poems are “more lighthearted, sometimes even frivolous” compared to those he made for Young’s poems, many scholars have argued for a sophistication underlying Blake’s illustrations. As the watercolor for “The Descent of Odin” (Figure 13) shows, for instance, Blake finds in Gray’s subject an opportunity to reflect Blake’s own interest in threshold moments, here symbolized by Odin at the gate to hell, that allow a heroic transcendence of binaries (Bentley 177). Defending the Gray watercolors against their popular rejection, Bruder likewise offers a deeper layer of significance to these illustrations. Noting that those who “devoted themselves to consolidating Blake’s canonical and institutional status . . . had little time for his Gray,” Bruder suggests that it is the “aesthetics gendered feminine” of these watercolors for Ann Flaxman that pushed them out of the Blake canon (1). Mee too notes that Blake goes beyond Gray’s nostalgia even in poems such as “To the Muses” that imitate Gray, although the attraction of Gray’s poetry for Blake is its representation of the past as “a site of primitive integrity and untrammeled inspiration irretrievably passed away” (108). Frye notes that Blake may have found in him a kindred spirit regarding Johnson’s

Figure 13 “The Descent of Odin,” page 4, seated before the eastern gate to hell (1797–8), Yale Center for British Art

Gwin, King of Norway 121 “charges of esoteric obscurity against Gray,” such as seen in Blake’s response to Reverend Trusler’s criticism of Blake’s painting that he commissioned (172).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Bruder, Helen. “ ‘The Bread of sweet Thought & the Wine of Delight’: Gender, Aesthetics and Blake’s ‘Dear Friend Mrs Anna Flaxman.’ ” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 1–11. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print.

Gwin, King of Norway This early poem appears in Poetical Sketches. It has received attention as a precursor to many concerns that follow as Blake’s cosmology develops. Gleckner, for instance, identifies it as “Blake’s first non-dramatic effort to incorporate prophecy into ‘history’ ” after the “failure of his major effort in the dramatic mode, King Edward the Third” (Gleckner 117). While the poem is often dismissed as a mere “exercise in popular poetry,” Blake’s emphasis on the tyrant Gwin’s allowing “the nobles to feed ‘upon the hungry poor’ ” is suggestive of the serious themes of Blake’s more mature poetry (Bloom 12). The poem has been seen more specifically to prefigure images used in later descriptions of Orc, constructing a “political dynamic that would later appear in America and elsewhere: the people’s uprising against Gwin is framed as a revolt of ‘nations’ ” (Wright 40). However, the revolt is left unresolved by the end of the poem, in which Gwin fell; the Sons of Norway fled, All that remain’d alive; The rest did fill the vale of death, For them the eagles strive. The river Dorman roll’d their blood Into the northern sea; Who mourn’d his sons, and overwhelm’d The pleasant south country. (Erdman 420, ll. 108–15) Frye notes the recurrence in Europe of Blake’s “equivocation” regarding whether the revolt is a “permanent success or not” (181). Gleckner, by

122  Hand; Hyle; Coban contrast, emphasizes the fact that “no apocalyptic vision emerges, not even a vision of an earthly interregnum of peace”; it is “a vision of cosmic . . . war and its ultimate horror, futility and absurdity” (117).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print.

Hand; Hyle; Coban In Milton and Jerusalem, these figures are three of the twelve sons of Albion. Hand has been said to represent Robert Hunt, who wrote “a damning review of Blake’s 1809 exhibition of paintings” (Essick 252). Hyle has been associated with Blake’s patron, William Hayley. Bloom suggests that Coban is an anagram for Bacon (413). As a whole, while Albion sleeps, they embody the fallen state of art and epistemology in England. Hand “ran in tender nerves across Europe to Jerusalems Shade” while Hyle is “compelld into a shape of Moral Virtue against the Lamb (Erdman 237–8, Plate 80, ll. 64, 77). It is important to emphasize that, having cast out their feminine portion as Emanations, these sons of Albion prevent Los from building Golgonooza. With the awakening of Albion, his sons themselves are whole since, just as Albion is divided from Jerusalem in his fallen state of sleep, his twelve sons are divided from their twelve Emanations, Hand’s female form as Cambel and Hyle’s as Gwendolyn. In their fallen state, however, they flee from Albion, who as England includes towns from Oxford and Cambridge to Lambeth, towards Babylon; as this geography collapses, Los cries out that London is “blind & age – bent begging thro the Streets/Of Babylon, led by a Child” (Erdman 243, Plate 84, ll. 11–12). This final detail of the Child leading the “blind & age-bent” London echoes Blake’s design for “London” in Songs of Experience: this pattern suggests a promise of redemption since the image in “London” shows a child leading the feeble, old man towards light, just as the movement east promises the reunion of England and Jerusalem.

Har 123

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert. “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 251–71. Print.

Har That this name is both the setting for the opening of The Book of Thel as well as the name of the father of Tiriel in his eponymous poem generates many points of comparison between the two contemporaneous works. While the former is a place representing naiveté and resistance to experience, the latter is the nostalgia of an old and bitter king. As the setting for Thel, Har has been regarded as a precursor to Beulah in the Prophetic Books. In this earliest representation of “unorganized innocence,” Blake shows the “impossibility” of refusing experience or Generation: Har is a static world that cannot contain the restless Thel, who longs albeit ambivalently for being of use: even as a shepherdess she is not needed by her sheep. Yet when offered by the matron Clay to enter her realm – in Blake’s later works, Generation – to see her grave representing not only her death but her life, she flees back to Har. The poem, however, ends before the reader can find out whether she can indeed return to her earlier state. As Blake’s cosmology evolves, the attempt to return to or stay in naiveté, or Har, leads not back to Har but to Ulro, a state of wintery sterility. The Har of Tiriel suggests the same doubleness that Thel’s willful naiveté represents in her poem although, because he is a king who wants to return to it, the emphasis here is on the danger of nostalgia, a topic Blake returns to throughout his developing cosmology. Erdman has suggested that the realm of Tiriel’s Har may be as “sinister” as it is “idle” (Prophet 133). That this Har briefly reappears in The Song of Los may help support such a claim since, in the later work, Har and his female portion, Heva, flee “[b]ecause their brethren & sisters liv’d in War and Lust” (Erdman 68, Plate 4, l. 5). Har has been distinguished from Adam the latter of whom, according to Frye, “is ordinary man in his mixed twofold nature of imagination and Selfhood” whereas “Har is the human Selfhood which, though men spend most of their time trying to express it, never achieves reality and is identified only as death”; Frye adds that, unlike Adam, “Har never outgrows his garden but remains there shut up from the world in a permanent state of near-existence” (242). The image in Figure 14 from The Song of Los could equally illustrate Frye’s reading that Tiriel “finds no rejuvenation in a second childhood” (243). Here, Har’s scepter appears as useless as Thel’s shepherdess crook in her poem, while Heva’s sleep in the lily suggests the

Figure 14 Har in The Song of Los, Plate 7, “Woman Asleep in a Lily” (1795), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

Hayley, William (1745–1820) 125 listless and stagnant qualities of unorganized innocence, in this case from the perspective of one who longs for a distorted dream of past innocence.

Bibliography Den Otter, A. G. “The Question and the Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 4 (1991): 633–55. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Levinson, Marjorie. “ ‘The Book of Thel’ by William Blake: A Critical Reading.” ELH 47 (1980): 287–303. Print.

Hayley, William (1745–1820) Blake met his future patron, Hayley, through Flaxman in January of 1800. As he was finishing a Series of Epistles to Flaxman Hayley was looking for an engraver to illustrate them, hurrying the process “partly in order to please his illegitimate son, Tom, who was dying of a spinal disease” (Bentley Blake Records 85). When Tom died that spring, Blake wrote to Hayley, “I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother & with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit. . . . Forgive me for Expressing to you my Enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of Since it is to me a Source of Immortal Joy” (Bentley Blake Records 89). That year, Hayley invited Blake and Catherine to move to his cottage at Felpham in Sussex. Blake engraved illustrations for Hayley’s own books, painted portrait miniatures of his circle of friends, and decorated his library. Blake’s decision to return to London after three years was strengthened by the Scolfield incident in 1803. Blake was ambivalent about Hayley’s support of him in his trial of January 1804; while he was grateful to be exonerated, Blake resented having to rely on Hayley to clear his name, associating Hayley with political and cultural repression. However, not only was Blake resentful about this specific episode, but he saw Hayley’s “well-intentioned advice” about his poetry and designs as condescension and hypocrisy. Blake was thus self-divided, as one “who outwardly suffered Hayley’s directions while seething within” (Essick and Viscomi 14). The double view of his relationship to Hayley illustrates Blake’s representation of his relationship to patriarchal power in all facets of his life: recurring through the Prophetic Books are the three classes of men: the Elect, representing those like Hayley who wield power, and the figures of the reprobate, Rintrah, or the humbly suffering Palambron as his two choices for responding to Hayley as the Elect.

126  “The Human Abstract” The critical consensus on their relationship has evolved over the past 150 years; the prejudice against Hayley began with Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 biography that, as Sato details, portrays Blake’s “aggressive attitude” towards Hayley, giving rise to a “stereotyped image” of Hayley as a “second-rate poet” and “meddlesome patron”; this position, Sato continues, informed criticism throughout the twentieth century, as exemplified by Wardle’s 1974 portrayal of Hayley as a “conservative, apolitical country gentleman” (134). In spite of Blake’s ill will towards Hayley, Blake continued to correspond with him from London, engraving illustrations for Hayley’s poetry and helping him with his other writings.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Ellis, Edwin John and William Butler Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake. 3 Vols. London: B. Quaritch, 1893. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Sato, Hikari. “Blake, Hayley, and India: On Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802).” The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Ed. Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki. New York: Continuum, 2006. 134–44. Print. Wardle, Judith. “Satan Not Having the Science of Wrath But Only of Pity.” Studies in Romanticism 13, no. 2 (1974): 147–54. Print.

“The Human Abstract” This poem, from the Songs of Experience collection, is the companion to “The Divine Image” in Songs of Innocence. It exposes the obfuscation behind the piety of those “divine images” that allegorize for the sake of mystification and separation of the human from the divine. Johnson and Grant describe the “abstraction” as mystification that “generalizes rather than particularizes, dehumaniz[ing] oneself and others” (42, n. 8). The poem has been described more largely as Blake’s warning against the dangers of education as a “process of transmission in which human action is always already implicated”; Blake’s placing the Tree of Mystery in the human brain “locates the (literal) roots of obscurity and ignorance in their human sufferers” (Williams 41, 40). Though pity and love “may be false . . ., inspiration is sacrosanct and – as with many irrational ideologies – there is no real explanation why” (Whittaker 101). The Gods of the earth and sea, Sought thro’ Nature to find this

Imagination 127 Tree But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain (Erdman 27) In this poem about “repressive moral law,” according to Damrosch, “everything that exists is mental, but not everything that is mental exists” (249). As with the Song of Experience, “A Poison Tree,” the Tree of Mystery here has been associated not only with the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis but with the Banyan tree as described in the Vedas, whose roots grow from its branches. The double reference to the Bible and to the Vedas challenges the east/west binary during this early period of Orientalist discovery at the very source of knowledge, subverting the Judeo-Christian insistence on knowledge as forbidden with the disorientation of the tree whose roots grow from its branches.

Bibliography Damrosch, Leopold. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Hyle: see Hand Illuminated printing: see Engraving

Imagination Blake insists that the human mind informs our experience from his earliest works to his last. One of the Proverbs of Hell in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell states that “Where man is not nature is barren” (Erdman 38, Plate 10, l. 68); Blake’s final Prophetic Book, Jerusalem, proclaims, “All Things Exist in the Human Imagination” (Erdman 223, Plate 69, l. 25). For Blake, the error of Enlightenment Deism lies in its central tenet that the world is fallen because it is founded on a dualistic relationship between the power of nature and the passive mind. This error permeates all disciplines for Blake, including philosophy, science, religion, and art.

128  Innocence Blake describes the fallacies of the three leading Deists, Bacon, Locke, and Newton, in Jerusalem: “Brooding Abstract Philosophy. To destroy Imagination, the Divine-/-Humanity” (Erdman, Plate 224, ll. 70, 19–20). The break between the two plates that divides “the Divine-” from “-Humanity” suggests the rift created by Enlightenment thinkers for, as Blake goes on to write, “in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven/And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within/In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow” (Erdman 225, Plate 71, ll. 17–19). In Vala, or The Four Zoas, Blake depicts Los, the Zoa associated with imagination, in relationship to Urizen, the figure who represents reason. As Otto notes, “the imagination appears as nothing before the might of the objective world” (237). However, the apocalypse of Night the Ninth reintegrates the realms of all four Zoas in an albeit fragile equipoise that suggests the potential accord between Los and Urizen, imagination and reason. Beyond this seemingly uncomplicated equation of the Zoas with a single meaning, however, it should be emphasized that in the fallen world, Los cannot build Golgonooza, the City of Art, because he himself has cast out his feminine portion, Enitharmon, and in his repressive state, he chains their son Orc, who embodies revolution.

Bibliography De Luca, Vincent. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Paley, Morton. Energy and Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Print.

Innocence In a pencil note on the manuscript of Vala, or The Four Zoas, Blake states, “Unorganizd Innocence, An Impossibility/Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with Ignorance” (Erdman 838). Innocence as wisdom – or as many Blake scholars have called it, “organized innocence” – does not flee experience but rather recognizes an inherent error on the part of those who are trapped in the illusory dualism of the Deists. For Blake, they mistakenly believe their existence limited to the fallen world of experience while innocence cannot be achieved but is rather a state they can only remember with nostalgia. Central to Blake’s “Bible of Hell” is his insistence that, contrary to Genesis, we can return to Eden with a mere shift in consciousness. Although

Innocence 129 Blake’s complication of the binary of innocence and experience evolves gradually into the four states of Beulah, Generation, Ulro, and Eden, his suggestion of this more complex “organized” innocence appears even in his earliest works. Thus, the poems in Poetical Sketches overlay an innocence that “dwells with wisdom” onto many the speakers of these early poems; “To Autumn,” for instance, complicates traditional depictions of Autumn as the dying year with the merry voice of a jovial personification of Autumn framed by a narrative voice tingeing Autumn’s abundance with a hint of tragedy, as seen in the enjambment of the poem’s first lines: “stained/With the blood of the grape” is complicated by that of Autumn himself, who is “lusty” and sings a song of eroticism traditionally associated with spring (Erdman 409, ll. 1–2, 6). With the engraved works that follow, the combined text and design allow Blake to create a yet more nuanced challenge to the reductive binary of innocence and experience. The Songs of Innocence collection often reveals a double perspective, even beyond the more apparent contrast created when there is a companion poem in the Experience collection; “The Chimney Sweeper,” for instance, not only sets the naiveté of Tom, the younger child, against the growing awareness of the older boy who narrates the poem, but includes an implicit third, authorial perspective through the text’s accompanying design that depicts not only a literalized voice of experience as text pressing down on Tom’s dream at the bottom of the page. Perhaps the most misunderstood of Blake’s figures who achieves organized innocence is Vala, maligned by some readers as a misogynistic creation. However, Vala represents the most important ill effect of the casting out of the female Emanations in the fallen world, for she represents the dualistic illusion of the separation between subject and object, of the mind and the world of phenomena rather than simply nature itself. In Night the Ninth of her eponymous poem, she achieves a nondualism that is unrivaled by any of Blake’s other figures. At this climactic moment that is a catalyst to the apocalypse, Vala, who had been seeking God outside herself, realizes that it is her own voice she hears beckoning her; the duality between inner and outer worlds dissolves as she sings to her flocks, realizing that the voice is none other than the echo of her own: “Follow me O my flocks & hear me sing my rapturous Song. . . . /For from the living living springs . . . I sing & you reply to my Song I rejoice & you are glad” (Erdman 397, p. 128, ll. 9–15).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

130  Introduction to Songs of Innocence Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

Introduction to Songs of Innocence Blake’s first illuminated printing was in 1789, the year he created Songs of Innocence. The Introduction to the collection is narrated by a Piper telling of his visitation by a visionary Child who issues a sequence of imperatives to the Piper: to pipe a song about a Lamb, to sing the song, and to write the words “In a book that all may read” (Erdman 7, l. 14). Many readers have seen in the poem a metatextual message for the collection, some describing the poem as a representation of Blake’s vocation in illuminated printing as a whole, namely “a commentary on writing itself, an introduction . . . to Blake’s entire medium of illuminated printing” (Williams 54). As seen in the earlier unengraved poems collected later as Poetical Sketches, this Introduction to Songs of Innocence is nuanced, containing comic and tragic elements, as Gleckner notes of the song about a Lamb that the visionary child asks the Piper to play, sing, and then write: the tragedy of Christ as sacrificial lamb is “not a selfish act . . . The necessity for such sacrifices can only be learned by experiencing the tears of stanza 2” (90). The Child has been variously interpreted: for Behrendt, [omit] neither muse nor reader, but “responsive audience to a performance of music” until the Piper begins writing (49). However, a comparison of the freely flying Child in the design accompanying this poem to the Child who has been transfigured into an angel in the design accompanying the Introduction to Songs of Experience suggests deeper nuances to the Child’s significance: in the Experience version, the Child now has wings and a halo but is held down on the shoulders of the speaker, no longer the Piper but rather the Bard of Experience (see Figures 15 and 16). This shift suggests the connection between the realm of Experience and organized religion that turns divine apprehension into an icon that is no longer spontaneously connected to oneself. Readers have variously interpreted the obscure line, “I stain’d the water clear,” (Erdman 7, l. 18). Either the Piper has tainted the water that had been clear or he has made the message clear by “staining” it through his illumination; in either case, by the end of the poem it is clear that he must communicate the message to others. Mitchell suggests that “the hollow reed and the stained water suggest that a kind of emptiness, darkness, and loss of innocence accompanies the very attempt to spread the message of innocence” (55–6), whereas for Williams, it is the culmination of the poem’s emphasis on “in-betweenness”: “a cursive script precariously in between writing and print,” a stain that has been in the poem from the first appearance of the “cloud” in the first stanza (55). This variety of interpretations

Introduction to Songs of Innocence  131 suggests the layers of meaning are not mutually exclusive; rather they recur to the ambivalence in point of view that overlays the tragic and comic.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Gleckner, Robert. The Piper and the Bard. Detroit, MI: Michigan, 1959. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing.” Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Eds. Eaves and Fischer. 1986. 46–95. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Figure 15 Frontispiece to Songs of Innocence (1794), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

132  Introduction to Songs of Experience

Introduction to Songs of Experience This poem opens the Songs of Experience volume with an embedded narration by a speaker introducing the Bard who warns “Earth” of the impending day of doom; the subsequent poem, “Earth’s Answer,” is her response. Scholars have commonly seen in the Bard a voice to which Blake gives credence, an early expression of later figures of “prophetic imagination” such as Los, who “accepts responsibility for the religious condition of the world” and who must awaken humanity from “its inhuman beliefs toward more positive visions of its spiritual potential” (Ryan 159). The Bard’s voice should not be assumed to be that of Blake, however. When read alongside the Introduction to Songs of Innocence, the Bard appears to be one who projects his limitations onto Earth as both timebound and as a binder of time. A comparison between the two frontispieces (Figures 15 and 16) underscores this perspective: the Innocence version shows the visionary and wingless Child flying freely overhead, the figures of Piper and Child gazing at each other in unmediated, mutual engagement, while the Experience version shows the adult figure, presumably the Bard, holding down what is now an angel, ironically with wings and halo, both figures aggressively staring out at the viewer.

Figure 16 Frontispiece to Songs of Experience (1795), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

An Island in the Moon  133

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Pagliaro, Harold. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print.

An Island in the Moon This untitled manuscript fragment, Blake’s first venture into satirical prose, was written in 1785 when Blake was twenty-seven but was not published as a whole until 1907. It is composed of fifteen caricatures of people in Blake’s circle, with Blake as Quid the Cynic and his brother Robert as Suction the Epicurean. Johnson and Grant see it as the precursor to Monty Python, with its “send-up of artsy pseudo-intellectuals, rendered in the endearingly silly British music-hall style” (360). Three of the “most delicate and fragile of the Songs of Innocence” (“Holy Thursday,” “The Ecchoing Green,” and “The Little Boy Lost”) appear at the end of what Frye calls a “Gargantuan nightmare . . . surely the most inappropriate context that could have been devised for them” (192). Others, however, defend this comic work as more than a “random concoction of prose, song and slapstick”; it is worth quoting Rawlinson’s catalogue of the objects of Blake’s satire as “an examination of Augustan ideas of satire,” parodying “nursery rhymes, opera, street cries, news sheets, religious texts, scientific theses, Acts of Parliament, bawdy doggerel, Last Testaments, Shakespeare and sentimental verse, of history, mathematics, literature, morality, fame, philosophy, the origins of religion and social order, the development of language and the essence of self,” with characters who form a “panoply of professional readers” (99). Although most likely an entertainment for Blake’s friends, with the “alternation of spirited dialogue and songs” suggesting “theatrical pieces,” it nevertheless critiques “the emptiness of this salon style of life – the constant drifting from house to house in search of diversion, the isolation amid continual chit-chat, the pseudointellectual arguments that go nowhere” (Johnson and Grant 374).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

134  Jerusalem [figure] Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print.

Jerusalem [figure] Blake’s Jerusalem is a city, a woman, and the spiritual center of the human that exists in a nondual state, both immanent and transcendent. She is central on all levels in Blake’s cosmology, from her redemptive place at the heart of Albion to her centrality in the narrative structure of Vala, or The Four Zoas, and even in her apparent absence when she is separated from Albion in his spiritual sleep. Culminating in the Prophetic Book Jerusalem, Blake’s cosmology tells the nonlinear story of Albion’s sleep, his separation from Jerusalem, his Emanation, during the nightmare that ensues in which the Zoas are at war. Central to Blake’s revision of a biblical apocalypse that promises redemption at the end of time is the reunion of Albion and Jerusalem that signals an Edenic state of equipoise achieved outside of time. The Prophetic Books recast this eternal moment from different perspectives. Whereas Milton ends on the brink of apocalypse, Vala, or The Four Zoas most complexly achieves a nondual representation of the recovery of Jerusalem through a linear structure in nine Nights overlayed with a circular relationship between the reunion of Albion and Jerusalem in Night the Ninth and the preceding Nights that comprise her exile. The song that ends Blake’s Preface to Milton is a rallying cry to build “Jerusalem/In Englands green & pleasant Land,” today still a powerful expression of reform in England (Erdman 95, Plate 1, ll. 15–16). As the plate in Figure 17 from Jerusalem shows, she manifests most actively in this final, eponymous poem. It puts her in direct confrontation even with figures in Blake’s life whom he perceived as blocking the visionary, such as Hand in this plate, who represents Robert Hunt, one of Blake’s most vitriolic reviewers. Blake here divides a four-line poem in half: the two lines to the left of Hand read, “SUCH VISIONS HAVE/APPEARD TO ME/AS I MY ORDERD RACE HAVE RUN” while, to the right of Jerusalem, the lines read, “JERU/SALEM/IS NAMED/LIBERTY” followed by the fainter line, “AMONG THE SONS OF ALBION.” This arrangement of text and design is emblematic of Jerusalem’s role in bringing about salvation for England by dissolving the duality that keeps Albion in his deathly sleep.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Jerusalem 135

Figure 17 Jerusalem and Hand, Jerusalem (1804), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Jerusalem While there have been a spectrum of scholarly positions regarding whether Blake’s final Prophetic Book is a fulfillment of apocalypse and redemption or a bleaker vision of the world with no promise of liberation from struggle, Jerusalem represents Blake’s fullest vision of apocalypse. Even if, as for some, it is a “Song of Experience” to Milton’s “Song of Innocence,” Jerusalem maintains its insistence on a dissolution of binaries (Raine I, 204). Blake’s impending trial for sedition after his confrontation with Scolfield has informed much of the book’s critical attention, particularly regarding the twelve Giant sons of Albion, “at least eight of whom have names connected with this episode” (Paley 9). Johnson and Grant, however, observe that the book is less a personal vindication for Blake than an evolution of his myth

136  Jerusalem with the “kind of thing that happens over and over when a country falls ill, breaks apart, loses its soul, and rejects its spirit of liberty and forgiveness (310). Although Frye likens Jerusalem’s four chapters to four acts – the fall, the struggle in the fallen world, the world’s redemption by divine man, and the apocalypse – Blake’s heterodox, nonlinear narrative should be read against the grain of the biblical story. The poem opens with Blake and Albion asleep. Albion’s jealous fears cause him to hide Jerusalem, an act that separates the divine from the physical world. The first stage towards redemption for Blake is recognizing the mutual origins of the Britons and Jews in the Druids. Albion accepts Urizen as God; he is seduced by Vala who represents the world of appearances. Of Blake’s figures that reappear in Jerusalem from the earlier works, Los undergoes the greatest change. Representing the failed potential of the artist in the fallen world, he cannot help Albion; thus Los builds him a couch of repose. As Los becomes inspired by Jesus, however, his art moves towards salvation. That Los becomes more important here than in the previous Prophetic Books has suggested to some scholars that through Los, Blake retracts his own role as vindictive prophet, thus indicating a growing conservatism on Blake’s part. However, in the section addressed to the Deists, Blake condemns Natural Religion with as much conviction as in his earlier works, claiming that Deism makes spiritual rebirth impossible. The emphasis of this chapter is on the Deistic illusion that the “vegetable” world exists separate from the imagination: “And the Four Gates of Los surround the Universe Within and/Without (227, Plate 72, ll. 45–6). Blake here contrasts the coming of Jesus as human vision with Enlightenment Deism that acknowledges only the physical world devoid of the visionary. Although the final section urges the Christians to build Jerusalem in order to return the Lamb of God to England, some readers suggest that Blake does not carry the Prophetic Book into the apocalypse; for Bloom, the Covering Cherub bars “apocalyptic completion” (477). Regardless of how one reads the end in narrative terms, however, Blake’s prayer for the Savior to “annihilate the Selfhood in me” reveals Blake’s identity throughout his vocation as a prophetic poet/artist who continues striving to achieve nondualism (Erdman 147). Indeed, the Savior states that he is in Albion and Albion is within him, defying spatial concepts of subject-object duality. Robert Southey, who shared the opinion of many of his contemporaries that Blake was “a decided madman,” is recalled by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1811 as having told Robinson that Blake showed him “a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem – Oxford Street is in Jerusalem,” regardless of Southey’s having gotten “his facts twisted: Oxford Street is not in Jerusalem the city; Jerusalem the woman is in Oxford Street, which appears only on plate 38” (Bentley 310). The misremembering is significant since it betrays the nature of what was seen as mad in Blake’s cosmology to his contemporaries: Blake’s very manipulation of the time-space continuum in which

Jesus 137 a city street is in a woman and a woman is the embodiment of the human spiritual center.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Doscow, Minna. Structure and Meaning in William Blake’s Jerusalem. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson UP, 1982. Print. Essick, Robert. “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003. 251–71. Print. ———. William Blake Printmaker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Paley, Morton. “Introduction.” William Blake: Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print. Wacker, Norman. “Epic and the Modern Long Poem: Virgil, Blake, and Pound.” Comparative Literature 42 (Spring 90): 126–43. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.

Jesus One of Blake’s most enigmatic statements about Jesus came out of a conversation with Henry Crabb Robinson who asked Blake “in what light he viewed the great question concerning the Divinity of Jesus Christ He said – [“]He is the only God[”] – But then he added – [“]And so am I and so are you[”] (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 421). This articulation of the paradox behind Blake’s nondualism makes clear that for Blake, Jesus himself was the consummate nondualist, thus underscoring what Blake regarded as the foundational error of Deism. Jesus is for Blake the embodiment of the human divine. In his painting “Virgin and Child,” Blake portrays the infant at Mary’s center, suggesting that he is “born” from her heart (Figure 5). Blake’s Jesus is often described as a revolutionary. Otto, for instance, notes that, in Vala, or The Four Zoas, “by enabling the fallen world to gain determinate form, his emergence opens the possibility that Error will be recognized and cast off” (94). Others have questioned the ambiguity of Blake’s representation of Jesus. Damon, for instance, describes Blake’s Jesus as born

138  Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809) out of wedlock to an unidentified man and a Mary whose “illicit act” was “free love in obedience to the Holy Ghost within her,” Jesus therefore a “transgressor from the womb,” offending “the Law both in his begetting and in his death” (213, 214). Yet such ambiguity only underscores Blake’s heterodox celebration of the nondual. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for instance, Blake writes that Milton’s puritanical representation of Jesus, devoid of the divine, is reduced to “a Ratio of the five senses” (Erdman 35, Plate 6). As his cosmology evolves, Blake incorporates Jesus, the embodiment of compassion, with the redeemed form of Luvah, the Zoa connected with erotic passion. With this association of Jesus and Luvah, Blake creates one of his most subversive variations on a theme that runs throughout his corpus, namely that energy, including that of sexuality, is the principle behind the spiritual redemption of humanity, by contrast with the fallen claim to a binary of body and soul that Blake decries as the error in all systematic religions.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809) The “distinguished bookseller” of St Paul’s Churchyard, Johnson had converted from his Baptist upbringing to Unitarianism, sympathizing with the Dissenters’ social and political causes (Bentley Stranger 109). As he was for William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Erasmus Darwin, Johnson was one of Blake’s principal employers after Blake completed his apprenticeship with Basire, Johnson giving Blake commissions for ninety plates between 1786 and 1801. Johnson hosted gatherings of Dissenters that included Henry Fuseli, Richard Price, William Godwin, Tom Paine, John Stedman, and Wollstonecraft. Although Blake was included in some of these gatherings, Essick describes the Johnson circle as “liberal in its politics, but also rationalist in its methodology . . . and skeptical in regard to prophecy, miracle, and other manifestations of transcendental revelation”; for this reason, not only would many of them not have condoned Blake’s visionary works, but Blake would not have chosen to conform to their ideology (192). Blake was thus uncomfortable with the Johnson circle from the beginning, although Johnson continued to

King Edward the Third 139 employ Blake as an engraver until 1804. Based on the fact that Johnson’s Analytical Review did not review any of Blake’s illuminated books, Mee concludes that “it is probable that the Johnson circle only ever really regarded him as a tradesman rather than as an intellectual like themselves” (103). Bentley suggests, perhaps contrary to the position of others, that rather than reject Blake, Johnson simply regarded him as an “unmarketable” talent (Blake Records 55). What emerges from the accounts of contemporaries is that Blake challenged the late Enlightenment rationality of even his friends on which John Linnell, one of Blake’s young disciples, the Ancients, commented retrospectively: “His eccentricities have been enlarged upon beyond the truth. He was so far from being so absurd in his opinions, or so nearly mad as he has been represented. . . . It must be confessed, however, he uttered occasionally sentiments sadly at variance with sound doctrine” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 58–9). The comment is perhaps more telling about the Johnson circle than about Blake, their own ambivalence towards his nondualism betrayed by terms like “eccentricities,” “absurd,” and “nearly mad,” an indication of the shifting epistemological ground that the late Enlightenment embodied.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Essick, Robert. “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189–212. Print. Mee, Jon. “ ‘The Doom of Tyrants’: William Blake, Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, and the Millenarian Public Sphere.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 98–114. Print.

King Edward the Third This early, fragmentary play, set in France before the battle of 1346, not only recalls Shakespeare’s drama enacting England’s wars with France but, as Wolfson notes, defines a “historical trajectory, extending from Edward’s to Blake’s day,” in which “the six scenes occupy the hours before the battle” (76–7). While Wolfson sees the play as “subtly subversive” (68), others have been more dismissive, calling it “simply ‘Rule Britannia’ in blank verse” (Frye 180). Though King Edward’s oration to his army and nobles in particular has been deemed “uncritical patriotism,” Erdman argues that Blake was “setting up his heroes in order to knock them down,” making the most of “historical ironies” (Prophet 68). While Erdman and others comment that the play is a “vast moral pageant rather than a drama” (Prophet 68), Gleckner challenges the critical consensus of the play’s “dramaturgical ineptness,” suggesting that Blake was

140  Lambeth; the Lambeth Prophecies drawn to Shakespeare’s play for its “idiom of visionary history”; far from patriotic jingoism, Gleckner claims, the Bard’s prophecy suggests “the ignominious defeat of Kings and Princes” (96–7, 102). It has also been noted that Blake “effectively attacks English imperial society” by adapting “history for satiric purposes, [and] impersonating the apologists of imperial liberty in order to expose them” (Rosso 262–3). Indeed, seen through the lens of Blake’s larger cosmology, it can stand as a glimpse of “Liberty” whose “eagle wings . . . covereth/Fair Albion’s shore, and all her families” (Erdman Complete 438, ll. 55, 59–60).

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print. Rosso, G. A. “Empire of the Sea: Blake’s ‘King Edward the Third’ and English Imperial Poetry.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 251–72. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: MacMillan, 1999. Print. Wolfson, Susan. “Blake’s Language in Poetic Form.” The Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 63–84. Print.

Lambeth; the Lambeth Prophecies William and Catherine Blake moved to the rural Lambeth in Surrey in 1790, described by Bentley as “market gardens and marsh,” mostly belonging to the Archbishopric of Canterbury (122). Delighted to have a garden for the first time, the Blakes “rejoiced in their space and their prosperity in Lambeth,” and it “entered far more into the fabric of Blake’s poetry than had any of his previous homes” (124). Perhaps the best example of the presence of Lambeth in Blake’s poetry is the description in Milton of “Jerusalems Inner Court, Lambeth ruin’d and given/To the detestable Gods of Priam, to Apollo” (Erdman 122, Plate 25, ll. 48–9). The series of illuminated books known as the Lambeth Prophecies was produced between 1793 and 1795. Among the six “minor prophecies” in the collection, three have been sub-grouped as the Continental Prophecies: America, followed by Europe and The Song of Los. The larger group includes Urizen, Ahania, and The Book of Los. The collection marks a pivotal stage of the evolution in Blake’s relationship between text and design

Language; text; song; voice 141 that is “beautifully woven into the text in a more complex way than in earlier works” (Johnson and Grant 84).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and john E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print.

Language; text; song; voice Throughout his poetry, from the Poetical Sketches to the Prophetic Books, Blake links all the levels of his cosmology, including classical myth, the Bible, and the biographical, through meta-linguistic struggle. His incorporation of language’s self-referentiality is central to the relationship between the states of duality and nonduality in his cosmology; singers, engravers, poets, storytellers, and prophets wrestle with the mediation of language in their apprehension of oneness with the divine. The two Introductions to the Songs of Innocence and of Experience announce that the states represented in the two collections are inextricably related to the medium of language. In the Introduction to Innocence, the Piper is bereft when his connection to the divine in the form of the visionary Child disappears once he begins to write his “happy songs”: “Piper sit thee down and write/In a book that all may read – ” the Child commands the Piper to write. The dash indicates not only that the Child vanishes abruptly once the writing must begin; the emptiness signified by the dash suggests that he leaves the poet-as-prophet bereft. (Erdman 7, ll. 20, 13–14). By contrast, the narrator of the Introduction to Experience prepares the reader for the Bard’s voice with the admonition, “Hear the voice of the Bard! . . . Whose ears have heard,/The Holy Word” (Erdman 18, ll. 1–2). The Bard is presented as a religious authority who has the conviction that he can mediate between Earth and the Divine through the embodied Word. The Bard’s is a Deistic notion of a divinity bound by time; That the Bard

142  Language; text; song; voice “present, past and Future sees” suggests that the reader has no direct relationship with the divine (Erdman 18, l. 2). As Blake’s cosmology evolves, the polysemousness of Blake’s figures has deeper linguistic implications: (I call them by their English names: English, the rough basement. Los built the stubborn structure of the Language, acting against Albions melancholy, who must else have been a Dumb despair.) (Erdman 183, Plate 36, ll. 58–60) At this point in Jerusalem, Los creates the structure of language to give Albion’s melancholy a form and thereby a means of release. Yet Albion, in his fallen state, cannot fathom that the structure of language is a modification of the eternal form: “So too is the case not only of language but of incarnation” (Erdman 192, Plate 43, l. 65). The most dramatic moment of redemption that triggers the apocalypse in Night the Ninth of Vala, or The Four Zoas involves the relationship between voice and nondualism. Vala, who had been seeking the Lord as Luvah and whom she thus perceives as external to herself, hears what she thinks is his voice: “behold the living living springs . . . /I sing & you reply to my Song I rejoice & you are glad (Erdman 397, p. 128, ll. 9–15). Her epiphany comes immediately after, in which she realizes the “living living” is the echo of her own “creating voice” (Erdman 396, p. 126, l. 6). Vala’s voice is perhaps the most important manifestation of nondual language since, as Nature, she merges self and other: For in my bosom a new song arises to my Lord . . . Flow on ye gentle airs & bear the voice of my rejoicing . . . Follow me O my flocks & hear me sing my rapturous Song I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds that glitter in the sun I will call & who shall answer me I will sing. . . . who shall reply (Erdman 396–7, p. 128, ll. 3–11) In this way, Blake represents the nonlinear movement towards organized innocence most powerfully through Vala’s voice; now Vala as feminized nature who had been cast out as Luvah’s Emanation ushers in the return to Eden through this vocal merging of subject and object.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.

Laocoӧn [{yah} and his two sons, Satan and Adam] 143 Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing.” Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Eds. Eaves and Fischer. 1986. 46–95. Print. Pierce, John. The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. Vogler, Thomas and Nelson Hilton, eds. Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Berkeley, CA: U California Press, 1986. Print.

Laocoön [{yah} and his two sons, Satan and Adam] This illuminated work was Blake’s last (c. 1826–7), yet it echoes his first illuminated texts, All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion (1788). Laocoön, the Hellenistic marble statue carved about 25 B.C., is regarded as one of the most important classical artifacts, depicting Laocoön, the Trojan priest warned against accepting the Greek’s gift of a wooden horse, and his two sons. All three are being crushed by serpents that Minerva sent. Blake’s two drawings and an engraving of the cast were housed at the Royal Academy in London in 1814 and 1815 Blake returned to the subject in a drawing around 1824 and then the illuminated engraving. As seen in Figure 18, through a “dense web of axioms and epigrams,” Blake expresses some of his most fundamental ideas about art and its relationship to religion and commerce (Essick and Viscomi 229). Blake presents the Greek figures in biblical terms, identifying them in Hebrew as “Yah” and his two sons, Satan and Adam Blake thereby thereby challenges the reader/viewer’s most fundamental theological assumptions, in this case, “that Adam and Satan are brothers and equal in the eyes of ‘Yah’ ” (Essick and Viscomi 231). The distinguishing feature of the work is its “wall of aphorisms, epigrams, and mini-narratives on subjects ranging from Jesus to economics,” expressing both Blake’s personal struggle as an artist in a commercial age and that of all “inspired artists to make art in countries devoted to money, moral law, war, and imitations” (Essick and Viscomi 231). Johnson and Grant compare the inscriptions to “graffiti or marginalia” since the inscriptions denounce the classical sculpture as a “copy of a much greater Hebrew original, making it an emblem of derivative art, false religion, and such enemies of the creative imagine as empire, money, and morality” (349). It has been suggested that the design forces the viewer to become involved with the artifact, thereby representing one of Blake’s basic ideas about art: “Because Christ is for Blake the imagination and is manifest in works of art . . ., Christianity requires participating in works of the imagination” (Essick and Viscomi 232). Tannenbaum, describing Blake’s art as the

Figure 18 Laocoön (1818), Fitzwilliam Museum

Lavater, Johann Caspar (1741–1802) 145 “process whereby the human and the divine merge through the imaginative transformation of the objects of sense into human form,” points to Blake’s Laocoön engraving in which Blake “identifies the Imagination as the Eternal Body of Man, Jesus, of which every person is a member and which manifests itself in works of art (99).

Bibliography Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. Spector, Sheila. “Glorious Incomprehensible”: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2001. Print. ———. Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Myth. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2001. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Lavater, Johann Caspar (1741–1802) A Swiss poet, physiognomist, and theologian, Lavater was a friend of Fuseli. The occasion of Blake’s meeting Fuseli was Blake’s 1788 engraving of a plate after Fuseli for the latter’s translation of Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man. Blake’s annotated copy of the Aphorisms reveals his profound respect for Lavater in spite of differences scattered throughout his annotations: “I write from the warmth of my heart. & cannot resist the impulse I feel to rectify what I think false in a book I love so much & approve so generally”; Blake makes his most direct statement on what he considers the nature of evil in his marginalia to Lavater’s Aphorisms: To hinder another . . . is not an act it is the contrary it is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinderd. For he who hinders another omits his own duty. At the time Murder is Hindering Another Theft is Hindering Another (Erdman 601)

146  Linnell, John (1792–1882) Out of Blake’s wrestling with his responses to Lavater thus emerges his articulation of energy as the only virtue and the repression of energy as the only vice. A significant difference between Blake and Lavater involves their views on women. Erle notes that, while Lavater tended to move beyond stereotypes in analyses of individuals, his “conception of women” was “very traditional”; it is during the writing of the Urizen books that Blake was reading Lavater, Erle observing that the drawings of Ahania particularly are influenced by Lavater (44). Yet while the connection is an intriguing one, Erle’s implicit conclusion needs to be underscored, namely that, rather than being a product of Lavater’s influence on Blake, the portrayal of Ahania points rather to Blake’s critique of Lavater: “Ahania is an amorphous figure; and yet her hybrid state . . . makes clear how what is defined as female by Lavater influences male behavior” (50). This hybridity indeed suggests Lavater’s definition of the female as male projection, a phenomenon that involves not just the relationship between Urizen and Ahania but all the Zoas and Emanations in the longer Prophetic Books.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake’s Lavaterian Women: Eleanor, Rowena and Ahania.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 44–52. Print.

Leutha: see Sexuality “The Lilly”: see “My Pretty Rose Tree”

Linnell, John (1792–1882) The first friendship Blake formed among the young artists who called themselves the Ancients was with the twenty-six-year-old Linnell. He was an engraver as well as a landscape and portrait painter who had studied with John Varley before entering the Royal Academy at the time Fuseli was its keeper. Linnell was introduced to Blake by the son of George Cumberland. Like Blake, Linnell had no formal schooling, lived for his art, and was a Dissenter. Although he met Blake many years after the death of Blake’s brother, Robert, Linnell said that Blake told him he “sat up for a whole fortnight with his brother Robert during his last illness & upon his going to bed which he did as soon as Robert died he slept for three days and nights. Mrs. Blake confirmed this” (quoted in Ackroyd 100).

“The Little Black Boy” 147 Although Linnell’s most important commonality with Blake was that he too was a non-conformist who spoke the “language of Enthusiasm,” their differences are striking: Linnell was “doctrinal,” having “joined the Baptist church . . . six years before he met Blake (Ackroyd 324). Another difference that had a positive outcome for Blake was that Linnell was successful with patrons and in “managing the ways of the world”; that he “did not see visions” was surely an asset (Bentley Stranger 365–6). He thus became a significant liaison to patrons late in Blake’s life himself commissioning Blake’s engravings for The Book of Job and Dante.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

“The Little Black Boy” The embedded narrative structure of this lyrical poem has suggested for many readers a multiplicity of perspectives on the relationship between religion and race. The poem’s two subjectivities, of the eponymous boy’s narration framing his mother’s voice, are complicated further by the accompanying designs whose variations in illuminations from one printing to another add further nuance to the poem’s implications especially regarding its placement in the Songs of Innocence collection and that of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The appearance of this poem in Songs of Innocence locates it during the abolitionist period, as Lauren Henry has noted, when Blake was likely to have come in contact with the poetry of the African-American slave Phillis Wheatley; Henry claims Wheatley may be the source of the double perspective of African religion and Christianity in the poem. Harold Bloom has called the poem “one of the most deliberately misleading and ironic of all Blake’s lyrics,” a poem that exposes racism by duplicating it; for Bloom, “[h]aving been instructed by confusion, the Little Black Boy ends in that state” (43, 46). Bloom’s claim, however, may be qualified by the radically contrasting illuminations of the same engravings depending on their appearance in the Innocence or combined Innocence and Experience collection. Although the poem is found in the Songs of Innocence whether in the 1789 collection or the 1792 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, there is a striking contrast between the versions of the final image’s illumination, as seen in Figures 19 and 20. The dramatic difference in the Little Black Boy’s skin color underscores how important illumination is to interpreting Blake’s design and, in turn, reading the Innocence poems either in isolation or from the combined

148  “The Little Black Boy”

Figure 19 “Little Black Boy,” Songs of Innocence version of the last plate (1789), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

perspective of the “Contrary States”; in this case, the implication is that one reads the Innocence version at face value whereas the version in the combined collection subverts the Christian promise that the boys will be equal in the eyes of God when they are in heaven. The latter suggests that the child has been hoodwinked by the white man’s religion and that the cycle of racism and oppression will continue as long as the boy accepts it. This final plate thus underscores the ambivalence of the poem’s promise of Christianity in which the black boy is in heaven with the white boy, at Christ’s feet. The Innocence illumination appears to equalize the two boys through the uniform light reflected on their skin, suggesting the potential for the Innocent reader’s straightforward interpretation of the poem’s conclusion; for the reader who has access to Experience, however, the disjunction between text and design mirrored in the coloration of the speaker’s black skin in contrast to the whiteness of both the English boy and Jesus points to the bitter irony of the continued subjugation of the black boy. The illumination of the engraving in the collected Innocence and Experience underscores the black boy’s position behind the white boy, who seems to be depriving the black boy of access to the light that, in this version,

“The Little Black Boy” 149

Figure 20 “Little Black Boy,” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1795), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

appears to emanate exclusively from the divinity of Jesus, represented by a halo-like sun behind the head of Jesus. That Blake continued to print the Innocence collection as he printed the combined Innocence and Experience collection suggests the importance for Blake of showing that the reader’s state literally and figuratively colors his/her experience of the relationship between religion and oppression; the former suggests the potential for the human to transcend the cruelty of oppression whereas the latter suggests the deceit of Christianity’s promise of heaven to justify the use of slavery.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor Books, 1965. Print. ———, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. http:// www.blakearchive.org/. Web. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Henry, Lauren. “Sunshine and Shady Groves: What Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ Learned from African Writers.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1995): 4–11. Print.

150  “The Little Girl Lost”; “The Little Girl Found”

“The Little Girl Lost”; “The Little Girl Found” This pair of poems first appeared together in the Songs of Innocence; Blake later moved them to Songs of Experience. Traditionally, readers have seen the narrative they form as allegorical. According to Keynes, together they form “a long ballad of Life and Death” in which the child named Lyca lives in the “sleeping world of Experience”; Keynes identifies Lyca as the soul and the Lion that finds her as “the Angel of Death, who removes her covering of flesh” and whose cave is therefore death (commentary following Plates 34–6). Raine sees in the story of the mother’s search for her lost daughter Blake’s rendition of “the descent of Persephone into Hades” (24). Regardless of the connections one draws to biblical or classical Greek tradition, a promise of redemption emerges from the two stanzas that function as a prologue to the first of the two poems. The metatextual level suggests that, beyond the traditional readings of the poem, the poet himself must struggle with his role as prophet, much as does the Piper in the Introduction to The Songs of Innocence. The narrator here is also an engraver who puns on his craft with the parenthetical, “(Grave the sentence deep),” suggesting that as he engraves he raises language from the dead as he plumbs its spiritual and psychological depths (Erdman 22, l. 4). That the imperative “Grave” is directed to himself, therefore, suggests that the commanding divinity is within him. Lyca’s dream journey is one that Blake develops further in his narrative poems through figures such as Thel, Oothoon, and Ololon. Lyca points ahead most directly to Vala in The Four Zoas for, like Vala, she is associated with both the earth and sexuality. Through Lyca’s proleptic similarity to Vala, the poem suggests an early foray into representing the organized innocence achieved in, through, and out of experience that Blake explores more fully in the Prophetic Books. Thus, in spite of her parents’ only seeing “desarts wild” in their own projected landscape, “in futurity,” the prophetic narrator sees that Lyca Shall arise and seek For her maker meek And the desart wild Become a garden mild. (Erdman 22, ll. 1, 5–8) The story that follows is tragic from the perspective of her parents who, dwelling in Experience, lack the insight of the prophetic narrator who not only sees futurity but sees that the caves of Lyca’s sleep are the depths of her forming consciousness that will ultimately bring about her parents’ own return to innocence.

Locke, John (1632–1704) 151

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. ———. “The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. 1968. 17–63. Print.

Locke, John (1632–1704) Locke was one of the three Enlightenment philosophers who comprise Blake’s unholy trinity, including Bacon and Newton; their espousal of Deism denied the visionary in its dualistic separation of the human and divine. Locke thus became a target of Blake’s anger with Locke’s assertion in his 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the mind has no innate principles, and that knowledge and morality can therefore only be gained through the senses and through reason formed, in turn, through education. From Blake’s earliest tractates through the Prophetic Books, Blake wrestles with Locke and the other Enlightenment philosophers. There Is No Natural Religion satirizes the Enlightenment genre of the philosophical treatise by refuting with a second voice the Lockean claims represented by the first voice that in itself appears increasingly absurd in its reductiveness. As Raine has observed, where Locke asks how some “pretend to know that their thoughts come from God,” Blake answers that Locke “has failed to discover the very nature of the human mind” which is “grounded in the divine mind itself” (111). Blake’s early indictment of Locke is central to the narrative poems that follow. In the earliest of these, the Book of Thel, Thel hears her voice of Experience from the grave crying out about her tragic life reduced to the senses; Thel thus rejects Generation, fleeing from the deluded subjectivity of her own projected voice. Thel therefore misses the opportunity to regain the innocence suggested by the final design of that poem. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon sees the error of the Lockean reduction of subjectivity to experience as represented by Theotormon’s Deistic God, Urizen, but Oothoon cannot put her freer subjectivity into play in a world whose structure is derived from this limiting mentality symbolized by the cave. The Prophetic Books, developing Blake’s cosmology most fully, give the fullest denouncement of Lockean philosophy. In Jerusalem, Blake recurs to

152  “London” the satire of the tractates with yet more bitter irony in giving voice to its Deistic God: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!/Who teach Doubt\& Experiment” (Erdman 203, Plate 54, ll. 16–18).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Glausser, Wayne. Locke and Blake: a Conversation across the Eighteenth Century. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

“London” That we have Blake’s Notebook containing his early draft of this Song of Experience tells us a great deal about the evolution of his thought during the revolutionary period, from outrage over political, religious, and social oppression to the recognition that liberation must begin within each individual since, as he asserts throughout his poetic career, no change can come about when one is trapped in oppressive ideologies. This shift is evident in Blake’s revision of the early draft’s “german forged links,” that suggest the tyranny of the Hanoverian king, to “mind forg’d manacles” (Erdman 796, note 8). Ackroyd points out that Blake changed the reference in this line from “links” to “manacles” because the latter was “one of the radical code words of the period,” as was the reference to each “chartered” street, a word he changed from the earlier “dirty” streets (157). As others have observed of the word “chartered,” especially, Tom Paine was an important influence on the poem, whose Rights of Man refers to the aristocracy’s chartering of towns. The poem catalogues the “marks of weakness, marks of woe” that the poet-prophet “marks in every face,” a word whose repetition is another important change from the earlier draft; in this case the change from “And see in every face,” suggests a commonality that dissolves the subject-object duality of the speaker and those he beholds. The original third and final stanza decries the chimney sweepers whose cry is tied to the church and the “hapless soldiers” whose blood incriminates the “palace walls.” Blake adds to the final draft what is most horrific in all the “chartering” of humanity: the “youthful Harlots curse” that ends the poem (Erdman 27, Plate 46, l. 14). Like Wollstonecraft in Vindications of the Rights of Woman, Blake

Loom; weaving; garment 153 links the preponderance of prostitution in London to the decay of society, the harlot both being cursed and perpetuating the curse. In making it the culminating point of the poem, Blake looks ahead to the developing cosmology by suggesting that individuals are trapped in the state of Generation, blighted by “plagues” of venereal disease (Erdman 4, 16). As much as the poetic diction suggests Blake’s affinity to Paine’s rhetoric, it should be underscored that Blake stood apart from him and other Dissenters including Wollstonecraft. While Blake would have sympathized with their antipathy towards religion as a patriarchal institution, their insistence on Enlightenment ideas of reason would have been anathema to his visionary nondualism. Blake’s indictment of the forging of the manacles in the mind could have included even these Dissenters. Paine may well have deemed Blake “one continual incoherent rant” as Paine had said of Isaiah, the biblical prophet whom Blake celebrates as a champion of the visionary in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (quoted in Ackroyd 159).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print.

Loom; weaving; garment Many of Blake’s female figures in the Prophetic Books are “weavers of garments,” the “looms of generation” appearing ubiquitously throughout The Four Zoas and Jerusalem (Raine, I, 86). In his fallen state, the veil over Albion becomes so powerful that “Thundring the Veil rushes from his hand, Vegetating Knot by/Knot, Day by Day” (Erdman 170, Plate 24, ll. 61–2). That this negative image of separation is associated with the female has given rise to criticism that has branded Blake a misogynist. However, consistent with his fuller representation of gender and sexuality throughout his poetry and design, Blake sees the binary of the masculine and the feminine, in which the female is cast out as an Emanation of the male, as the source of the delusion that in turn creates this separation represented by the veil. Thus, the veil’s most important manifestation in Blake’s cosmology is in its association with Vala, in which the veil represents the delusion of the dualism between nature, or the objective world, and the human subject. The repercussions of this dualism extend throughout human history.

Figure 21 Jerusalem, Plate 31 [Erdman plate 45] (1804), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection 

Los; Urthona 155 Raine sees Locke as “the weaver of [the] stifling cloth, Vala’s veil” that obscures the vision of “deluded mankind”; it is “a net that catches the souls who have sunk into the waters of materialism (II, 183). Vala’s epiphany in The Four Zoas leads to the reintegration of Albion in Night the Ninth, in which she becomes aware of her own self free of her fallen identification with the veil of dualism: “Rise sluggish Soul why sitst thou here why dost thou sit & weep/Yon Sun shall wax old & decay but thou shalt ever flourish” (Erdman 396, 127, 24–5). In Jerusalem, Albion’s sleep, having caused his female portion, Jerusalem, to wander from him, also gives rise to Vala’s fallen state in which she ensnares humanity in the threads forming the vale and veil of dualism. As Eaves et al. suggest, the design of the plate (Figure 21) echoes the shuttle in the text: “I hear thy shuttles sing in the sky, and round my limbs,/I feel the iron threads of love & jealousy & despair” (Erdman 195, Plate 45, ll. 49–50). One can add, beyond this observation, that the visual image of the loom in both poem and design visually echoes the dense lines of the engraved letters of the text that appear to wrap around their plate; as a visual reminder of the etymological link of text and textile the metatextual layering of the poem reinforces the nondualism promised by Albion’s reintegration beyond this moment of delusion.

Bibliography Eaves, Morris, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, ed. The William Blake Archive. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid= thel.f.illbk.02&java=yes. Web. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968.

Los; Urthona One of the four Zoas, Los is the recurring figure of imagination, the poet/ artist, whose labor is to build Golgonooza, the spiritual center of art. He reappears throughout the Prophetic Books, although with different valences, especially regarding the biographical. Blake introduced Los in The Book of Urizen in 1794; from there Los evolved into a role in Milton that becomes important to the redemption of Milton when Los unites with him and Blake in Felpham. Los sometimes manifests as Urthona whose name, sounding like “earth owner,” suggests the acquisitive physicality of his state. In his most dire state of fallenness, he becomes the Spectre of Urthona to whom Los speaks directly and whom Los subsequently subdues:  . . . Los behold undaunted, furious His heav’d Hammer; he swung it round & at one blow

156  Los; Urthona In unpitying ruin driving down the pyramids of pride, Smiting the Spectre on his Anvil (Erdman 251–2, Plate 91, ll. 41–4) As a variant of the imagination that Los embodies, Urthona creates forms in his forge “in the deep dens or caves of the subconscious”; he thus “never manifests as his own person” (Damon 426). His fall from wholeness occurs when Urizen and Luvah are at war, the story told in The Four Zoas. Sometimes reductively, therefore, readers have tended to describe Los as a mouthpiece for Blake, especially in the case of the often-quoted statement by Los in Jerusalem, “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans” (Erdman 153, Plate 10, l. 20); certainly, Los here expresses the revolutionary refusal to be entrapped in systematic religion or philosophy reminiscent, for instance, of Blake’s revolt against Swedenborg that Blake proclaims in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Yet the label of authorial persona discounts the role of Los in the fallen world as he participates in it, both in the earlier minor prophecies and the later Prophetic Books. Thus, for instance, Dorrbecker helps complicate Los by suggesting that Europe presents Los and his sons, as the aggressive British stance towards Europe in contrast with the label of Los as revolutionary poet-prophet (152–3). By the time of his writing The Four Zoas, Blake recognized that the answer is not to replace one system with another equally static system, since Los’s claim to build his own system is itself dangerously reductive without the integration of other subjectivities. In his fallen state, during the sleep of Albion, Los projects division, chaining his son, Orc, who represents the spirit of rebellion. Bloom claims that Los “is able to become truly the prophet armed” only at the end of Jerusalem, in which he confronts the “fully revealed abomination” of “natural tyranny” (473). However, his merging with Milton, Blake, and Ololon in Milton and his reintegration with the full range of subjectivities that comprise Albion in Vala, or The Four Zoas are equally important in establishing as elemental his role in a redemptive aesthetic. Los participates in the liberation of Albion’s vision when he denounces Deism: “Albions Sons . . . Fixing their Systems, permanent: by mathematic power/Giving a body to Falsehood that it may be cast off for ever. . . . God is within, & without! He is even in the depths of Hell!” (Erdman 155, Plate 12, ll. 11–15). Los can only build Golgonooza when he can “deliver Individuals from . . . Systems” (Erdman 154, Plate 11, l. 5).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor, 1963. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print.

Luvah; love 157 Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books, Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Luvah; love The first appearance of Luvah is in The Book of Thel, in which the Cloud identifies him as the God of Love. Luvah evolves into the Zoa that is a nondual representation of both eros and the compassion of Jesus. When he appears in Vala, or The Four Zoas, the myth of his transformation into the Cloud is elaborated: having been at war with Urizen, whose offer to share dominion over Albion he has ultimately rejected, he is cast into Urizen’s furnaces, transformed from earth-worm, serpent, dragon, infant, until, when he is fully melted in Urizen’s furnaces, he becomes the Cloud that seeks to dominate Albion who rejects him. Raine suggests that in this fallen state love comes about because of the “apparent separateness of individuals” as opposed to the spiritual world, in which “natural ‘love’ becomes unnecessary because the same life is in all,” a view she claims Blake held from early in his career, citing The Book of Urizen (212–13). As with all of Blake’s Contraries, however, the common nondual energy at their core is important to underscore in grasping the foundational principle behind Blake’s cosmology. Thus, Luvah is reborn as Orc, and, as Damon notes, “love suppressed has turned to hate” (256). Blake in turn develops his heterodox identification of sexual energy with the compassion of Jesus in Vala, or The Four Zoas. Through the inverse movement from hate to love, Orc becomes Luvah identified as Christ, the Divine Lamb, “open’d within the Center” of Albion, and therefore within Jerusalem (Erdman 370, p. 98, l. 11). In Jerusalem, Blake writes that Albion sees “his Sons assimilate with Luvah, bound in the bonds/ Of spiritual Hate, from which springs Sexual Love as iron chains” (Erdman 203, Plate 54, ll. 11–12). The redeemed relationship between Vala and Luvah in Night the Ninth of Vala, or The Four Zoas, best represents Blake’s nondualism: the intersubjectivity of Vala and Luvah provides the catalyst to the apocalypse: “Their ancient gold age renewed for Luvah spoke . . . Come forth O Vala from the grass & from the silent Dew,” a disembodied voice on the “vocal wind” that culminates in Vala’s epiphanic “Rise sluggish Soul. . . . I will cause my voice to be heard on the clouds . . . I will call & who shall answer me” (Erdman 395–6, passim, pp. 126, l. 29–128, 10). What had been Luvah’s voice calling Vala is the echo of her own voice, an affirmation of her causality and thus her awakening.

158  Lyca

Bibliography Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Lyca In the two poems, “Little Girl Lost” and “Little Girl Found,” of the Songs of Experience (originally in Songs of Innocence), Lyca is the child whose name, Raine suggests, is from the Greek root “light” associated with “the brightness doubly appropriate to an immortal and a virgin soul” (27). Raine also identifies her with Earth in “Earth’s Answer” since, although she is the sleeper, it is earth who will awake “in futurity” (26). The prophetic narrator identifies Lyca as the Earth who seeks her “maker meek” upon awakening from a sleep suggestive of that decried by the evangelical Bard in the Introduction to the Songs of Experience. In this case, however, the narrator is not issuing imperatives to his audience as does the Bard, but rather tells a nuanced story that suggests rather than commands: In futurity I prophetic see, That the earth from sleep, (Grave the sentence deep) Shall arise and seek For her maker meek. (Erdman 20, ll. 1–6) The parenthetical “Grave the sentence deep” is a command to himself with layers of meaning: he is himself raising Lyca as not only Earth but language from the dead through his prophecy. Lyca looks ahead to Vala in her association with nature and sexuality. The renewal that Lyca brings about forecasts the redemption Vala triggers in Vala, or The Four Zoas. This association underscores the importance for Blake not only of innocence transcending the binary of naiveté and experience, but of the connection to the redemption of language through the dispelling of subject-object duality.

Madness; “Mad Song” 159

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Raine, Kathleen. “The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. 1968. 17–63. Print.

Madness; “Mad Song” Asked by Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to write of his memories of Blake, the pre-Raphaelite painter and art historian Seymour Kirkup wrote reminiscences that recur frequently to the theme of Blake’s madness and, more specifically, to the unresolvable question of whether Blake’s recording of his visions in his poetry, prose, and art could be “spiritual” – the implication being that they would be legitimate if he had witnesses – or mere “hallucination”; thus, to Rossetti in 1866 Kirkup wrote, “I thought him mad [though] I don’t think him a madman now. . . . Blake was an honest man, and I always thought so – but his sanity seemed doubtful because he could only give his word for the truth of his visions”; to Swinburne the same year, Kirkup asks whether Rossetti believed “as I did that Blake was mad? I have now studied Spiritualism for 11 years closely – Hallucination can never account for it in presence of many witnesses. A dozen people can never dream the same thing – Blake had no witnesses – There was only his word – his brain might have been in error – that is madness – Modern spiritualists count competent & respectable witnesses by millions – as for conjuror’s tricks, they are easily guarded against – & magnetism, does GR think it imposture? Experience is all we can trust” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 288, 291). Kirkup articulates what many of Blake’s contemporaries tried to understand as well: the paradoxical relatability of Blake’s so-called madness. Reflecting this paradox, Wordsworth said of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, “There is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the Sanity of Lord Byron & Walter Scott (quoted in Bentley Stranger 380). Before he met Blake in 1825, Henry Crabb Robinson placed Blake in the “race of ecstatics, mystics, seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams”; to Robinson, this “race” embodied the “union of genius and madness in single remarkable minds,” which Robinson illustrates through Blake’s giving bodily form to spiritual beings. Later, however, he said Blake “had an air of inspiration – But not [one that] would suggest the notion that he was insane” (quoted in Bentley

160  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Stranger 339, 381). Blake’s collection of Visionary Heads, in which he illustrated and recorded his conversations with the dead for John Varley, was further testimony to his madness for many contemporaries. Yet as early as Poetical Sketches, in which the poem “Mad Song” appears, Blake inverts the reason/madness hierarchy, suggesting that it is the Enlightenment thinkers who, reducing the universe to a claustrophobic cell, are truly mad: “Lo! To the vault/Of paved heaven . . . /My notes are driven,” an image reflected in his print of Newton against a wall of stone from which he seems to be cut (Erdman 415, ll. 9–12). The younger artists known as the Ancients, by contrast, thought him “singularly sane,” often defending him against such charges (Bentley Stranger 381). Sounding far more sane than many of his contemporaries, Blake said in his Public Address, “I am Mad or Else you are so both of us cannot be in our right senses” (Erdman 573). Of the elder poet Cowper who had been institutionalized, Blake wrote in his annotation to Spurzheim’s Observations on Insanity (London, 1817), “Cowper came to me and said, “Oh! That I were insane, always. . . . Oh! that in the bosom of God I was hid . . . as a refuge from unbelief” (Erdman 663). The generational split regarding the relationship between madness and creativity can thus be seen to have a historical context, with the elder contemporaries emerging from the more rigid Enlightenment Deism that celebrated reason and categorized as lunacy the visionary, or that which cannot be deduced empirically lunacy.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Youngquist, Paul. Madness and Blake’s Myth. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1989. Print.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell This 1790 “anatomy,” as Frye identifies its genre, combines prophecy, satire, prose, and poetry. Though Marriage has often been described as Blake’s spiritual manifesto, written as testimony of his resurrection during his “Christological” thirty-third year, the label is problematic since point of view is never straightforward in the text, veering from the personal to the satirical and problematizing any single voice as authorial. Joseph Viscomi’s study of the text from the engraver’s perspective lends credence to the idea of its “narrative discontinuity.” From the start, Blake challenges the passive reader’s assumptions that are based on literary tradition: the prefatory “Argument” is in verse while the

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 161 text that follows is prose, the opposite of traditional narrative poetry beginning with a prose argument that would summarize the poetry to follow. Adding even greater opaqueness to the Argument, the first word, Rintrah, would have been unknown to any of Blake’s readers since it was his first use, the name embodying a prophet’s righteous indignation. The Argument has some elements of the biblical story of creation but departs so significantly that the reader is forced to abandon the habit of passively accepting religious dogma. Thus, the “sneaking serpent walks/In mild humility” in a world of hypocrisy, forcing the “just man into barren climes” (Erdman 33, Plate 2, ll. 16–17). The literary headings that follow the Argument are equally misleading: “The voice of the Devil” may or may not be different from the voice that precedes it, while the “Memorable Fancy” sections are modeled on the “Memorable Relations” of Swedenborg that Blake discredits as “a recapitulation of all superficial opinions” (Erdman 43, Plate 22). With his attack on Swedenborg at the heart of the satire, Blake refuses to equate a marriage of “heaven and hell with equilibrium; this subversion of the Swedenborgian marriage of contraries suggests that the text is yet more deeply a manifesto of nondualism, disorienting the reader who seeks the binaries the text inherits and overturns not only from Swedenborg but from the Enlightenment tradition that produced him. The narrator “travels to hell and back, hangs over abysses with an angel . . ., while the order of events and the relation of one narrative space to another are seldom specified”; that there are “several voices, including the ‘I’ who reports a journey to hell to gather proverbs” is an important observation not only about this text but about Blake’s cosmology as a whole. (Eaves et al. 117). The “Proverbs of Hell” section (Plates 7–10) thus intensifies the disorientation of subjectivity by transforming the cautionary biblical aphorisms into “an eclectic mixture of several classifiable types of sayings,” many that are “formulated as witty contraries to lumps of worldly wisdom of the kind that proverbs condense into unforgettable morsels” (Eaves et al. 125– 6). The narrator of the Memorable Fancy preceding the Proverbs describes canvassing the devils in hell to generate the list of Proverbs. In so doing, he undermines the biblical notion of a unified code of ethics, the reader forced to re-evaluate the judgment s/he brings to the reading of each Proverb, some of which we judge as wise, others as Satanic from a traditional perspective. Who is devil, who angel becomes more vexed than a simple inversion of the traditional binary, preparing for the complex distinction Blake draws in the Prophetic Books between states and individuals. Blake’s allegory in the Marriage “takes a self-reflexive turn inward to his own mind” in the first Memorable Fancy, in which the devil’s “cognitive workshop into the external world” is “his artistic medium, relief etching, to model artistic execution”; by “assimilating the standard aims of satire, condemnation and remedy, to a Judeo-Christian pattern of fall and redemption, it becomes a kind of holy satire.” (Eaves et al. 125).

162  “Mary” The prophetic dimension of this anatomy manifests most explicitly in the Memorable Fancy section that tells of Blake’s dinner party with the biblical prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. It follows the plate in which Blake returns to the tractate All Religions Are One for a more precise critique of organized religion, beginning with “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses” until “a system was formed” from which “some took advantage” and “enslav’d the vulgar . . . : thus began Priesthood” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). When Blake asks how the Prophets “so roundly “ asserted that “God spake to them,” Isaiah’s response comes closest in this text to being an ideal for Blake – perhaps looking ahead to the Rintrah of the Prophetic Books: “I saw no God. Nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing. . . . the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God. I cared not for consequences but wrote” (Erdman 38, Plate 12). The question is as revealing as the response, for Blake is thinking of his own “cause of imposition” by the “Elect” as he calls his patrons and other patriarchal figures. Isaiah is thus portrayed here as heroic in his own age, and for an age of Deism that calls one mad who experiences divinity unmediated, as did Blake. The concluding segment, “A Song of Liberty,” is both afterword and prologue: for Blake, political liberation can only come about after the liberation of the mind, as his phrase “the mind-forg’d manacles” suggests in “London.” Blake has taken his reader/viewer through the intellectual war against passive acceptance of received authority only after which is there hope for redemption, an idea that resonates throughout the Prophetic Books to come that Blake here refers to here as his “Bible of Hell” (Erdman 44, Plate 24).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. The Evolution of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part I]. http://siteslab.unc.edu/viscomi/evolution.htm#_endn0. Web.

“Mary” In the Songs and Ballads collection, this poem tells of a young woman who lives in a hypocritical society that shuns her for her beauty and open sexuality: In the Morning the Villagers rose with delight And repeated with pleasure the joys of the night

Mathew circle 163 And Mary arose among Friends to be free But no Friend from henceforward thou Mary shalt see Some said she was proud some calld her a whore (Erdman 487, ll. 13–17) The Mary of this poem is often attributed to Mary Wollstonecraft, a friend of Blake’s. Raine comments that the poem parallels Wollstonecraft’s life by representing a woman who “remains faithful to her inner truth at the cost of her life”; Raine claims the poem “contains in embryo the theme of Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Oothoon is Mary” (167–8). Bentley dismisses the connection, however, as contrived “more by critical ingenuity than by fact” (111). Regardless of the biographical reading, however, Mary’s plight exemplifies Blake’s sensitivity to the imprisonment of the objectified female in western society’s dualistic relationship between the sexes: And thine is a Face of sweet Love in Despair And thine is a Face of mild sorrow & care And thine is a Face of wild terror & fear That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier (Erdman 488, ll. 45–8) These lines describe Mary’s face in a catalogue of complex emotions, restoring her subjectivity to an identity lost in the objectifying judgment of the community.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Mathew circle Harriet Mathew, a patroness of young artists, was a “Blue-stocking” and a friend of Lady Mary Wortley Montegu. Along with her husband, the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, she held salons at their home, which had been decorated by their friend John Flaxman. Blake participated in these salons, singing as well as reciting his songs. As one witness said of Blake’s reception at the Matthew home, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit” (quoted in Ackroyd 85).

164  Millenarianism The Mathews defrayed the costs of printing the Poetical Sketches, although A. S. Mathew claims in the preface that the poetry was the work of “untutored youth” and that he is “conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page” (Bentley 75). Although Blake’s engagement with his contemporaries here and in Joseph Johnson’s gatherings has helped recent commentators balance the early depiction of Blake as a loner in isolation from his contemporaries, it is also true that Blake “often offended people with his manner and conversation,” and so the evenings at the Mathews’ home came to an end (Ackroyd 87).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001.

Millenarianism The notion that the apocalypse was imminent abounded in the rhetoric of the Dissenters of the late Enlightenment, beginning notably with the 1789 sermon of Unitarian minister Richard Price that celebrated the storming of the Bastille and, in biblical language, looked toward France with the hope that its utopianism would come to England. It was this powerful religious rhetoric that so alarmed Burke that he responded to Price with Reflections on the Revolution in France, answered in turn by over seventy polemical essays decrying Burke’s conservatism, including those by Wollstonecraft and Paine. This millenarianism is central to Blake’s cosmology; while such figures as Orc in America have been compared to that of the messianic Jesus, however, it is important to distinguish the Christian idea of apocalyptic judgment arriving at the end of time from Blake’s own heterodox insistence that time and space are merely constructs that he calls Generation from which we can be freed only through the release from our “mind forg’d manacles.” Mee argues that, even in the Prophetic Books, the struggles among the Zoas suggest an “apocalyptic process which opens out rather than marks an end of history” (38).

Bibliography Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print.

Milton 165

Milton By having John Milton reform himself in this two-part Prophetic Book, Blake releases him from what Blake sees as Milton’s own errors as well as those of commentators such as Blake’s patron, William Hayley. Blake had earlier expressed his ambivalence towards Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, characterizing the poet as sublime but flawed in his representation of such binaries good and evil, fallenness and redemption, male and female, innocence and experience, subject and object. The elaborate nondualism of this Prophetic Book builds upon the earlier wrestling with Milton in Marriage, breaking down the barrier Enlightenment Deism built as the continuum of space and time. In the poem, places “in the landscape are also parts of the human body, although that body is sometimes conceived as the dispersed fragments” of Albion; Blake thus “recovers an alienated otherness by making it part of ourselves,” the body becoming “a medium of interchange between subjectivity and objectivity, the latter only a projection of the former” (Essick and Viscomi 11). The Preface frames the poem with Blake’s ambivalence towards Miltonic poetics: it celebrates the biblical sublime by contrast to the “silly Greek & Latin slaves of the Sword,” as much an attack on the neo-classical writers that perpetuated the idealization of the war hero and the constraints of classicism as it is of classical literature itself (Erdman 95, Plate 1). The Preface is the voice of the fiery reprobate, Rintrah, who urges the youth of England to “Rouze up” against the “ignorant Hirelings” that dominate “Camp, the Court, & the University” and who “would if they could for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War” (Erdman 95, Plate 1). The song that ends the Preface has become an anthem of the English working class, defying the Enlightenment establishment that has oppressed the working class by asking if Jerusalem could ever have existed where now are “dark Satanic Mills” (Erdman 95, Plate 1, l. 8). In order to rebuild Jerusalem in England, Blake pledges not to “cease from Mental Fight,” urging all people to be “Prophets” (Erdman 95–6, Plate 1). Each person, this statement suggests, must be connected to the visionary, an outcome that can only come about through liberation from what Blake calls in “London” the “mind-forg’d manacles” (Erdman 27, l. 8). Book I begins with Milton, now an angel in his created heaven, listening to the Bard’s elaborate Song, a compressed rendition of Blake’s cosmology that tells of the error of the fallen world, whose inequities are linked to such binaries as good and evil, heaven and hell, and male and female. Milton, recognizing that he has perpetuated these errors through works such as Paradise Lost, offers to give up his place in “eternity” to return to Generation, an epic descent that many readers have paralleled to God sacrificing Jesus to save humanity.

166  Milton But Blake’s is a heterodox epic, and so Milton’s descent into the underworld of Generation means that he must acknowledge Satan as a state rather than a character, and thus as an aspect of himself. When Milton’s Emanation, Ololon, returns to Generation from Beulah hers is the epic descent of the feminine who must shed her identity as a perpetual virgin akin to Thel in the poem bearing her name; Ololon joins Milton after both have resolved their limitations, and thus the poem ends as they prepare for the apocalypse. The nonlinear narrative itself is heterodox since Milton’s redemption occurs in a moment that the poem revisits with Blake’s deepening understanding rather than moving forward in time. Milton is at once Blake’s most autobiographical work, since he enters the epic as a character, and it is also the most agile of the Prophetic Books in moving among this autobiographical level and the historical and cosmological, including references to people in his life alongside his mythical figures such as Ololon and the Zoas, especially Los and Urizen. On multiple levels, therefore, Blake challenges Enlightenment conventions of space and time as “fallacious projections of a limited and limiting mentality. . . . Time travel is not only possible but inevitable” in a universe in which the moment and eternity merge (Essick and Viscomi 10). Blake instead offers representations of cyclicality and eternity so that characters and places have more than one identity. As seen in Figure 22, the title page itself announces the poem’s complication of subjectivity: the viewer is looking through the point of view of the figure who may be a composite of Milton, Blake, and the reader/viewer, all of whom are given the agency to disrupt linearity and spatial orientation as the swirling lines and the rupture of Milton’s name and the title suggest. Thus, Milton enters into Blake via the latter’s foot, and there is a merging among “Milton’s Shadow, his Spectre, Albion’s Spectre, Urizen, Satan, the Covering Cherub, and Blake’s patron William Hayley into one being” (Essick and Viscomi 12). Characters also fragment, beginning with the sleep of Albion and the dividing of his being into Zoas, Emanations, and Spectres, as well as Ololon dividing from the twelve-year-old that had formed her identity before she re-entered Generation. One of the most important elements of this Prophetic Book is that Milton’s own descent into Generation is not enough to redeem him, the history of English verse, or the world founded on illusion. That this journey is not complete until Ololon makes her descent from Beulah to Generation suggests that hers is an equally heroic quest in the need for her to shed her identity as a “Virgin of twelve years” (Erdman 137, Plate 36, l. 17). Just as Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Blake’s friend, Mary Wollstonecraft, decried Milton’s misogynistic representation of women in Paradise Lost, Blake shows Milton to have cast out his feminine portion until the moment, seen in Figure 10, in which Milton, Ololon, Blake, and Los are reunited in Felpham:

Figure 22 Milton, Title Page (1804), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

168  Milton For when Los joind with me he took me in his firy whirlwind My Vegetated portion was hurried from Lambeths shades He set me down in Felphams Vale & prepard a beautiful Cottage for me that in three years I might write all these Visions To display Natures cruel holiness: the deceits of Natural Religion. Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld The Virgin Ololon (Erdman 137, Plate 36, ll. 21–7) That the liberation of Ololon’s subjectivity brings about the redemption of Milton suggests here that Blake’s writing about the Deistic illusion of dualism is simultaneously cause and effect of the potential return to Eden or wholeness. Whether or not one accepts the premise that Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion is indeed modeled on Wollstonecraft, Oothoon’s return in the poem’s final moment to reap the “Human Harvest” in preparation for the apocalypse suggests that the poem ends on the brink of the liberation of the feminine from the bondage of patriarchal oppression (Erdman 144, Plate 42, l. 33).

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Brisman, Leslie. Milton’s Poetry of Choice and its Romantic Heirs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Print. Damon, S. Foster. “Blake and Milton.” The Divine Vision. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Gollancz, 1957. 89–96. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Fox, Susan. Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Print. Frye, Northrop. Notes for a Commentary on Milton.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. New York: Haskell House, 1968. 97–137. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “Milton and Its Contexts.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 231–50. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton.” Blake’s Sublime Allegory.” Eds. Curran and Wittreich. Madison, WI: U Wisconsin P, 1973. 281–307. Print. Wittreich, Joseph. Angel of the Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Print.

Milton, John (1608–74) 169

Milton, John (1608–74) Blake had known Milton’s works since he was a young boy, writing later that “Milton lovd me in chldhood & shewd me his face” (Erdman 707). As were many poets of the period, Blake was ambivalent about his predecessor as Puritan poet, recognizing his vision but also critical of what he saw as his flaws, including his treatment of women, both biographically and in his poetry; the repressiveness of his brand of Christianity; and his casting out his own radicalism in the form of Satan in Paradise Lost. This double view is apparent in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which the devil gives a radical revision of conventional readings of Paradise Lost, describing Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (Erdman 35). For Raine, The Book of Urizen is Blake’s satirical response to, rather than mere “influence” by, Milton, who claims at the outset of Paradise Lost to be telling of “man’s first disobedience”; instead, Blake announces that his poem is of “Urizen’s tyranny” (58–9). Unlike Milton’s Satan, Raine adds, Urizen repents, admitting “in his contrition, that his world is an image or reflection of the world of Imagination the Son or Logos” (73). Between 1801 and 1809 Blake illustrated three of Milton’s poems, including Paradise Lost. Blake’s greatest tribute and critique of the poet is his epic poem, Milton, which was written after his disastrous experience at Felpham. In Blake’s view, Milton’s errors were responsible for the rise in “classical paganism, moral-self-righteousness, and rational materialism,” as Essick and Viscomi observe; Blake links his patron Hayley with these flaws, they note, “evinced by his contempt for Blake’s poetry and his contributions to the late eighteenth-century conversion of Milton the revolutionary poetprophet into a versifier of conventional pieties” (16).

Bibliography Brisman, Leslie. Milton’s Poetry of Choice and its Romantic Heirs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Print. Damon, S. Foster. “Blake and Milton.” The Divine Vision. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Gollancz, 1957. 89–96. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Fox, Susan. Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Wittreich, Joseph. Angel of the Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Print.

170  “My Pretty Rose Tree”; “Ah! Sun-flower”; “The Lilly”

“My Pretty Rose Tree”; “Ah! Sun-flower”; “The Lilly” Although it is generally agreed that this trilogy of poems in Songs of Experience explores psychological varieties of love and sexuality, there has been a spectrum of interpretations about point of view both within each and among all as a group. Blake’s Sun-flower, for instance, has been described on the one hand as symbolic of “man’s aspirations” since it is “always turned towards the sun while its roots are planted firmly in the ground,” (Keynes Plate 43), whereas it has also been described as Blake’s “terrible lyric” of a “perfect symbol of the ‘vegetable’ life rooted in this world and longing to be free” (Frye 74). Keynes describes “The Lilly” as symbolizing “innocent and honest love,” in contrast to what he sees as the “hypocrisy of the rose with its mockmodesty and the sheep with its simulated courage” (Plate 43). However, “My Pretty Rose Tree” appears as much a commentary on the narrator, who regards the thorns as his “only delight” because she has turned away in jealousy (Erdman 25, l. 8). Raine compares the Lilly to the later figure of Jerusalem through the writings of Boehme; knowing Blake’s “dislike of ‘natural selfish chastity,’ we are surely justified,” Raine writes, “in asking what exactly he did find to praise” in the figure of the Lilly; Raine argues that Blake transforms the conventional emblem to one of “a love above the conflict of opposites to which belongs the rose of sexuality” (217). Another reading suggests itself when the poem is viewed through the perspective of The Book of Thel, whose Lilly is a figure of self-sacrifice in Har, one whom Thel cannot relate to and who therefore sends Thel to the Cloud to address her restlessness.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Newton, Sir Isaac (1643–1727) For Blake, Newton was one of the three principle Enlightenment architects – including Locke and Bacon – of the Mundane Shell, the illusion of the world and universe as knowable only through reason, devoid of spiritual vision. Blake was not alone in regarding Newton as a symbolic figure for the Enlightenment. Dorrbecker emphasizes the historical context for Blake’s assigning Newton the “mythic role of the Antichrist,” noting that “at the end of the eighteenth century the Newtonian world-view . . . dominated all enlightened discourse” (150).

Newton, Sir Isaac (1643–1727) 171 In Milton, Blake has the eponymous poet overcome the “Newtonian Voids” in his descent to Generation, a state that believes its time/space dimensions to be the only reality. Milton exclaims in his moment of epiphany, I come in Self – annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour . . . To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering (Erdman 142, Plate 41, ll. 2–4) Once Albion is liberated from the illusion of his separation from the divine, Newtonian science as the “idiot Questioner who is always questioning/But never capable of answering . . . who publishes doubt and calls it knowledge; whose Science is despair” can be overcome (Erdman 142, Plate 41, ll. 12–15). Blake’s print, Newton, echoes the “Ancient of Days,” the earlier print an ironic depiction of the patriarchal God of Deism, as though that God is the projection of the mind of Newton. Like the Ancient of Days, Newton is naked and muscular, emphasizing his physicality; like him as well, Newton holds a compass that suggests his attempt to contract the universe into mathematical precision (see Figure 23). Blake includes a draped fabric behind Newton that seems to connect to the paper on which he is drawing, suggesting a veil that obstructs one’s view beyond Newton’s geometrical designs of

Figure 23 Newton (printed 1804–5), Tate Art Gallery

172  Notebook the universe. Rather than being in the sky as the Ancient of Days is, Newton is underwater, the reef upon which he sits nevertheless paralleling the stony heavens of the Ancient of Days; perhaps this underwater setting is a reference to the dwelling of the Prophetic Books’ Polypus, a recurring image of the physical world reduced by Enlightenment science to its lowest life form.

Bibliography Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Nondualism: see Contraries

Notebook Following his brother Robert’s death in 1787, Blake began using Robert’s Notebook as a workbook of poems, prose, and drawings until it was filled up in 1818. In the Notebook, sometimes referred to as “The Rossetti Manuscript” because D. G. Rossetti purchased it in 1847, some poems “express the Devil’s wisdom about the sanctity of energy, particularly sexual energy, and the association of eternity and gratified desire” (Bentley 143). The Notebook contains preliminary drafts of all but three of the Songs of Experience, other “never-published lyrics as good as Blake’s best published work, angry epigrams, drafts of philosophic poetry such as The Everlasting Gospel,” along with poems Blake did not intend to publish and drafts of prose works ranging from Vision of the Last Judgment to “many hasty and tentative sketches” (Johnson and Grant 175).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David and Donald K. Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print.

Ololon Milton’s Emanation in Blake’s poem, Milton, undergoes an epic journey of her own that culminates with her merging with Milton to prepare for the apocalypse. As Essick and Viscomi note, she is variously “a river, a place, its inhabitants and a twelve-year-old virgin,” this fluidity of character, place, and state of being typical of Blake’s challenge to conventional allegory (12).

On Homer’s Poetry; On Virgil 173 Limiting her identity to the twelve-year-old virgin has led to critical misconceptions that conflate the error of Milton’s perception of the female who must undergo transformation according to Blake’s story of Milton’s redemption. Thus, Book Two of the poem focuses on Ololon’s quest to free herself from that identification. She descends into Generation to give up this limited identity as a perpetual virgin, Milton’s embodiment of female virtue. As Geoffrey Hartman noted, her name is pronounced “All alone”: like the other Emanations in Blake’s Prophetic Books, she is cast out in the fallen state of the Zoas and left to wander in lost confusion. Ololon is liberated from her identity as a child virgin in a lovely image: “Away from Ololon” the Virgin “divided & fled into the depths/Of Miltons Shadow as a Dove upon the stormy Sea” (Erdman 143, Plate 42, ll. 5–6). Once she is reunited with Milton, Blake, and Los in Felpham, Ololon achieves a redemptive femininity that in turn promises the potential for the return of Jerusalem to Albion and the building of Golgonooza, the City of Art. Ololon is no less than the culmination of the sequence of female characters seeking liberation from their repressive patriarchal worlds in Blake’s earlier works. These range from Thel, who retreats back to the false safety of her virginal Har from the realm of Generation and sexuality where Ololon has the courage to go forward from Beulah, to the various female figures in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, including Lyca, to Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

On Homer’s Poetry; On Virgil These two interrelated tractates make up Blake’s shortest text in relief etching (Essick and Viscomi 227). This broadsheet contains many of the ideas Blake had expressed in earlier works such as A Descriptive Catalogue (1809) and A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810), including the criticism that Greek literature is the product of memory rather than inspiration, that Greece and Rome destroyed rather than created Art, and that “moral virtues are allegorical dissimulations” (Essick and Viscomi 227). Blake’s ambivalence towards Homer is revealed in his double use of the word “unity,” suggesting that it is “either externally imposed or predicated on the completed form, but has nothing to do with the creative process itself” (Essick and Viscomi 228). Although Blake defends Homer, he ends by stating, “it is the Classics! . . . that desolate Europe with Wars” (Erdman 270). This statement echoes Blake’s diatribe against Classicism in the Preface to Milton.

174  Oothoon On Virgil also condemns Greece and Rome for being warlike states, destroying rather than creating art. He criticizes those of his own day who “are obsessed with translations and copies, and with buying, selling, and criticizing instead of making art” (Essick and Viscomi 228). The basis of Blake’s attack on the corporeal war glorified in the epic is that it does not acknowledge that true warfare is spiritual, the subject of his own Prophetic Books. Johnson and Grant point out the significance of the design of the single plate: “The inscription over On Virgil, which editors traditionally have printed as the last sentence in On Homer’s Poetry, could equally well be considered the epigraph for On Virgil,” the message being a “proclamation of the superiority of Christian or Gothic art to the Classics” (347).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print.

Oothoon As the protagonist of the 1793 narrative poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon is simultaneously British woman, African slave, Native American, and America herself. She has been linked by many readers to Mary Wollstonecraft. This multi-layered figure exemplifies Blake’s challenge to the static symbolism of traditional allegory. The centrality of female sexuality for Thel and Ololon speaks to the “contrary states” both in themselves and in their relationship to each other. Yet, while the poem has been referred to as the Song of Experience companion to The Book of Thel as a Song of Innocence, Blake’s nonlinearity in both poems individually and in relation to each other complicates any simple binary. David Erdman was not only the first to discuss Visions as political allegory regarding Blake’s support of the abolitionist movement; he notes the African influence of the double vowels in Oothoon’s name. Blake emphasizes the association with slavery from the first dramatic line of the poem: “Enslav’d, the Daughters of Albion weep . . . /For the soft soul of America” (Erdman 45, Plate 1, ll. 1, 3). Although these Englishwomen are weeping for the symbolic action about to take place in which Oothoon is raped and impregnated by her owner, Bromion, their grief is not mere pity, for they too are enslaved. That Oothoon’s oppression is not just that of a slave by her owner, but of all women by patriarchal society suggests the complexity of Blake’s allegory as he extends the implications of colonialism to the oppressed at home. Regarding the indictment of patriarchal repression of female sexuality,

Oothoon 175 Oothoon is seen both in the “Argument” and at the opening of the poem, before the rape, as having overcome her fears about sexuality as she is on her way to meet her lover, Theotormon. Female sexuality is embodied by the setting of Leutha’s vale, where Oothoon plucks a marigold in an act of conscious will that stands in striking contrast to the passive phrase denoting a woman’s loss of virginity as being “deflowered”: “I pluck thee from thy bed/Sweet flower. And put thee here to glow between my breasts” (Erdman 46, Plate 1, ll. 11–12). The rape, the only action of the poem, takes place in the half-line, “Bromion rent her with his thunders” (Erdman 46, Plate 1, l. 16). The sections of the poem that follow the rape are devoted to its aftermath, through speeches given by each of the three characters. There has been considerable debate over Oothoon’s character, who at times in the poem masochistically reflects Theotormon’s rejection of her after the rape, as seen in the plate in Figure 24, in which she calls on Thetormon’s Eagles “to prey upon her flesh,” the design reflecting the sexual nature of the violence with which she inflicts herself (Plate 5). However, the psychological depth of her evolving awareness from this masochistic first reaction to a complex understanding that the chain of events – from her embracing her sexuality in Leutha’s vale to her rape by Bromion to her rejection by Theotormon – is not causal: namely, she distinguishes her nondual

Figure 24 Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

176  Oothoon sexuality from the virgin/whore binary of her patriarchal society. As she thus works through layers of grief and anger over the inability of Theotormon to grasp her liberation from his binaries, she moves beyond Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminism that could not reconcile female sexuality with the empowerment of women in society. At her most powerful, Oothoon goes beyond Wollstonecraft in the boldness of her denouncing Urizen as the “mistaken Demon of Heaven”; Oothoon here understands that Urizen, the patriarchal God of Christianity, has been created by Theotormon, the God-tormented Englishman who uses religion to oppress women. Yet more striking is her realization late in the poem that her sexuality has not tainted her, a revelation that leads her to denounce Theotormon’s virgin/whore binary: And does my Theotormon seek this hypocrite modesty! This knowing, artful, secret, fearful, cautious, trembling hypocrite. Then is Oothoon a whore indeed! And all the virgin joys Of life are harlots. (Erdman 49–50, Plate 6, ll. 16–19) That Oothoon cannot fully realize her vision beyond this duality imposed on women is seen in the poem’s conclusion, in which the Daughters of Albion, or British women, continue to echo Oothoon’s lament. However, before these final lines, Oothoon’s suggestion that she catch young virgins for Theotormon to enjoy and that she will “lie beside [him] on a bank & view wanton play” has been variously interpreted from masochistic to triumphantly transcendent (Erdman 50, Plate 7, l. 25). The accompanying design on the final plate reinforces the ambiguity, with three figures on the “bank” looking up at a flying figure whom one can assume to be a Daughter of Albion. That the three figures on the ground echo the three characters in Bromion’s cave (see Visions entry for discussion) suggests that Bromion and Oothoon, whose chains have been transformed to cloth blanketing them together, have more promise for redemption than Theotormon who remains in literal self-absorption.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Orc 177 Fisher, Peter. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Toronto, OH: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Orc As the rebellious son of Los, Orc embodies revolutionary energy represented as a perpetual adolescent. In his fallen state, Los chains him to a rock in jealousy tyranny. Orc’s agonistic relationship with patriarchal domination takes a variety of textual forms, from his first appearance in America to Jerusalem; he is also echoed in Blake’s designs, through such figures as Isaac dodging Abraham’s sacrifice in Blake’s ironic depiction of the biblical story (see Figure 1). Orc has been described as an ambivalent figure of revolution in the Continental Prophecies. He is violent when he rises up against the repressive rule of patriarchy represented not only by Los, but by Urizen, Enlightenment reason’s repression of creative energy. As he evolves in the Prophetic Books, Orc challenges the very notion that Urizen's realm is real, as seen at a critical juncture in Night the Seventh of Vala, or The Four Zoas, in which Orc denounces Urizen: . . . thou sitst closd up In that transparent rock as if in joy of thy bright prison Till overburdend with its own weight drawn out thro immensity With a crash breaking across the horrible mass comes down Thundring & hail & frozen iron haild from the Element (Erdman 354, p. 79, ll. 5–9) Blake depicts Orc’s defiance of Urizen’s sovereign intellect visually: while Urizen has symbolically staked out his realm by creating a ring of books around himself as a fortress, Orc’s form is its visual antithesis, represented as a ring of fire. This image of Orc is transformed at the apocalypse in Night the Ninth of Vala, or The Four Zoas. Besides his ambivalent relationships with Urizen and Los, Orc’s identification with another Zoa, Luvah, has a yet more heterodox form of ambivalence. At the heart of Blake’s cosmology is the identification of Orc as Luvah, who becomes Orc when, as Damon notes, “love suppressed has turned to hate” (256). Yet the inverse of this relationship between Luvah and Orc occurs in Vala, or The Four Zoas when Orc becomes Luvah, now identified as Jesus. Blake, at his most subversive here, connects sexual energy with the compassion of Jesus in the movement from hate to love.

178  Paine, Thomas (1737–1809)

Bibliography Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Ferber, Michael. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) This revolutionary philosopher and political theorist emigrated from England to America in 1774, his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense helping spark the American Revolution. The British government feared the influence of Paine’s radical 1790 treatise, The Rights of Man, which supported the French Revolution and attacked Burke’s On the Revolution in France. Blake admired and “celebrated Paine as a staunch defender of political liberty in his America” (Bentley 112). Supporting Paine against the attack on him by the political bishop, Richard Watson, Blake wrote that “Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop” (Erdman 620). Ironically, Blake criticized Paine, along with Watson, for his Deism. Nevertheless, as Mee observes, Blake and Paine shared the radical idea of the Bible as a target of “the cultural hegemony [that] appropriated and distorted tradition” (169). Blake admired Paine’s “courage and integrity as a political radical,” even advising Paine to flee England; Blake is thereby credited as one among several of Paine’s friends for Paine’s escape from a “vengeful government” (Bentley 113). The double meaning of “chartered” in Blake’s “London,” in which the speaker hears and sees suffering in “each charter’d street” and the “charter’d Thames,” has been attributed to Blake’s respect for Paine’s revolt against England’s oppressive adherence to the Magna Carta, especially as Burke celebrates it in his criticism of the French Revolution (Erdman 26, ll. 1–2).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Palamabron; Elynittria 179 Ferber, Michael. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Palamabron; Elynittria Of the three classes of men that the Bard describes in Milton, Palamabron represents the redeemed and Rintrah the reprobate. They embody the two choices for the underclass to relate to the Elect, an amalgam of the British government, the Royal Academy, the church, and the patronage system embodied most personally for Blake through William Hayley. The Bard identifies the hypocrisy of the elect as “Satan: with incomparable mildness”; in contrast to Rintrah’s indignation against “Satans soft dissimulation of friendship,” Palamabron responds with meekness to the cruelty of the Elect, realizing too late that “pity divides the soul/And man, unmans” (Erdman 102, Plate 8, ll. 19–20, 35). In Milton, the Bard sings of Elynittria, “Palamabron’s jealous consort,” who “with her silver arrows repelld” Leutha (Erdman 104, Plate 11[12], l. 38). She is the “mistress of the arrows of desire,” according to Bloom (914). When Leutha confesses her seduction of Palambron, Elynittria is moved to “put down her weapons” (Johnson 240–1). Although he acknowledges that one must “walk warily” when applying biography to the poetry, Frye equates Elynittria’s appearance in the Bard’s Song with Catherine, Blake’s wife, while Frye equates Palamabron with Blake and Satan with Hayley (325). For Erdman, Leutha and Elynittria appear in Europe as “ideal portraits of the queens of France and England as pictured to the youth who are being sent to war” (Prophet 223).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Commentary. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman, New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “Milton and Its Contexts.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 231–50. Print.

Palmer, Samuel (1805–81) A landscape painter and printmaker, Palmer was nineteen when he met the sixty-seven-year-old Blake through John Linnell. He wrote to Alexander Gilchrist years later that this early encounter with Blake was “one of profound

180  The Pickering Manuscript important” in his life; he describes Blake’s powerful presence: “His eye was the finest I ever saw: brilliant, but not roving, clear and intent, yet susceptible; it flashed with genius, or melted in tenderness. It could also be terrible. Cunning and falsehood quailed under it, but it was never busy with them. It pierced them, and turned away. Nor was the mouth less expressive; the lips flexible and quivering with feeling”; Palmer recalls “on one occasion, dwelling upon the exquisite beauty of the parable of the Prodigal, he began to repeat a part of it; but at the words, ‘When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him,’ could go no further; his voice faltered, and he was in tears” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 392). Those ten years were Palmer’s most productive and inspired. By 1835, Palmer’s work had become more conventional; he devoted more time to teaching and less to his own art. Palmer recalled going with Linnell to visit Blake “lame in bed, of a scalded foot (or leg). There, not inactive, though [almost] sixty-seven years old, but hard-working on a bed covered with books sat he up like one of the Antique patriarchs, or a dying Michael Angelo. Thus and there was he making in the leaves of a great book (folio) the sublimest designs from his (not superior) Dante” (Bentley Blake Records 400–1).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

Paracelsus: see Platonism

The Pickering Manuscript Blake assembled this booklet of ten handwritten, unillustrated poems, mostly in ballad form, around 1805. It is named after its 1866 owner, B. M. Pickering. Several of the Pickering ballads exist in other versions, such as “The Golden Net” and “The Grey Monk,” which appear in the Notebook. For Frye, the ballads explore the relationship between innocence and experience. Included also are “The Smile,” “The Mental Traveller,” The Land of Dreams,” “Mary,” “The Crystal Cabinet,” “Auguries of Innocence,” “Long John Brown & Little Mary Bell,” “William Bond,” and “Mr. Blake’s Nursery Rhyme.” Johnson and Grant emphasize that “[t]hese are not working drafts. . . . but the polished work of an artist able to crystallize seeping cosmic myths, profound theological speculations, bold sociopolitical critiques, and disturbing psychosexual insights into brief masterpieces of stunning originality” (395).

Platonism; Paracelsus; Plotinus 181

Bibliography Adams, Hazard. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1963. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. McClenahan, Catherine L. “No Face Like the Human Divine? Women and Gender in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript.” Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Eds. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins. Rutherford: NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. 189–207. Print. Ryscamp, Charles. “Introduction.” The Pickering Manuscript of William Blake. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1972. Print.

Platonism; Paracelsus; Plotinus New Critical, or Formalist, scholars of Blake emphasized a connection between Platonism and Blakean myth. For Raine, that connection lies in Plato’s belief that the soul’s innate forms reside in the intelligible world: “Blake’s first acquaintance with the Platonic theory of art must have come through one of Thomas Taylor’s earliest publications, Plotinus’ Concerning the Beautiful. According to Plotinus, sensible things are beautiful through their participation in form; and the forms we recognize reflected in matter . . . are innate in the soul, or intellect”; Blake, Raine continues, “adopted in its entirety the Platonic view of form, inseparable from other aspects of that philosophy,” notably the theme of the artist that Raine notes in The Four Zoas in which Los becomes the artist because he sees that “the specters of the dead can be given life only by participation in intelligible form” (I. 261–4). The Marriage of Heaven and Hell refers to Paracelsus, whom Blake includes with Jacob Boehme as producing “ten thousand volumes of equal value to Swedenborg’s” (Erdman 43, Plate 22). Raine observes that the “great difference between the Neoplatonic and the alchemical philosophies lies in their opposed conceptions of the nature of matter. For Plotinus and his school, matter is mere mire, the dregs of the universe. . . . To the alchemists, spirit and matter, active and passive, light and darkness, above and below are . . . complementary principles, both alike rooted in the divine”; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Raine continues, is “written under the direct influence of this philosophy [of alchemy]” (I, 118). Frye too connects Blake to Platonism through “a mythology rather like Blake’s theory of states. There are two great principles in life, Eros, which is energy and heat, and Venus, which is form and light. These two principles are subject and object in this world, male and female in a higher state, creator and creature in a still higher one” (154). However, unlike Raine’s suggestion of a common nondualism in stating that the “complementary principles” for both are “rooted in the divine,” Frye’s analysis maintains that these contraries are separate “principles.”

182  Poetic Genius For scholarship of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the connection may appear reductive, even if Blake had been influenced by Plato. As Blake has Los say in Jerusalem, “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans/I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Erdman 153, Plate 10, ll. 20–1). Blake problematizes any influence of Platonism with his polysemous and nondual creativity.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Plotinus: see Platonism

Poetic Genius Blake’s earliest engraved work, All Religions Are One, announces as the first Principle “That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. And that the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius. Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius” (Erdman 1). This assertion encapsulates Blakean nondualism: at the center of every person is the spirit of poetry that permeates one’s existence, expanding outward to the physical body and connecting individuals to “all things.” By the fifth Principle, Blake claims that the origin of all religions is “each Nations different reception of the Poetic genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy” (Erdman 1). Later, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake expands this definition of religion’s origin by noting that the “ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses . . . Till a system was formed” and Priesthood was created. “Thus,” Blake concludes, “men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). The Poetic Genius is divinity itself, cast out in the projections of the vengeful Gods of warring nations. This idea is echoed by Ezekiel, Blake’s dinner guest, in the following “Memorable Fancy”: “we of Israel,” Ezekiel tells Blake, “taught that the Poetic Genius . . . was the first principle and all the others merely derivative . . . all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius” (Erdman 39, Plates 12–13). In its most evolved stage of Blake’s cosmology, the Poetic Genius becomes one with Divine Humanity. In the Prophetic Book Milton, the Bard sings the story of Albion’s fall into spiritual sleep to those in Milton’s

Poetical Sketches 183 heaven; he tells the “Angels” in Milton’s heaven that he sings “According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius/Who is the eternal all-protecting divine Humanity/To whom be Glory & Power & Dominion Evermore”; while this nondualism is a sacrilege to the complacent Angels in heaven, because Milton is himself is a Poet of Genius, he heeds the call to correct his errors and thus begin his descent to the underworld of Generation. This epic journey ultimately brings about the redemption of humanity, namely, to restore the Poetic Genius to its rightful place at the center so that it may radiate outward through the universe (Erdman 108, Plate 14, ll. 1–3).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Poetical Sketches Blake’s first volume of poems, composed between the ages of twelve and twenty and printed privately by the Reverend A. S. Mathew and John Flaxman in 1783, Poetical Sketches is the only collection of Blake’s poetry conventionally printed and without illuminations. Its twenty-six poems range over most of the important genres and subjects of the late eighteenth century, although they are “boldly experimental in metrics and imagery (Johnson and Grant 1). Bentley notes that contemporary readers were perplexed with “the extraordinary range in verse form and subject: lyrics, seasons poems, dramatic sketches, created mythology, and experimental prose just one step removed from blank verse” (Stranger 79). Flaxman sent Hayley the collection as a “Pamphlet of Poems” in 1784 in the hopes of raising a subscription to send Blake to Rome, but, as Bentley notes, the “subscription never materialized and Blake never left England” (Blake Records 32). This failed attempt occurred six years before Blake’s 1800 letter of ostensible thanks to Flaxman for arranging the connection to Hayley that in turn afforded Blake an extended residence in Hayley’s cottage at Felpham. The early failure of Poetical Sketches to raise money for Blake to go to Italy supports the idea that behind Blake’s expression of gratitude in the later letter to Flaxman was a resentment that had been simmering for years towards Flaxman who himself went to Italy under a patronage he had no problem cultivating.

184  “A Poison Tree”

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print.

“A Poison Tree” Blake originally called this poem in The Songs of Experience “Christian Forbearance”; the changed title points to the evolution of the poem: while it draws on Genesis, it became a meditation of psychological depth on the nature of cruelty. The speaker observes the difference between the catharsis created when he expresses his anger to his friend compared to the festering of unexpressed anger towards his foe. It is the latter that fascinates him, the very perverse coexistence of conflicting emotions creating a metaphorical tree from the seed of anger buried in his heart: And I waterd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears: And I sunned it with smiles, And with soft deceitful wiles. (Erdman 28, ll. 5–8) The central image, the Poison Tree, is related to the Tree of Mystery in “The Human Abstract”; from the Judeo-Christian story of the fall it extracts a parable that identifies the seeds of fallenness in the traditional role of the creator. In this case, the speaker’s anger produces a poison apple that his foe eats, making him “glad [to] see [his] foe outstretchd beneath the tree” (Erdman 28, ll. 15–16). The irony of having the foe in the role of serpent stealing into the speaker’s garden complicates the traditional binary of good and evil.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. “Blake’s Self-Annihilation’: Aspect of Its Function in the Songs, with a Glance at Its History.” English (Summer 1981): 117–47. Print.

Polypus 185

Polypus In Blake’s cosmology, this lowest life form is the consequence of Enlightenment science’s reduction of nature to mere phenomena. The Polypus has enjoyed richly grotesque descriptions by scholars; as a “huge wriggling mass of life,” it dwells in the “lowest reaches of natural, fallen space . . . imaged as a monstrous sea creature” (Frye 130; Essick and Viscomi 11). As “the totality of life in the world of Generation,” the Polypus is a “huge pulpy mass of stinking life” (Frye 287). In Milton, Blake describes Milton’s descent from Eden into “Eternal Death,” a “Polypus that vegetates beneath the deep!” (Erdman 109, Plate 15, l. 8). Later, in describing Ololon’s descent in Book II, Blake has her step “into the Polypus within the Mundane Shell,” explaining that “they could not step into Vegetable Worlds without becoming/The enemies of Humanity except in Female Form” (Erdman 136–7, Plate 36, ll. 13–15). This echo of Milton’s epic descent into the Polypus is significant when it is visited by his Emanation, since it is the self-transformation of the female who had been trapped in the objectification that left her perpetually virginal and therefore trapped in Beulah that transforms the fallen state of humans “sunk below the instinct of self-preservation.” (Frye 130).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

Prophecy; Prophetic Books In his marginalia to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, Blake explains that Prophecy is not merely a production of the future: “Every honest man is a Prophet. . . . a Prophet is a Seer not an Arbitrary Dictator” (Erdman 617). Paley notes that, for Blake, the function of Prophecy “is not to predict the future but to expose the otherwise hidden motives and consequences of human decisions” (64). As early as There Is No Natural Religion, Blake introduces the connection between the Poetic Character and Prophecy, faculties not measurable by Enlightenment science: “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again” (Erdman, 3). With his characteristically paradoxical nondualism, Blake

186  Rahab; Tirzah contrasts the mechanized, Newtonian universe to the expanding power of prophecy. As a genre of illuminated engravings combining text and design, Blake’s three major Prophetic Books, Milton, Jerusalem, and Vala, or The Four Zoas, represent the culmination of Blake’s unique cosmology: they are mythical anti-narratives that variously describe the nonlinear relationship between the current state of fallenness and the potential for redemption available in an immediacy that defies time and space through the mythical embodiment of England, Albion, during whose sleep his spiritual center and female Emanation, Jerusalem, appears to be lost and during which his Zoic faculties fragment from each other and further splinter into Spectres and Emanations. Tannenbaum traces the nonlinear structure of Blake’s prophecies to the biblical prophecies, in which the “poet-orator was free to provide multiple perspectives on the same theme or the same event,” Blake’s “episodic narration and his use of abrupt transitions and rapidly shifting scenes” apparent from the early prophecies (41, 43). These narratives began with the shorter and less complex Lambeth Prophecies. Blake’s choice of six- and seven-foot lines for his narrative poems, going back to The Book of Thel, was “not a random one,” as Dorrbecker notes, for it is an elevated style Blake imitated from both the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost (22). Dorrbecker describes the transition of America from historical allegory to prophecy, inspired by Swedenborg’s notion of the “sublime allegories” of the Bible that supplied Blake with the “single most important model for the genre as well as the prosody of his Continental Prophecies” (17).

Bibliography Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Ostriker, Alicia. Vision and Verse in William Blake. Madison, WI: U Wisconsin Press, 1965. Print. Paley, Morton. Energy and Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Rahab; Tirzah In his attack on the Deists in Jerusalem, Blake writes, “He never can be a Friend to the Human Race who is the Preacher of Natural Morality or Natural Religion. He is a flatterer who means to betray, to perpetuate

Reason 187 Tyrant Pride & the Laws of that Babylon which he foresees shall shortly be destroyed, with the Spiritual and not the Natural Sword: He is in the State named Rahab: which State must be put off before he can be the Friend of Man” (Erdman 200, Plate 52). Rahab and Tirzah are aspects of a “threefold monster,” as Frye notes; “Chief of them is Satan, the Covering Cherub. . . . Another is the Rahab or Great Whore . . ., the ultimate fallen form of Vala. . . . The third is Tirzah, the shrouding womb of the physical universe out of which we must break to live” (Frye 301). Bloom notes that Blake’s Rahab, having descending from the Book of Joshua, then through Dante, is the “unredeemable harlot of Babylon, the Mystery of the book of Revelation,” and therefore an ironic departure “from the typological reading of Rahab in the Bible of heaven,” for she is “an orthodox type of the Church” (283). As is always the case with Blake’s depictions of gender and sexuality in his cosmology, one must be cautious about assuming representations of misogyny reflect Blake’s authorial subjectivity. Rahab, “Religion hid in War,” is a hermaphrodite, whose yoking together of apparent Contraries stands as a grotesque parody of the nondual, androgynous state, Eden, an equipoise of binaries whose fluidity contrasts the effect of Rahab as an obstacle to unity.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Rosso, George. “The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in Its Biblical Contexts.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 287–326. Print.

Reason Throughout Blake’s career, reason is portrayed as the oppressor that inhibits energy. Reason is the hallmark of Enlightenment thought as seen in the writings of the philosophers Blake consistently decries, including Newton, Locke, Bacon, and Voltaire. In There Is No Natural Religion, Blake provides a counterargument to their collective voice as man’s “reasoning power” that allows him to “compare & judge” only what “he has already perciev’d”; in his indignation against this Deistic insistence on the passivity of the mind, Blake counters, “Reason or the ratio of all we have already known. Is not the same that it shall be when we know more” (Erdman 2). Here, Blake takes the Greek term, ratio, to create a derogatory term for the reductiveness of reason.

188  Reuben Urizen is the Zoa associated with reason who dominates the others in the fallen world and who must work in equipoise with the others, reintegrated with his Emanation, Ahania, in order to awaken Albion from his spiritual sleep and who would, in turn, thus be re-integrated with his own Emanation, Jerusalem. Before Blake’s developed cosmology, however, reason appears in other forms throughout his work. In An Island on the Moon, the caricatures that include Etruscan Column the Antiquarian, Obtuse Angle, and Inflammable Gass argue over an unnamed author; when the Antiquarian dismisses the author, Inflammable Gass says, “Your reason Your reason . . . why why I think it very abominable to call a man a blockhead that you know nothing of” to which the Antiquarian gives him an incoherent example he prefaces with “Reason Sir” (Erdman 450). By the time Inflammable Gass’s demand for “Your reason” becomes Urizen in the Prophetic Books, the satire has deepened to a cosmological irony.

Bibliography Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie, G. A. Rosso and Christopher Hobson, eds. Blake, Politics, and History. New York: Garland, 1998. Print. ———. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Worrall, David. “Blake and the 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture.” Blake in the 90s. Eds. S. Clark and D. Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 194–211. Print. ———, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

[Relief etching: see Engraving]

Reuben This son of Jacob appears in Vala, or The Four Zoas, along with his brother Levi. Harold Bloom suggests that, while Albion is identified with Jacob, “Adamic man” is associated with his sons. Bloom theorizes that this reference was added later, “probably imported back into the Zoas manuscript from Jerusalem” (230). Reuben reappears in Jerusalem, along with Hand, a figure of Blake’s creation, as “natural or ordinary man” (Bloom 423). Frye notes that Hand is Reuben’s Spectre, whereas his immortal aspect, imagination, is called Merlin (376). When Reuben is redeemed at the end of Jerusalem, he is freed from his “twelvefold

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92) 189 wanderings,” which, as Bloom suggests, means rescuing all the tribes, that is to say all men, from their ordeal in the wilderness and planting them in the “Divine Analogy” of the whole cycle of history (471). John Pierce identifies a series of thematically congruent events in the Reuben episode of Jerusalem: “All share the common idea of limiting the senses, yet. . . . the fear Reuben feels and inspires while being transformed by Los is experienced as the terror of the sublime, a terror which ennobles the mind and expands the imagination” (768).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Korshin, Paul J. Typologies in England 1650–1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. 348–58. Print. Pierce, John B. “Typological Narrative in the Reuben Episode of Jerusalem.” SEL 33 (Autumn 1993): 755–70. Print.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92) Primarily a portrait painter, Reynolds was director of the Royal Academy while Blake was studying there. Representing for Blake the oppressive rule of the powerful Elect, Reynolds recommended that Blake “work with less extravagance and more simplicity,” an “affront” Blake saw as “a kind of conspiracy to depress divine imagination and inspired art” (Bentley 52). As Blake writes in his marginalia to Reynolds’s 1798 Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Having spent the Vigour of my Youth & genius under the Opression [sic] of Sr Joshua & his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, the Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks on these Books Nothing but Indignation & Resentment”; Blake goes on to connect Reynolds’s oppression of the energy of inspired art with his “rolling in Riches[.] Barry was Poor & . . . called a Madman & only Portrait Painting applauded & rewarded by the Rich & Great” (Erdman 636). That the wealthy who reward the likes of Reynolds, “hired to depress art,” in turn connects Blake’s indignation to the three classes of men in his Prophetic Books: Fuseli may still have the potential to be Rintrah the revolutionary who opposes the Elect, whereas Blake here fears he is closer to Palamabron, impotent in meekness: “Fuseli Indignant hid himself – I [was] hid” (Erdman 635, 636).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Print.

190  Rintrah Eaves, Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print.

Rintrah The wrathful prophet who appears in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton, Rintrah embodies one of two possible responses of the oppressed to the Elect, the wealthy and powerful in society. For Blake, the Elect takes many forms, from government to religion to his patron, Hayley. However, the elect is most directly identified as Satan in the Bard’s Song at the opening of Milton, which tells of “the Three Classes of Mortal Men. . . . The first, The Elect . . . The second, The Redeem’d. The Third, The Reprobate” (Erdman Complete Works 100, Plate 5, l. 32–Plate 6, l. 2). Rintrah is the revolutionary who defies the oppression of the Elect. The other possible response is to be Palamabron, meek and ineffectual. Thus, Rintrah, as opposed to Palamabron, requires “expression to free Blake from the bonds, both economic and psychic, tying him to Hayley” (Essick and Viscomi 15). Even before the “Three Classes of Men” appear in the Prophetic Books Rintrah makes his first appearance as the first word in the “Argument” to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air,” a phrase that also ends the Argument (Erdman 33, Plate 2, l. 1). Invoking the fiery reprobate is an appropriate announcement that will be echoed by the biblical prophet Isaiah, “the voice of honest indignation” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). Yet it is also significant that Blake begins the work not with Isaiah or Ezekiel, but with a name none of his readers would be familiar with; while references to the Bible are scattered throughout the Argument, including the serpent and “Red clay,” the literal meaning of Adam, Blake disorients the reader from the start by resisting a clear identification between the biblical story and his own so that the reader’s “perilous path” through the text mirrors that of Rintrah.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. “Blake’s Bible of Hell: Prophecy as Political Program.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 37–52. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867) 191

Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867) A lawyer and journalist who was fascinated by Blake, Robinson tried to find out and record all he could about Blake. Although he referred to Blake years later as “the insane poet painter & engraver,” Robinson saw him as “this extraordinary genius” (quoted in Bentley 296). Robinson’s anecdotes about Blake are an important source for knowledge about Blake’s conversation and reputation among his contemporaries, such as in Robinson’s anecdote about giving a copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience to Wordsworth, whose response was “this man is mad, but there is something in this madness which I enjoy more than the Sense of [Sir Walter] Scott and Lord [Byron]”; conversely, Robinson’s conversation with Blake reveal that Blake “admired” Wordsworth in spite of considering him “an atheist,” to which Robinson “protested”; Blake explained, “Who ever worships nature denies God”; Robinson thereupon remarks that Blake “always beat [him] in an argument,” adding that Blake nevertheless “almost went into a fit of rapture at” Wordsworth’s “platonic ode” (quoted in Bentley 313).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E., ed. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print.

Royal Academy In 1779, Blake was admitted to study as an engraver at the Academy. It was founded with royal patronage in 1768; two of its directors, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence, were knighted. Established as “the primary avenue to fame and fortune for artists in Britain,” its classical ideal was meant to be “suitable for the walls and cabinets of connoisseurs”; Blake, whose training had been in the Gothic style of Westminster Abbey, found the rigid dictates of the Academy’s neo-classicism repressive (Bentley Stranger 49). Among the “high-spirited” young artists at the Academy who were irreverent towards its keeper, George Michael Moser, Blake recalls in his annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses that, when “looking over the Prints from Rafael & Michael Angelo. in the Library of the Royal Academy,” Moser commented, “You should not Study these old Hard, Stiff & Dry, Unfinish’d Works of Art. . . . How I did secretly Rage!” Blake responded to Moser, “These things that you call Finishd are not Even Begun how can they then, be Finish’d? The Man who does not know The Beginning never can know the End of Art” (Erdman 639). The Academy’s 1785 exhibition included four of Blake’s drawings that were excoriated in an anonymous review that describes the figure of “Gray’s Bard” in Blake’s eponymous drawing as appearing “like some lunatic, just

192  Satan; serpent; devil escaped from the incurable cell of Bedlam; in respect of his other works, we assure the designer, that grace does not consist in the sprawling of legs and arms” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 40). Blake’s outrage against such rejection of his designs by this bastion of institutionalized art fueled the acrimony underlying the Prophetic Books, as in the 1804 Preface to Milton, when Blake rails against the “Fashionable Fools” who “depress [the] powers” of the “Painters! . . . Sculptors! Architects!” (Erdman 95, Plate 1). After the Royal Academy refused to exhibit his watercolors, Blake organized an exhibit at his brother’s residence. In the 1809 advertisement to the exhibit, Blake challenged “those who have been told that my Works are but an unscientific and irregular Eccentricity, a Madman’s Scrawls,” demanding of them “to do me the justice to examine before they decide” (Erdman 528).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Eaves. Morris. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Satan; serpent; devil Although one of the ways Satan manifests in Blake’s cosmology is as his patron, Hayley, Blake asserts that Satan is a state rather than an individual, a revelation for Milton that ultimately liberates him from his previous errors in his eponymous Prophetic Book. Raine observes that Blake equates the state of Satan with war, for “as God resides in man, so does Satan,” the “sum of those ‘dead’ from eternity, the specters”; he invents “a moral code based upon the false belief that individuals can of themselves be good or evil,” and therefore if “individuals can be evil, then the good will feel justified in burning them or making war upon them . . . a blasphemy against the Divine Humanity” (53, 214, 229–30). According to Blake’s cosmology, Albion is prevented from falling into eternal death by the limits of opacity, Satan, and of contraction, Adam. It is important to distinguish the devil in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell from Satan; while the latter is closer to the “sneaking serpent” in the Argument to the Marriage, the voice of the devil is a satirical view of the revolutionary from the perspectives of the self-regarded angels. In the Prophetic Books, Satan is the composite Elect, “whose evil resides in the manipulation of false pity and the promotion of repressive conventions” (Essick and Viscomi 15). Blake’s subversion of the biblical Satan can be seen in “Eve Tempted by the Serpent” (Figure 25), in which Blake renders the story of Genesis as he

Satan; serpent; devil 193

Figure 25 Eve Tempted by the Serpent (1799–1800), Victoria and Albert Museum

does his “Bible of Hell”: here, Eve is at the center of the painting, clearly in motion, with her arms extended and feet in mid-step, embodying both beauty and sexual energy in her engagement with the serpent whose coils echo both her hair and the tree that in turn suggests the Tree of Knowledge. Whether Eve is reaching up for the apple or the serpent has it in his mouth, perhaps offered by Eve in a reversal of the biblical story, their intimacy with each other and with the landscape that the serpent appears to have emerged from stands in striking contrast to Adam who is asleep, perhaps reflecting the spiritual sleep of Albion in Blake’s Prophetic Books, although others such as Michael suggest that this is “Adam’s dream” (166). The more subversive reading, however, is truer to Blake’s larger cosmology: by taking Adam’s subjectivity away rather than giving it the dominance that Milton does in Paradise Lost, Eve’s relationship with Satan as serpent is more lively and, by extension, spiritual, than that with an Adam, who cannot embrace Eve’s vision or energy.

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Essick, Robert and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print.

194  Scolfield, John Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Framing Eve: Reading Blake’s Illustrations.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 159–69. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Scolfield, John In 1803, while Blake was living in William Hayley’s cottage at Felpham, an incident occurred that affected Blake for the rest of his life. As he described it in a letter to Butts that year, a soldier named Scolfield was invited into Blake’s garden “as an assistant by a Gardener at work therein” without Blake’s knowledge; when Blake “desired him as politely as was possible to go out of the Garden, he made an impertinent answer,” at which point Blake “insisted” he leave (Erdman 732). Blake continues, “He then threatend to knock out my Eyes with many abominable imprecations. . . . [I]t affronted my foolish Pride[.] I therefore took him by the Elbows & pushed him before me till I had got him out. . . . I perhaps foolishly & perhaps not, stepped out at the Gate & putting aside his blows took him again by the Elbows & keeping his back to me pushed him forwards (Erdman 732). When Blake got Scolfield “to where he was Quarterd,” they were “met at the Gate by the Master of the house,” who was also the proprietor of Blake’s cottage, along with his wife and daughter (Erdman 732). Blake is careful to explain that “not one word of threat on account of Sedition was utterd at that time. This method of Revenge [a charge of sedition] was Plannd between them after they had got together in to the Stable” (Erdman 732). Before a magistrate a few days later, Scolfield offered the following deposition: “Blake a Miniature painter . . . did utter the following seditious expressions viz. That we (meaning the people of England) were like a parcel of Children, that . . . if Buonapart sho[ul]d come he wo[ul]d be master of Europe in an hour’s time . . ., that every Englishman wo[ul]d be put to his choice whether to have his throat cut or to join the French. . . . that he Damned the King of England” (Bentley Blake Records 160). While Scolfield’s soldier friend, John Cock, claimed to have heard Blake’s seditious words, Blake’s own Memorandum, along with the testimony of a neighbor, Mrs. Haynes, refuted Scolfield’s accusations. Blake’s trial the following January was a source of great anxiety for him. Hayley knew it was imperative that he make a public appearance in defense of Blake; having suffered injuries from a fall off his horse, Hayley wrote in his autobiography that he said to his physician, “You must patch me up very speedily, for living or dying, I must make a public appearance within a few days at the Trial of our Friend Blake” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 183). Hayley’s friend Samuel Rose was engaged as counsel for Blake; at the conclusion of the case that Rose made for Blake’s innocence he “apparently broke down and could not continue his speech, as Hayley explained later” (Bentley Blake Records 183). Rose was later “highly complimented by the Duke of Richmond” for

Self-annihilation; selfhood; states 195 his defense of Blake and “magnificently remunerated by Hayley” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 194). Blake was not only shaken by the accusation of Scofield and the subsequent trial, but, more deeply, he was disturbed by his dependence on Hayley for clearing his name and regaining his freedom. The incident became an important element in Blake’s cosmology in which he represents the crisis through the figures of Rintrah, Palamabron, and the Elect: whereas Hayley, as a respected member of the ruling class, embodies the Elect, Blake himself has the choice between being the reprobate, Rintrah, a class of fiery rebels who “never cease to believe,” or Palamabron, the “redeemed” class, the obsequious and passive tool of the Elect, “who live in doubts & fears perpetually tormented by the Elect” (Erdman 122, Plate 25, ll. 35–6). Scolfield himself appears at the opening of Jerusalem in a catalogue of “terrible sons & daughters of Albion” that “revolve most mightily upon/The furnace of Los . . . to desolate Golgonooza” (Erdman 147, Plate 5, ll. 27–9).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Self-annihilation; selfhood; states When Milton hears the Bard’s Song at the opening of his eponymous Prophetic Book, he understands that he is the Satan he created in Paradise Lost: “I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One!/He is my Spectre! In my obedience to loose him from my Hells . . . I go to Eternal Death” (Erdman 108, Plate 14, ll. 30–2). That Milton is a great but flawed poet Blake had proclaimed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; here in Milton Blake shows him taking off “the robe of promise” in his Puritan heaven to correct his errors. The very notion of selfhood in Paradise Lost is for Blake Milton’s foundational error, for it was his own revolutionary energy that brought his character Satan to life while God and the Angels were devoid of life. Later in Book II, just before and perhaps a catalyst to Ololon’s descent from Beulah into Generation, Milton is instructed to deepen his understanding of his identity being bound up with Satan as well as Adam: We are not Individuals but states: Combinations of Individuals. . . . Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States. States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease:

196  Sexuality; eros; androgyny; Leutha You cannot go to Eternal death in that which can never Die. . . . Thou O Milton art a State about to be Created. (Erdman 132, Plate 32, ll. 10, 22–6) Raine notes that Selfhood has “nothing to do with ‘selfishness. . . .’ The belief in the substantial existence of the human individuality and the denial of the divine influx has as its consequence the supposition that the world perceived by the senses is all” (216). Raine traces Blake’s use of the term “states” to Swedenborg from whom, she claims, Blake derives the “concept of the composite life of states”; the implications for the artist are paramount since “true poetry begins where human personality ends,” the lesson Milton must learn from his epic descent into Generation (240, 247). As Essick and Viscomi observe of Milton, Blake introduces “a form of self-annihilation that attempts to overcome the self-centredness that radically divides a single self or a community from all others and casts that other as the enemy”; they assert that Blake’s “critique of selfhood goes to the heart of Western metaphysics”; Blake replaces the unitary self with a “more fluid and open concept of being where the gulf between self and other is bridged – indeed, annihilated” (12). Once Milton understands that Satan and Adam are states rather than individuals that he himself has accessed in writing his epic, Milton makes way for the return of Ololon, a yet more difficult aspect of his identity with which Milton must come to terms as his repressed, androgynous self.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. “Blake’s Self-Annihilation’: Aspect of Its Function in the Songs, with a Glance at Its History.” English (Summer 1981): 117–47. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Selfhood: see Self-annihilation Serpent: see Satan

Sexuality; eros; androgyny; Leutha Though discredited later, an apocryphal story circulated in 1815 in which Thomas Butts found William and Catherine Blake in their garden at Felpham reciting Paradise Lost “freed from ‘those troublesome disguises’ which prevailed since the Fall” (Bentley xxvi). True or not, the story offers an insight into Blake’s view of the relationship between innocence and sexual experience. His garden becomes suggestive of an Eden that we can return to, unlike

Sexuality; eros; androgyny; Leutha 197 the Eden of the Bible. As Blake articulated it in a pencil note on the manuscript of Vala, or The Four Zoas: “Unorganized innocence: an impossibility. Innocence dwells with wisdom, never with ignorance” (Erdman 838, n. 19). In Jerusalem, Blake writes that Albion sees “his Sons assimilate with Luvah, bound in the bonds/Of spiritual Hate, from which springs Sexual Love as iron chains” (Erdman 203, Plate 54, ll. 11–12). Raine suggests that the fallen state, in which love comes about because of the “apparent separateness of individuals,” contrasts the spiritual world, in which “natural ‘love’ becomes unnecessary because the same life is in all,” a view she claims Blake held from early in his career, citing The Book of Urizen (212–13). Raine disagrees with earlier critics such as Saurat who believed that Blake condemned sexual love; Raine counters that, in poems such as “Ah! Sun-flower” and The Gates of Paradise, the “Sexual Garments” are part of the natural order and that in “any attempt to locate chastity” there is “hypocrisy” (215). Blake’s challenge to the binary of chastity and sexual experience has significant implications for the way he represents women in his poetry and design. At the opening of Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon embraces her sexuality, symbolized by her wandering through Leutha’s vale, the realm of sexuality; as she states in the Argument, she “plucked Leutha’s flower,” an active version of the traditionally passive idea of the woman being “deflowered” through sexual intercourse with a man (Erdman 45, Plate iii, l. 5). Instead of identifying with the traditional role of the reticent virgin towards masculine sexual domination, she embraces a Marygold who appears either female or androgynous (see Figure 26). That Oothoon’s choosing her own sexuality is followed by her rape by Bromion creates confusion on her part, and the rest of the poem is devoted to her exploration of whether there was a causal relationship between her embracing her sexuality and the rape; the two events also form the catalyst to the dialogic structure of the rest of the poem that takes up the voices of repression, oppression, and indignation represented by Theotormon, Bromion, and Oothoon, respectively, about the blame cast on women for both their sexuality and their victimization by men and the patriarchal structure of society. Some of the most interesting recent scholarship regarding Blake’s cosmology has dealt with the representation of sexuality that sometimes transcends, sometimes defies, heteronormative tradition. Colebrooke discusses sexual difference in Blake’s cosmology that needs to be distinguished from the traditional male/female binary that in turn is “accompanied by a sexual vitalism: as long as the feminine is understood as an alien, threatening, fallen and unproductive harlot or whore there can be no productive life, but if the feminine is incorporated in a fruitful and dynamic contrary then sexual difference will be the opening to new life and renovated perception” (23). Androgyny as an ideal has been a critical commonplace in Blake studies for decades, the reintegration of Zoas and Emanations being generally agreed upon as foundational to Albion’s redemption. However, criticism

Figure 26 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon leans in for the embrace of an ambiguously gendered Marygold in Leutha’s Vale (1793), Library of Congress, Rosenwald Rare Book Collection

The Song of Los 199 has more recently been interested in homoeroticism in Blake’s poetics and design. Hobson notes that 2010 was a year marked by milestones in the publication of scholarly studies in these fields; before then, he observes, discussion of sexuality in Blake shied away from inquiring into ambiguities of gender identification in Blake’s figures beyond a cursory note of “indeterminately male or female” (“Normalizing,” 223). Hobson concludes, however, that the field needs to continue its exploration of “delegitimizing heteronormativity and heteronormalization in Blake studies; expanding historicized knowledge of homosexuality in Blake’s era; and comprehending Blake’s extraordinarily wide sense of both standard and perverse sexuality” (“Normalizing,” 233).

Bibliography Atwood, Craig. “Christ and the Bridal Bed: Eighteenth-Century Moravian Erotic Spirituality as a Possible Influence on Blake.” Re-Envisioning Blake. Ed. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 160–79. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Colebrooke, Claire. “Blake, Literary History and Sexual Difference.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 16–25. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: U Michigan P, 1992. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Hobson, Christopher. “Normalizing Perversity: Blake and Homosexuality in 2013. Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. 2013. 221–34. Print. ———. Blake and Homosexuality. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeoius Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Saurat, Denis. Blake and Modern Thought. London: Constable, 1929. Print.

Song: see Language

The Song of Los This poem’s two parts, “Africa” and “Asia,” are linked to the two earlier Continental Prophecies, America and Europe. Although Blake calls this a “Song,” it is not a lyrical poem, but a song in the “bardic tradition,” as Dorrbecker notes; Los’s audience, including Urizen and Ariston, “shudder” at Los’s account of oppression and revolution, perhaps aware that they are

200  The Song of Los the “villains of the story that is to follow,” since the poem condemns “the unholy alliance of church and state” (Dorrbecker 298, 288, 296). Cox has observed the “dualistic distinctions” that organize the Song, “[c]hief among them [being] the distinction between freedom and law,” the “Asia” section following “Africa’s” presentation of religious corruption with political corruption (162). “Africa” contextualizes Christianity in the span of the longer history of religion, a subject that Blake articulated first in All Religions Are One and developed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses . . . Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood” (Erdman 38, Plate 11). In the “Africa” section of Song of Los, Blake describes the postlapserian, natural world created by Urizen. After the poem opens with Noah and Adam as the two patriarchs, the sons of Los, with the exception of Orc, have been “involved in upholding Urizen’s stern government,” suggesting “the role of the earliest priests who had stolen and perverted the ‘Poetic Genius’ ”(Dorrbecker 292). Howard and others take issue with those who criticize the “Africa” section for its historical compression and extensive cataloging of names from the history of religion and philosophy. Bloom, for instance, claims it is devoid of all poetry because “the burden of religious and intellectual history from Adam and Noah to Rousseau and Voltaire is rather too much for a poem of fifty- two lines” (174). “Asia” takes up Orc’s political revolution against the tyranny of monarchy, symbolized through Urizen’s authority. Orc brings about apocalypse, but, as Cox notes, “He is not allowed to do anything but rise in glory. Limited in this way, he has little opportunity to get into trouble, but his opportunities to explain things are correspondingly limited” (163).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience 201

Songs of Innocence and of Experience Subtitled Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, Blake’s most well-known and admired work suggests a dynamic interaction between and even among various poems, in turn both between and even within Innocence and Experience. The Innocence collection was etched in 1789, although three Songs appeared in 1784 in An Island in the Moon. Twenty-one copies of Innocence and twenty-seven of the combined collection were printed. As Johnson and Grant observe, the relationship of Innocence and Experience is “not one of direct, static contrast but of shifting tensions,” suggesting that Innocence should be considered “a condition of mind and spirit, a freshness of perspective” rather than “a pastoral idyll” for “within the state of Innocence . . . there is the possibility of change and even of corruption” (16). In 1793 Blake began publishing the Experience volume. The combined volume, dated 1794, was issued repeatedly through 1826 although Blake continued to produce the Innocence volume separately as customers ordered it. Blake rearranged the order of the Songs in most copies, adding “To Tirzah” to Experience after 1805. Many readers have sought to contextualize the Songs in Blake’s political context. According to Worrall, “Blake’s Songs are reflective of [the] groundswell of political contrariety in which songs, pamphlets and anonymous letters . . . competed for ideological supremacy in a society undergoing rapid political polarization” (205). For Thompson, more specifically, Innocence was written at the time Blake became involved with the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, while Experience was written when Blake came to embrace revolutionary energy, whose “explicitness in social and political criticism . . . aligns the Experience songs with the advanced radicalism of the times” (173). The Experience volume includes images of “prematurely blighted and embittered children, dark forests, sick flowers, wild beasts, the black and bloody city, and the poisonous dead Tree of Mystery that grows in the human brain” (Johnson and Grant 17).

Bibliography Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. “Blake’s Self-Annihilation’: Aspect of Its Function in the Songs, with a Glance at Its History.” English (Summer 1981): 117–47. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print. Worrall, David. “Blake and the 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture.” Blake in the Nineties. Eds. Steve Clarke and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 194–211. Print.

202  Space and time; vortex

Space and time; vortex Blake’s concepts of space and time derive from his reaction against eighteenth-century materialist philosophy. His cosmology challenges the dualities of inner and outer distinctions as well as linear progression, particularly in his most radical revision of the Christian belief in an apocalypse at the end of time: for Blake, it is potential in any moment. At the beginning of his eponymous Prophetic Book, Milton descends from the Puritan heaven he created in Paradise Lost into Generation; this is the world as “the Sea of Time & Space,” ironically the underworld of his epic journey. Yet the world of time and space is scrambled, for “what was underneath soon seemd above”; as “Miltons shadow [falls]/Precipitant loud thundering into the Sea of Time & Space,” Blake first apprehends Milton as a physical presence in the Newtonian universe: “in the Zenith as a falling star,/Descending perpendicular” (Erdman 110, Plate 15, ll. 39–48). Later in the poem, the continuum of time and space undergoes yet deeper transformation: Los and Enitharmon fall from a state of expanding senses to the fixed and deadened world of time and space until Los can redeem them, at which point the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events of Time start forth & are conceivd in such a Period Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery (Erdman 127, Plate 29, l. 1–3) Raine identifies Boehme as the source for Blake’s concept of the door into eternity, the “opening of centers” (155). This coexistence of eternity with time and infinity with space is most famously represented in “Auguries of Innocence”: To see the World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour (Erdman 490) By contrast to the redeemed center is the recurring image of the vortex in the Prophetic Books’ descriptions of fallen movement. According to Essick and Viscomi, the vortex defines time and space “by a journey both spiritual and physical based on a geometry not of three axial dimensions but of the cone. Such a journey is repetitious . . . as the traveller spirals along the cone, and yet is progressive as the pilgrim . . . moves from the mouth of the cone to its tip, comes to the tip of another cone, and spirals expansively along its surface to infinity/eternity” (11).

Spectre 203 In Vala, or The Four Zoas, Urizen’s progress through his dens is vortical, a self-created chaos around an empty center: His dismal voyage . . . Creating many a Vortex fixing many a Science in the deep And thence throwing his ventrous limbs into the Vast unknown Swift Swift from Chaos to chaos from voice to voice a road immense. (Erdman 349, p. 72, ll. 9–15) Urizen is the descendent of the narrator of the “Mad Song,” who feels the “vault of heaven” pressing down on him; Urizen goes further yet in the perversion of redeemed vision, creating a vacuous center surrounded by chaos.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Spectre In Blake’s cosmology, the fragmentation that ensues when Albion falls asleep involves not only the splintering of Zoas from their Emanations, but of their further fragmentation into Spectres. Raine identifies Plato and Plotinus as the sources for Blake’s Spectres; they are the souls who have descended through the gate of birth into Generation; they are dead, she explains, through “the loss of the vision of eternity” (264). The fallen male characters of the earlier narratives, particularly Theotormon and Bromion in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, can be seen as prototypes for the Spectres. Like their precursors, the Spectres are misogynists, seeing the Emanations as interchangeable; there is a pattern among them in confusing female identities in Vala, or The Four Zoas. Tharmas confuses Enion for Vala (Erdman 365, p. 93); later, after Urizen hears Ahania’s story of Vala’s seduction of Albion, he says, “Art thou become like Vala” (Erdman 366, p. 94, l. 8). In this way, Blake’s misogynistic male characters must be seen as objects of his criticism rather than his mouthpieces. In Jerusalem, Albion’s Spectre takes on the role assigned to Urizen in the other Prophetic Books: he is “the Reasoning Power in every Man” (Erdman 203, 54, 7). More specifically, he embodies Deism, cut off from Divine Vision: “I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power!” (Erdman 203, Plate 54, ll. 16).

204  Spurzheim, J. G. (1776–1832); Cowper, William (1731–1800)

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Vine, Steven. Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Print.

Spurzheim, J. G. (1776–1832); Cowper, William (1731–1800) The German phrenologist Spurzheim wrote Observations on Insanity in 1817, a book Blake comments on through his marginalia. In one particularly moving annotation, Blake reflects on the ironic claim of the so-called rational founders of Enlightenment thought, Bacon, Newton, and Locke, and one of the mad poets they disparage, Cowper, a highly respected poet long considered to be a forerunner of canonical Romanticism, best known for his epic The Task. Cowper was institutionalized for madness from 1763–5. In his annotations to Spurzheim’s 1817 Observations on Insanity, Blake writes, Cowper came to me and said, O that I were insane always I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane. I will never rest till I am so O that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us – over us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – from Bacon, Newton and Locke. (Erdman 663) Here Blake suggests that Cowper’s so-called insanity was the means by which he was free to write the greatest of his poetry that broke so early from neo-classical constraints. Madness thus becomes a social category, reflecting on anyone who ventures beyond the rigid paradigm of Enlightenment thought, as Blake indicates by invoking the “unholy trinity” of Bacon, Newton, and Locke from which he has Cowper say Blake protects himself through a madness Cowper envies. The theme of madness recurs throughout Blake’s work, beginning with “Mad Song” of Poetical Sketches where he explores the psychology of the willful and therefore insane denial of energy among Enlightenment thinkers.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Adams, Hazard. Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97) 205 ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Youngquist, Paul. Madness and Blake’s Myth. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1989. Print.

States: see Self-annihilation

Stedman, John Gabriel (1744–97) In 1791, Captain John Stedman commissioned Blake to make sixteen engravings based on Stedman’s own illustrations for his Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. The text describes Stedman’s life in Surinam, including his ambivalent reaction to the oppression of Dutch colonists there. Having fallen in love with a slave named Joanna, Stedman cannot buy her freedom and returns to England without her. Scholarship has condemned “Stedman’s ineffectual . . . response to the cruel treatment of women and his complicity in the slave system”; in an episode illustrated by Blake, Stedman “made matters worse when he tried to stop an overseer from whipping a female slave” (Eaves et al. 232). Stedman met Blake in 1793, after Blake’s engraving of the last ten plates of Stedman’s Narrative; it was the beginning of a friendship that Stedman recorded in his journal for the following two years, apparently forged by Blake’s attempts to intercede between Stedman and Johnson, who, as publisher of the Narrative, “mard [the book] intirely [sic]” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 67). The influence of the text on Visions of the Daughters of Albion has been widely observed, with Theotormon’s refusal to hear Oothoon or even look up from his fetal position at the margin of Bromion’s cave following Oothoon’s rape by Bromion suggests Blake’s indictment of Stedman’s emotional paralysis and ambivalence.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Stedman, John. Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. 1796. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/copy. xq?copyid=bb499.1&java=no. Web.

206  Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834)

Stothard, Thomas (1755–1834) This painter was known as “a prolific inventor of charming vignettes for the booksellers” (Bentley 22). Along with Cumberland and Flaxman, Stothard occasionally sailed with Blake. In one such expedition, Blake, Stothard, and another friend were arrested as spies and eventually released, an adventure that Blake represented in an etching that may have been designed by Stothard (Bentley 24). Stothard’s daughter later remembered Blake as “that amiable, eccentric, and greatly gifted artist, who produced so many works indicative of a high order of genius and sometimes no less of an unsound mind” (quoted in Bentley 23). Far less charitable, however, is Blake’s only reference to Stothard. In an 1803 letter to his brother, James, Blake writes, Stothard was & will be no further My friend than he is compelld by circumstances. The truth is As a Poet he is frightend at me & as a Painter his views & mine are opposite he thinks to turn me into a Portrait Painter as he did Poor Romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do. (Erdman 725) The bitterness here is a theme in Blake’s writing about false friends, from the “Smile of Deceit” in his poem “The Smile” (Erdman 482, l. 2) to “the sneaking serpent” who “walks/In mild humility” in the Argument to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Erdman 33, Plate 2, ll. 17–18) to the wry prayer in Milton, “O God protect me from my friends, that they have not power over me/Thou hast giv’n me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies” (Erdman102, Plate 9, ll. 5–6).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772) This Swedish mystic appears at various stages of Blake’s writing with so much ambivalence that the question of his influence on Blake continues to be debated. Swedenborg began his career with an emphasis on astronomy, physiology, biology, and psychology, exploring these scientific pursuits in conjunction with philosophy and religion. Swedenborg shifted his focus to that of visionary and spiritual leader in 1749, a period when his travels outside Sweden included London. Swedenborg had a vision in which the old church was replaced by the New Church that Swedenborg saw as the New Jerusalem heralding the

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772) 207 second coming of the Messiah. The year of this vision was 1757, the year of Blake’s birth – a synchronicity Blake treats satirically in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. After Swedenborg died his publishers, translators, and followers organized a Swedenborgian New Church or Church of the New Jerusalem in London, circulating his works widely. Swedenborg’s devotees hoped to prove his apotheosis when they opened his tomb, only to discover his “unresurrection,” a catalyst for Blake’s satire of Swedenborg in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Eaves et al. 119). Scholars have differed about the phases of Blake’s relationship to Swedenborg. While Raine connects Blake’s symbolism to Swedenborg’s notion of correspondence between the physical world and spiritual essence, she gives the more equivocal description of that correspondence as “neither the beginning nor the end of Blake’s deep interest in Swedenborg,” whose “visions” form the “raw material” of Blake’s poetry (3–4). Erdman, by contrast, challenges Blake’s early Swedenborgianism as mere legend, noting that the “direct influence” of Swedenborg’s writings was “slight, except . . . through opposition”; “Blake at all times kept his distance from the Swedenborgian doctrine of the ‘divine humanity’ ” (134, 154). As Bentley speculates, based on Blake’s having bought copies of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell and Divine Wisdom, he most likely received “a general Invitation . . . to all the Readers of the Theological Works of the Hon. Emanuel Swedenborg, who are desirous of rejecting, and separating themselves from the Old Church” (50). Blake’s initial response to Swedenborg’s writings in the late 1780s was one of overt excitement over what seemed to be intellectual daring, bringing together Enlightenment rationalism with religious vision. Yet while Blake was enthusiastic about Swedenborg when he discovered his writings, Blake “began to have second thoughts very soon,” as Bentley notes, soon becoming “actively hostile” to Swedenborg (53). Blake eventually dismissed the so-called “visionary” as a mere “sheep in wolf’s clothing” (Eaves et al. 119); Blake came to understand Swedenborg’s system as dualistic, more akin to the status quo than revolting against it; compared to Blake’s own cosmology of a subsuming consciousness that holds apparent polarities in equipoise, Swedenborg uses a false scientific paradigm to systematize his mysticism.

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. “Blake’s Early Swedenborgianism: A Twentieth-Century Legend.” Comparative Literature 5 (1953): 247–57. Print.

208  Tatham, Frederick (1805–1878) Essick, Robert N. and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Tatham, Frederick (1805–1878) A disciple of Blake’s who came to have a “surprising influence on Blake’s life and reputation,” Tatham was the son of an architect, Charles Heathcote Tatham, whom Blake admired (Bentley 402). Tatham marveled at Blake’s gift for languages, claiming, “I have possessed books well thumbed and dirtied by his graving hands, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian” (quoted in Bentley 230). Tatham took in Catherine Blake as his housekeeper after William’s death. He became heir to her collection of Blake’s “residue of his Works being Drawings, Sketches & Copper Plates”; Tatham later became bankrupt and sold many of Blake’s drawings and prints over thirty years (Bentley 445).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Essick, Robert. “Blake, Catherine Sophia (1762–1831).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. Print.

Text: see Language

Tharmas; Enion The Zoa who represents the senses and physical body, Tharmas is the “Parent power” whose division from his Emanation, Enion, in Night the First of Vala, or The Four Zoas, begins the fragmentation of the Zoas (Erdman 301, p. 4, l. 6). Enion bewails her separation from him at the opening of Vala, or The Four Zoas: “All love is lost Terror succeeds & Hatred instead of Love/And stern demands of Right & Duty instead of Liberty” (Erdman 301, p. 4, ll. 18–19). Jealous of Tharmas’s “secret loves,” she murders them, not realizing they are her own children. Enitharmon and Los, Enion and Tharmas’s children, flee from her. The opening dialogue between Tharmas and Enion in The Four Zoas suggests “one voice dividing” as two, according to Ault (50). Otto takes this observation further by noting the causal relationship between the splitting into sexes of Tharmas and Enion in their fallen state (53). By the end of Night the First, Enion is “blind and age-bent” (Erdman 310, p. 17, l. 1).

Thel 209 By Night the Fourth, Tharmas communicates through pure emotionalism, a literalized excretion: “the voice of Tharmas rolld/Over the heaving deluge. He saw Los & Enitharmon Emerge/In strength & brightness from the Abyss his bowels yearned/over them” (Erdman Complete 331, p. 47, ll. 103–6). After Enion reduces him to a Spectre, he struggles to become a man, according to Damon, enduring the “rage of thwarted sex”; taking pity on his children with Enion, Enitharmon and Los, he tells them to build the universe of death and decay (400). In his conflict with Urizen, Tharmas unites with the Spectre of Urthona, giving his power to Los. Throughout the first eight Nights, she wanders while Tharmas “seeks her in vain” (Damon 123). When he is reunited with Enion in Night the Ninth, Tharmas is humanized, reintegrated into the wholeness of the awakened Albion. In a state that Blake describes as “terrors of the uncertain” in this Prophetic Book, Enion comes to represent the ironic power of doubt to transform the perceived world (Erdman Complete 322, p. 34, l. 11). In this regard, as well, Erdman has suggested that Blake derives Tharmas’s name from “Doubting Thomas” (Prophet 298).

Bibliography Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning “the Four Zoas.” Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ——–, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Thel As the protagonist of The Book of Thel, her name has been identified as deriving from the Greek word for “wish,” suggesting for many readers that the poem represents desire’s search for meaning in the world (Fisher 205, n. 35). She is presented at the opening of that work as the youngest of the “daughters of Mne Seraphim” in Har, a place that will evolve into Beulah in the Prophetic Books. It is ephemeral, insubstantial,

210  Thel and shadowy, as opposed to the realm of experience that Blake later calls Generation. Thel is commonly read as both desiring and fearing the realm of experience, in particular sexuality. She seeks “self-definition by acts of association (with others potentially like herself) and substitution (of their identity for hers)” (Eaves et al. 78). Her “Motto” is composed of what appear to be rhetorical questions that are both epistemological and erotic: Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole: Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl? (Erdman 3, Plate i) The first two questions suggest the frustration of being ill equipped to know the nature of the “pit,” which looks ahead to the final phase of Thel’s visit to her own grave. The second two questions ask about sexuality, both the wisdom of masculine domination and the feminine passivity represented by the golden bowl. They are the questions of one who refuses to enter experience and to emerge with knowledge, leaving the questions unanswerable from the state of Har. The questions thus form an undercurrent throughout Thel’s quest for answers that ends with the horrifying voice from her grave. Its questions are more sophisticated and unanswerable, despairing about the cruelty of the realm of experience that binds one to the senses and then denounces one for that bondage: “Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” (Erdman 6, Plate 6, l. 20). Thel’s name is thus ironic, for the wishfulness lacks the willfulness necessary to take the journey that the more evolved female figure, Ololon, takes in Milton, in which she sheds her identification with the young virgin. Thel’s questions are, by contrast, never answered but rather intensify without resolution.

Bibliography Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Den Otter, A. G. “The Question and the Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 4 (1991): 633–55. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Fisher, Peter. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Toronto, OH: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Print.

Theotormon 211

Theotormon The fiancé of Oothoon in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Theotormon rejects Oothoon after she is raped by Bromion. Unlike him, Theotormon is “wandering in [his] own circular interrogations rather than conversing,” later speaking not to Oothoon but to “the ‘shadows dire’ of his imprisoned mind” (Eaves et al. 227–8). Erdman connects Theotormon’s “moral paralysis” after Oothoon’s rape to Stedman’s “anxieties” regarding slavery and gender (Prophet 234). Blake’s characterization of Theotormon is a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a Christian who prays to Urizen, the Deistic God whom Oothoon comes to recognize as a projection of patriarchal oppression. Theotormon’s shadowy misogyny looks ahead to the Spectres that splinter from the Zoas and their Emanations. Whether or not Oothoon plays into his sadism masochistically or transcends it has been a source of critical debate; the choices, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since Oothoon’s complex response to Theotormon’s passive aggressiveness can be attributed to her vision of his hypocrisy that nevertheless is trapped in a rigid social structure symbolized by the cave.

Bibliography Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. ———. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1977. Print.

There Is No Natural Religion Along with All Religions Are One, this 1788 tractate is Blake’s earliest venture into the illuminated, engraved book. As he does in All Religions Are One, Blake begins this tractate with one of two voices, “apparently straightforward statements of Lockean principles, now extended over the entire first group of seven text plates. ‘Moral fitness’ and its source in ‘Education’ are left undefined in ‘The Argument,’ but both are necessarily ‘subject to’ and delimited by ‘Sense’ ” (Eaves et al. 31). Blake suggests that Locke violates his own logic, “for if human ‘perceptions’ are limited to the sensate, then any ‘thoughts’ beyond the sensate would be impossible” (Eaves et al. 32). According to Johnson and Grant, “the revolutionary idea of the work . . . is that a human being’s desires become unlimited as his senses expand but that desires once set free can never be satisfied by sensory gratification alone” (12). For Blake, “Natural Religion,” or Deism, is, as he says in Milton, an “impossible absurdity” because it is antithetical to spirituality (Erdman

212  Tiriel 141). The Deistic belief that religion is derived from experience is at the heart of Blake’s objection, since it denies his belief in the Poetic Genius: “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character,” he writes in the Conclusion to Part B, in which he provides the counterargument to the Deistic voice of Part A “the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again” (Erdman 3). Blake introduces the connection of nascent capitalism with the metaphor of the Deistic universe as a mill, so that by this conclusion, the cosmos according to Locke, Bacon, and Newton is reduced to a static, rigid, and oppressive projection of their limited vision.

Bibliography Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print.

Tiriel The first of Blake’s poems to use fourteeners, the seven-beat line characteristic of the Prophecies, this 1789 work includes both design and text, although they are not integrated as are Blake’s other writings in relief etching. Tiriel is an old, blind king who curses his disobedient sons; led by Hela, his daughter, he wanders into the wilderness until he reaches the garden of Har, Tiriel’s father. Blake’s plot of the blind and dying king banished from his palace by his sons and wandering, concealing his identity, is, according to Raine, a Gothic rendition of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus; Raine reads the poem as a “phantasmagoria on the theme of the death of an aged king and tyrant-father” (34–5). Many critics have noted that Tiriel anticipates Urizen. According to Bloom, who suggests his name plays upon the first syllable of “tyrant,” Tiriel’s struggle is “to maintain himself as an almighty tyrant despite his bodily decay”; like Urizen, Bloom adds, Tiriel may “on one level of meaning represent Blake’s satiric vision of the Jehovah of Deistic orthodoxy, irascible and insanely rationalistic” (946). While Frye dismisses the serious implications of Tiriel’s histrionic outbursts with the statement that “a king is the only man who gets a real chance to be a tyrant” (243), Erdman, one of the first to emphasize the poem’s significance as historical allegory of the English monarchy, argues that the poem is a “preliminary study of the . . . ruler of the British Empire appearing in later prophecies” (Prophet 135).

“To Nobodaddy” 213

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Bloom, Harold. Commentary. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman, New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Tirzah: see Rahab

“To Nobodaddy” This portmanteau coinage of Blake’s has inspired later writers including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Salman Rushdie. Its combination of “nobody” and “daddy” is, as Erdman points out, the comic name that parodies “the epic name, Urizen” (Prophet 179). The name epitomizes Blake’s satirical denunciation of the patriarchal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, an empty signifier who is the projection of a vengeful God of oppression, responsible for the ills of the world: Why art thou silent & invisible Father of Jealousy Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds . . . Why darkness & obscurity In all thy words & laws (Erdman 471, ll. 1–6) In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Oothoon addresses as “Father of Jealousy” Urizen, the God to whom Theotormon prays; another incarnation of the projected patriarchal God is emblematized in “The Ancient of Days” (Figure 9). His image is also echoed in the painting Abraham and Isaac, in both the figure of Abraham and the implied presence of the patriarchal Jehovah in the upper right corner of the painting (Figure 1).

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. ———. Blake, Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1977. Print.

214  “To the Public”

“To the Public” Blake etched this Prospectus to a series of illustrated books, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; America; The Gates of Paradise (For Children); and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, on October 10, 1793. In it, the only public advertisement Blake ever made, he announces “a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense” (Erdman 692). Bentley notes that “To the Public” is the “high-watermark of Blake’s ambition in selling his works in Illuminated Printing, the works by which he is best known in the literary world” (150).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988

Trusler, John (1735–1820) Reverend Trusler, introduced to Blake by George Cumberland, had proposed to publish 150 sermons printed in “imitation of handwriting, so that preachers could pretend to be the composers of the sermons they delivered” (Bentley Stranger 181). Blake made a drawing of “Malevolence” to be followed by other illustrations of the vices and virtues. However, after seeing the drawing of “Malevolence,” Trusler criticized Blake’s “Fancy,” which “seems to be in the other world or the World of Spirits, which accords not with my Intentions” (quoted in Stranger 181–2). Blake responded with his characteristic acerbic wit: Revd Sir I really am sorry that you are falln out with the spiritual World Especially if I should have to answer for it . . . you ought to know that What is grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. (Erdman 702) Bentley notes that, although Blake claimed the “drawing [was]in my best manner,” his inspiration for the design was “somewhat second-hand,” derived from both Europe and a plate from Blake’s illustrations to Young’s Night Thoughts (Blake Records 83). As further evidence of the ambivalence of Blake’s friends towards his nondual vision, describing Blake as “Dimd

Ulro 215 [sic] with superstition,” Cumberland “docketed” the letter given to him by Trusler upon closing his correspondence with Blake (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 83).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Ulro This is one of the four states that Blake develops explicitly in his Prophetic Books, although Ulro is present in the nascent cosmology of his earliest works. It is the projection of starkness and sterility by one who refuses to move from Har or Beulah into Generation, the realm of both life and death, as is the case for Thel. By contrast, Ololon’s epic journey into Generation in Milton is redemptive not only for Ololon and Milton, but for humanity, promising emergence into Eden. As Frye and Bloom have observed, one cannot merely retreat into “unorganized innocence” (Erdman 838) Ulro is also the stony projection of Enlightenment thought devoid of vitality, as first seen in the “Mad Song” of Poetical Sketches, in which the speaker perversely “turn[s his] back to the east, /From whence comforts have increas’d” (Erdman 415–16, ll. 21–2). It evolves with greater specificity in Milton as “a Globe rolling through Voidness,” one that is inextricably tied to Enlightenment thought: “a delusion of Ulro/The Microscope knows not of this nor the Telescope. They alter/The ratio of Spectators Organs but leave Objects untouched” (Erdman 127, Plate 29, ll. 16–18). In Blake’s final Prophetic Book, Jerusalem, “Ulro is the space of the terrible starry wheels of Albions sons” that has “walled up” Eden (Erdman 156, Plate 12, ll. 51–2).

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print.

216  Urizen books

Urizen books This group of three illuminated books, including The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania (1795), has had renewed scholarly attention in recent years after having been dismissed earlier as a retreat from the political realm of the earlier Continental Prophecies. These three books take the conflict between Urizen and Los further than the earlier minor prophecies did, developing the historical relationship between religion and the political sphere. Los, the Bard in Europe, is now the “Eternal Prophet,” the enemy of Urizen who parodies the Newtonian God of Enlightenment Deism, creating the illusion of duality: “Times on times he divided, & measur’d/Space by space in his ninefold darkness/Unseen, unknown” (Erdman 70, Plate 3, ll. 8–10). The three books question biblical authority by “calling into question the status of divine revelation as derived from writings descended from the Mosaic period. . . . The Bible’s apparent discontinuities, abrupt transitions, repetitions and inexplicable speakers are all replicated in [them] because to parody the Bible was to make a political intervention sanctioned by growing scholarship and accelerated by active anti-clericalism” (Worrall 20–1). Blake’s chronicling and parodying religion in these books has been described as preparing for the “intellectual war” that is the more overt subject of the Prophetic Books beginning with The Four Zoas; according to Mee, the “parody of religious doctrine and forms” in all three of these works “is typical of a strong current in radical writing” that supported the French Revolution, Blake’s writing during the period emphasizing both “the need to maintain and perpetually renew prophetic struggle” and “the need to be aware of the dangers of this energy itself degenerating into the apostasy of state religion” (210–11, 213). Gender is an element of these early Prophecies that has received little attention but is conspicuous in its absence until The Book of Ahania, in which Ahania is the victim of the conflict between Urizen and their son, Fuzon. As Johnson and Grant note, “there is no feminine or female consciousness in the beginning; only belatedly is a female entity derived from a secondary fissure within the all-male primordial divine/human persona” (113). As opposed to inferring misogyny on Blake’s part from this replication of patriarchy in the creation story, however, the absence of the female is an important element in Blake’s parody of Enlightenment creation: beyond this dismal world of repressive masculinity, Blake develops his protofeminism in the subsequent Prophetic Books, in which fallenness is a consequence of Deism’s masculinist casting out of the feminine as the Emanation of male subjectivity, the female emerging powerful and regenerative from victimization by her male counterparts to herald in the apocalypse that is Eden.

Urizen 217

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Worrall, David, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print.

Urizen The Zoa whose name has been traced to the Greek word for “horizon,” sounding as well like “your reason,” Urizen’s story is told in greatest detail in Vala, or The Four Zoas. He embodies Blake’s indictment of the Enlightenment privileging of reason as the crowning mental faculty, the most egregious perpetrator of dualism in the fallen world. Urizen first appears in “A Song of Liberty” and then “To Nobodaddy,” where he is addressed “Father of Jealousy”; it is significant that it is Oothoon, the female figure who, rejected by her fiancé in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, first calls Urizen by name. Oothoon’s is a powerful denunciation of the male God created by men who have enslaved her. As he develops in Blake’s evolving cosmology, he is the jealous God who creates the world, or Mundane Shell, with compasses and his palace, the “temple of the religion of suppressed sex . . ., the temple of materialism . . ., and the druidic temple of Natural Religion” (Damon 420). The heart of Blake’s subversion of scripture is the double identification of Urizen with Jehovah and Satan; as Mee points out, however, although The Book of Urizen is “largely devoted to an ironic account of the genesis of state religion, Blake never suggests Urizen’s control is total . . . but its potential is not obliterated” (178, 183). Although in his fallen form, Urizen is identified as Satanic doubt brought about by his “desire for dominion,” it is not until”; the apocalypse, in which the Zoas are reunited with their Emanations and Spectres, and Albion, reunited with Jerusalem, awakens, that the redeemed Urizen comes to embody faith (Damon 419). The Four Zoas elaborates Blake’s myth of the creation and development of Urizenic religion: when he casts out Ahania, who has warned him of his reliance upon futurity in his fear of overthrow by Orc, Urizen falls into a stony stupor until roused by Orc, at which point Urizen declares himself King of All, binding futurity, “the spider web of religion” following him “wherever he goes” (Damon 421). The Tree of Mystery arises from his heel, becoming

218  Vala; Vala, or The Four Zoas; veil a labyrinth from which he struggles to free himself. Orc, confronting him, divides into the Serpent in Eden. Los, having begun to create Golgonooza, finds his hatred for Urizen turned to love. Nevertheless, this revelation does not affect Urizen, now an imperialist and slave trader who proclaims himself a God. At the apocalypse, Urizen abandons his fear of futurity, at which point Ahania returns and he reaps the harvest of the new age.

Bibliography Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print.

Urthona: see Los

Vala; Vala, or The Four Zoas; veil Blake announces his “Bible of Hell” at the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a cosmology that challenges the Judeo-Christian tradition especially as it manifests through the dualism of Enlightenment Deism. This cosmology begins developing with the minor prophecies and continues deepening and complicating through the Prophetic Books. There is a discrepancy among commentators about why Blake never engraved Vala, or The Four Zoas among all the Prophetic Books. Magno and Erdman suggest that “Blake evidently would have finished the whole work [. . .] if he had found a customer” (13); however, I counter that Blake here achieves the greatest nondual challenge to tradition of any of his works, in part because of its loose form – literally, with its unbound, inked pages rather than the engraved copper plates of Milton and Jerusalem – but also because, in its apparently unfinished state – with crossed-out title and pencil sketches alongside engraved images on leftover sheets from his work on Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – it most radically challenges dualism as it manifests through the time/space matrices of Newtonian science and traditional literary form. Blake achieves this nondualism by experimenting with nonlinear narrative and fluid characterization and symbolism. Arranged in nine Nights, it is loosely structured around the power struggles of the four Zoas who are elements of Albion. When Albion falls into a spiritual sleep, his consciousness splinters into series of fragmentations, from Albion into his Zoas, and the Zoas splitting into male Spectres and female Emanations. Jerusalem, Albion’s Emanation, goes missing during his spiritual sleep that

Vala; Vala, or The Four Zoas; veil 219 comprises the first eight Nights; the poem moves paradoxically towards regeneration in Night the Ninth in an apocalyptic vision of the reunion of all the composite parts that make up Albion; this is not an apocalypse at the end of time, but rather potential at any moment. The manuscript, housed at the British Library, began with the title “Dream of Nine Nights” in 1796 or 1797, based on Young’s Night Thoughts that he had been engraving and illuminating in a design that surrounds the text, “graphic interpretations of another poet’s visions (Magno and Erdman 13). Vincent De Luca suggests that Vala was Blake’s attempt to supersede Young’s Night Thoughts, explaining that “nothing illustrates the attempt with more striking visual force than the inscription of Blake’s original poetry in a space designed to hold the lines of Young” (121). Instead of completing the project, however, Blake used the proof sheets to create his own Prophetic Book. A similar series of watercolor designs for Thomas Gray’s poetry replaced the Young project, completed in a two-volume set of illuminations. When the Book became Vala, dated 1797 on the title page, Blake did not have a patron; it was not until twenty-five years later that John Linnell became the patron to support the project. When Blake gave the manuscript to Linnell it contained unresolved problems in which revisions are not clearly canceled and choices are not made between alternate readings, including the order of some of the Nights. The manuscript remained in the Linnell family library over seventy years. It was first edited in 1891 by E. J. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, who decided how to put loose pages together. The manuscript reached the British Museum (now Library) in 1918, the sequence of pages undergoing further editorial consideration. According to Magno and Erdman, the plan was to “inscribe his text . . . in a flourishing ‘copperplate’ ” that eventually gave way to a “plain, workaday handwriting” in the course of many revisions (13). The margins of the manuscript pages reveal many stages of revision and addition; Blake rearranged some pages. The manuscript survived erasures made in a Victorian household. The original title, Vala, suggests that the transformation of the eponymous character is significant to the movement of the poem. In her fallen state, Vala represents the perception that the world of phenomena is separate from oneself; not until her redemption, in which she achieves nondualism, can the totality of Albion be redeemed. At the pivotal moment triggering Albion’s awakening, Vala recognizes the soul’s immortality: Rise sluggish Soul why sitst thou here why dost thou sit & weep Yon sun shall wax old & decay but thou shalt ever flourish The fruit shall ripen & fall down & the flowers consume away But thou shalt still survive arise O dry thy dewy tears (Erdman 396, p. 127, ll. 24–7) By contrast to her role in the fallen world represented in the earlier Nights, Vala realizes that the bliss she seeks is not merely “another” in this natural order to which even the Sun is subject.

220  Varley, John (1778–1842); Visionary Heads A recurring image associated with the fallen state of Vala, the veil represents the delusion of dualism between the perceived objective world and the human subject, a dualism whose repercussions extend throughout human history according to Blake’s cosmology. During Vala’s awakening in Night the Ninth, therefore, she understands the veil to be an illusion of separateness so that the eternal is not separate from the temporal or spatially bounded.

Bibliography Ault, Donald. Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning “the Four Zoas.” Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986. Print. De Luca, Vincent. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in “the Four Zoas”. Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s “Vala or the Four Zoas.” Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Magno, Cettina and David Erdman, eds. “The Four Zoas” by William Blake. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987. Print. Rosso, George. Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of “the Four Zoas.” Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993. Print. Wilkie, Brian and Mary Lynn Johnson. Blake’s “Four Zoas”: Design of a Dream. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978. Print.

Varley, John (1778–1842); Visionary Heads One of the Ancients, the younger generation of artists devoted to Blake during his later years, Varley was introduced to Blake through Linnell. As a “prolific landscape artist, debtor, and astrologer,” Varley was fascinated by Blake’s visions, which Varley connected to astrology (Bentley Stranger 369). Varley illustrated his Treatise on Podiacal Physiognomy (1828) with plates after Blake’s Visionary Heads. Blake recorded and drew portraits of his visions of spirits who visited him during the night. Varley, for whom Blake recorded these visions, sat with him during some of these midnight visitations, writing that “Blake never slept; he sat with a pencil and paper drawing portraits of those whom I most desired to see” (372). He described sitting up with Blake until three in the morning while Blake conversed with spirits. The two created their “midnight portraits” that resulted in three books known as The Small BlakeVarley Sketchbook (discovered in 1967), The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook (discovered in 1989), and The Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook (“not yet discovered”) (Blake Records 346).

Vision 221

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

Veil: see Vala

Vision A lifelong nondualist, Blake had vivid visions from the time he was a child that defied the laws of time and space central to the Deistic Enlightenment. When he was four, “God put his head to the window and set the child screaming” (Bentley Stranger 19). According to Samuel Palmer, Blake was sometimes punished for reporting these visions: when Blake would return from a walk and “describe the angels he had seen in the trees – His father was so angry at first with his accounts that he treated them as falsehoods & severely whipped him several times” (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 10). When he was between eight and ten, he saw a tree filled with angels when walking in the countryside. Henry Crabb Robinson notes that when Blake said “my visions,” “it was in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters. . . . Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy – He thinks all men partake of it – but it is lost by not being cultivated” (quoted in Bentley Stranger 20). In his 1809 Descriptive Catalogue, Blake writes that “The Prophets describe what they saw in vision as real and existing men whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs. . . . A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapor or a nothing: they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce” (Erdman 541). A contemporary anonymously claimed that “Blake was not the victim of a mere optical delusion. He firmly believed in what he seemed to see. He had no doubt but that the spectre of Edward the Third frequently visited him. He painted the Monarch, in oil, at three sittings” (Bentley Blake Records 408). Whether these visions were evidence that Blake was “Artist or Genius – or Mystic – or Madman” was a source of endless debate among Blake’s contemporaries, as Robinson expressed (quoted in Bentley Blake Records 420).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

222  Visions of the Daughters of Albion Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” London: MacMillan, 1863, 1880. Print.

Visionary Heads: see Varley, John

Visions of the Daughters of Albion Included among the Lambeth Prophecies, Visions is dated 1793. In a brief but dramatic plot that takes place at the beginning of the poem, Oothoon has overcome her fears about sexuality and, on her way to meet her lover, Theotormon, is raped by Bromion. The rest is devoted to the aftermath of the rape through speeches given by each of the three characters. The poem has been regarded as a Song of Experience answering The Book of Thel as a Song of Innocence. They have in common two young women seeking self-fulfillment but who discover “unanticipated terrors that dramatically shift the text’s aesthetic from the pastoral to the horrific sublime,” according to Eaves et al.; by contrast to Thel, who flees from the body and its deadly associations,” Oothoon “accepts the body and its potential for delights that overwhelm conventional distinctions between the physical and the spiritual, even in the face of continued sexual and cultural violence” (228–9). The Daughters of Albion, or British women, echo Oothoon’s lament throughout the poem. Matthews addresses the much-debated ending of the poem, suggesting that what appears to be Oothoon’s sexual liberation in the final plates appears to conflict with her rape at the beginning of the poem: “No actions follow from her words in a poem which largely evades coherent narrative and ends shortly after” the speech in which she offers to catch “girls of mild silver, or of furious gold” for Theotormon (17; Erdman 50, Plate 7, l. 24); Matthews notes Blake’s “odd switches between first and third person” in her speech so that it is not clear whether her viewing “their” wanton play includes her or not; the ambiguity of whose point of view the scene is suggests to Matthews Fuseli’s “Nightmare,” which she notes is “simultaneously about the dreamer and the dream” (17–19). While the focus on the gender binary has been central to scholarly discussion of the text, it is important to emphasize its connection to the poem’s political and epistemological layers. As an affirmation of the “organized innocence” that takes her beyond the limited perspective of the fearful Thel, Oothoon’s revelation that she is “pure,” as she tells Theotormon, in turn connects her nondual sexuality with a larger rebellion against the dualistic oppression of patriarchy on all fronts in England and in the colonies. As she struggles to come to terms with Theotormon’s hypocrisy, therefore, Oothoon sounds much like the voices in earlier Blake works such as There Is No

Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] (1694–1778) 223 Natural Religion: “They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up./And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle” (Erdman 47, Plate 2, ll. 31–2). To return to the controversy over the poem’s ending, one can perceive Oothoon’s growing assertion that she will not be bound by the hypocrisy of the socio-political and theocratic world from which she cannot escape. The result is an ending of powerful ambivalence in which Oothoon simultaneously rejoices in bliss and wails in frustrated rage.

Bibliography Behrendt, Stephen. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. Fisher, Peter. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Toronto, OH: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

Voice: see Language

Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] (1694–1778) Pretentious caricatures argue about this French Enlightenment philosopher in An Island in the Moon, Blake’s earliest reference to him. However, whether Voltaire himself is the target of this satire has been debated because, at this early phase of his career, Blake praised Voltaire’s position regarding the French Revolution. Blake’s vitriol against Voltaire’s Enlightenment ideas is by contrast unmistakable by the time Voltaire reappears in the cosmology of the Prophetic Books. There can be no doubt that as a Deist, Voltaire is anathema to Blake. He appears in Milton and Jerusalem as the offspring of Rahab (Erdman Complete 116, Plate 22, l. 42). In Jerusalem, Blake represents Voltaire, along with the other French Enlightenment philosopher, Rousseau, as one of the two wings of the Spectre of Albion, England devoid of vision and thus embodying the unholy trinity of Bacon, Locke, and Newton: I am God O Sons of Men! I am your Rational Power! Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man! Who teach Doubt & Experiment & my two Wings Voltaire: Rousseau. (Erdman Complete 203, Plate 54, ll. 16–18)

224  War Voltaire thus takes his place among the most egregious perpetrators of the fallen world represented here as the shadow of England created by Enlightenment Deism. In the short poem “Mock on Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau” included in Songs and Ballads, Blake holds both philosophers responsible for the destruction – political, intellectual, and spiritual – in Europe. Here Blake addresses specifically his rejection of his earlier outright satire, shedding that ironic voice to indict them for theirs: “You throw the sand against the wind/And the wind blows it back again”; in Blake’s prophetic voice he continues, “And every sand becomes a Gem/Reflected in the beams divine” (Erdman Complete 477, l. 4).

Bibliography Damrosch, Leopold. Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Erdman, David. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1977. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Vortex: see Space and Time

War In his Continental Prophecies, Blake celebrates revolutionary uprising, represented by the chained Orc. Yet Blake saw war as “the last resource of the energies of life, under the oppression of law, empire, exploitation, and the tyranny of the ruler of this world,” according to Raine, in spite of the fact that “a pacifist he was not,” advocating “all war against tyrants, but never . . . war made by tyrants against life” (347–8). Blake is consistent in his emphasis that, as he announces at the opening of Vala, or The Four Zoas, “Intellectual Battle” must be waged through “the march of long resounding strong heroic Verse” (Erdman 300, p. 3, ll. 2–3). Representing oppression in “London” as the “mind-forg’d manacles,” Blake insists that our passive acceptance of bondage to dualistic thought underlies all societal ills (Erdman 27, l. 8). Blake condemns the “silly Latin slaves of the sword,” in his Prologue to Milton, following with the song, “I will not cease from Mental Fight,/Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem,/In Englands green & pleasant Land” (Erdman 95–6, Plate 1, ll. 13–16).

Bibliography Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print.

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97) 225 Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print.

Weaving: see Loom

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759–97) Soon after she moved to London in 1789, Wollstonecraft met Blake through their mutual publisher, Joseph Johnson, whose circle “actively campaigned for what was known as ‘innovation’ in all areas of English life”; that group included, as well, Henry Fuseli and Tom Paine (Ackroyd 158). Blake illustrated Wollstonecraft’s children’s book, Original Stories; she also wrote memoirs, novels, and treatises. Wollstonecraft’s 1790 Vindication of the Rights of Men was the first among many prose polemicists including Paine to criticize, albeit anonymously in Wollstonecraft’s case, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. She came to realize that the liberation promised by the early phase of the French Revolution excluded women, prompting her to write her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that argued women were as capable of reason as men and therefore deserved an education equal to that offered to men. Wollstonecraft’s readers familiar with her tumultuous emotional life, made known by Godwin after her death through his publication of her letters and memoirs, have pointed out the discrepancy between her authoritative voice of advocacy for women’s rights in the latter Vindication compared to her personal despair, prior to her marriage to Godwin, over multiple failed relationships with men, including her humiliation at the response of shocked rejection by the free-thinking Fuseli and his wife when Wollstonecraft suggested they join her in a ménage et trois. Blake’s perspective of Wollstonecraft, as he represents her through Oothoon in his 1793 Visions of the Daughters of Albion the year after Wollstonecraft’s latter Vindication was published, extends the plight of Wollstonecraft’s self-conflicted subjectivity to the Daughters of Albion, or British women. That the Daughters of Albion “hear her woes and eccho back her sighs” has been traced to the “new sex panic” connected to Godwin’s publication of Wollstonecraft’s Memoirs (Matthews 4). Some readers have taken the influence of Wollstonecraft further into Blake’s cosmology. Based upon the public disparagement of Wollstonecraft following Godwin’s publication of her letters to her lover, Imlay, more specifically, it has been suggested that Blake expands the “love triangle” of Visions in The Four Zoas, with Enitharmon based on Wollstonecraft (Wada 36).

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Bentley, G. E. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print.

226  Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) Bruder, Helen. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeoius Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. Wada, Ayako. “Visions of the Love Triangle and Adulterous Birth in Blake’s the Four Zoas.” Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 35–46.

Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) Having read The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Wordsworth echoed the sentiments of many of his contemporaries regarding Blake’s supposed madness. Their mutual friend, Henry Crabb Robinson, recalled Wordsworth saying to him of Blake, “There is no doubt that this man is mad, but there is something in this madness which I enjoy more than the Sense of [Sir Walter Scott] or Lord [Byron]” (quoted in Bentley 313). By contrast, Blake abhorred Wordsworth’s dualism, as he recorded in his marginalia to Wordsworth’s Poems: “I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration”; of “My Heart Leaps Up,” Blake writes, “There is no such Thing as Natural Piety Because The Natural Man is at Enmity with God” (Erdman 665). Yet more direct is Blake’s attack on the dualism that he associates with Wordsworth’s elitism, as he articulates in his marginalia to The Excursion: of Wordsworth’s lines, “How exquisitely the individual Mind . . . to the external World/Is fitted. – & how exquisitely too, . . . The external World is fitted to the Mind,” Blake writes, “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your Lordship”; Blake continues his marginal diatribe a few lines later in Wordsworth’s poem, “does not this Fit & is it not Fitting most Exquisitely too but to what not to Mind but to the Vile Body only & of its Laws of Good & Evil & its Enmities against Mind” (Erdman 666–7). Writing to Dorothy Wordsworth in 1826, Robinson recounted, “I had the pleasure of reading to B[lake] in my best style . . . the Ode on Immortality – I never witnessed greater delight in any listener And in general B: loves the poems – What appears to have disturbed his mind, on the other hand, is the preface to the Excursion[.] He told me . . . that it caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him” (quoted in Bentley 438). Yet in spite of Blake’s vitriol against what he called Wordsworth’s Atheism, with which Blake equated the “natural piety” of “My Heart Leaps Up,” he made a distinction between what he saw as the inspiration of the poetry and the “heathen philosophy” of Wordsworth’s separation of nature and mind.

Zoas 227 Robinson’s 1852 Reminiscences reveal precisely what moved Blake in Wordsworth’s poetry. Robinson writes that whenever he read aloud to friends the Intimations Ode, Robinson left out “one or two passages – especially that beginning ‘But there’s a tree of many one,’ lest I should be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain precisely what I admired. . . . But with Blake I could fear nothing of the Kind, And it was this very Stanza which threw him almost into an hysterical rapture – His delight in Wordsworths poetry was intense” (quoted in Bentley 701).

Bibliography Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print.

Zoas Central to Blake’s cosmology are the four components of Albion’s psyche, the Zoas called Urizen, Los, Tharmas, and Luvah. When Albion falls into the sleep that creates a spiritual and creative void, the Zoas, a word Blake derived from the Greek for life form, take on distinct entities as they war with one another, each contributing to and perpetuating the nightmare of fallenness. They fragment further into Spectres and Emanations as the fallen world spins out of control. The apocalypse can only come about through the equipoise of the Zoas rather than a bland whole that would blur their identities. Vala, or The Four Zoas is Blake’s most elaborate experiment in representing the nondual relationship between the fallen Zoas and their redeemed state as Blake describes it in Night the Ninth, in which each Zoa has an epiphany that lifts the veil obscuring their vision of wholeness so that Albion can awaken: “While the flail of Urizen sounded loud & the winnowing wind of Tharmas/So loud so clear in the wide heavens,” Luvah “arose from the bright feast . . ./His crown of thorns fell from his head he hung his living Lyre/Behind the seat of the Eternal Man & took his way/ Sounding the Song of Los” (Erdman 403, p. 134, l. 32–p. 135, l. 25). The nonlinear relationship of this apocalyptic vision in Night the Ninth and the fallen world of the first eight Nights, founded on an illusion of dualistic separation between self and other, suggests that the balance among the Zoas is a fragile equipoise.

Bibliography Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print.

228  Zoas Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. “From America to the Four Zoas.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 210–30. Print. ———. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or the Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Rosso, George. Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of “the Four Zoas.” Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993. Print.

A William Blake chronology

1757 The second eldest of five children, William is born on November 28 at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, London, to James Blake, hosier and haberdasher, and Catherine Wright. 1762 Robert Blake (“Richard” on his baptismal certificate) born. He was Blake’s favorite brother. 1768 Enters Henry Pars’s Drawing School after having been taught at home. 1769 Starts writing poems later collected in Poetical Sketches. 1772 Apprenticed to the engraver James Basire for the next seven years. 1773 Created his first independent engraving, later revised as Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (printed 1810). 1774 Begins drawing tombs at Westminster Abbey, influencing his lifelong interest in the Gothic. 1779 Begins six-year program of study at the Royal Academy. Meets John Flaxman. Starts engraving for Joseph Johnson. 1780 Exhibit at Royal Academy is well-reviewed by George Cumberland under the name “Candid,” whom he meets along with Thomas Stothard. 1782 Marries Catherine Boucher. 1783 Financed by Flaxman and the Mathews, Poetical Sketches printed although not sold. 1784 Death of father, James Blake. Blake opens print shop on Broad Street with James Parker and lives above it. Exhibit at Royal Academy. 1785 An Island in the Moon printed. 1787 Robert Blake dies of tuberculosis; William sees his spirit ascend, clapping for joy. Meets Fuseli. 1788 First relief etchings that combine text and design, the tractates All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion. 1789 Creates Tiriel. Prints Songs of Innocence and Thel. Though joins Swedenborg’s New Church this year, leaves soon after. 1790 Starts The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 1791 Has Book I of The French Revolution typeset although it is never published. Illustrates Wollstonecraft’s stories; creates engravings for Darwin. Begins engraving Stedman’s Narrative.

230  A William Blake chronology 1792 Completes Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His mother dies. 1793 Creates Songs of Experience, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America: A Prophecy, The Gates of Paradise (For Children). 1794 Collects Songs of Innocence and of Experience with its new title page. Creates Europe: A Prophecy, The First Book of Urizen. 1795 Creates The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, The Song of Los. 1796 Illustrates Young’s Night Thoughts with 537 watercolors surrounding text. No new illuminated books for fifteen years. 1797 Engravings for Night Thoughts using paper from Vala, or The Four Zoas. Illustrates Gray’s Poems for Flaxman, 116 watercolors. 1798 Annotations for Watson, Bacon, Reynolds. 1799 Exhibits at Royal Academy. Commissions for Butts. 1800 Exhibits at Royal Academy. Moves to Felpham at Hayley’s invitation. 1801 Portraits for Hayley’s circle; watercolor illustrations of Milton’s Comus. Work on Four Zoas. 1802 Commissions for Hayley. 1803 Commissions for Butts. Scolfield incident leads to arrest for sedition. Returns to London, South Molton Street. 1804 Acquitted. Begins work on illuminated books again, including Milton and Jerusalem. 1805 Creates designs for Blair’s The Grave (published three years later). 1807 Paradise Lost watercolors; continued commissions for Butts. 1808 Exhibits at Royal Academy; begins Canterbury Pilgrims. 1809 Has first show in brother’s shop on Broad Street, including Descriptive Catalogue; Hunt gives the show a scathing review. 1810 Canterbury Pilgrims. 1811 Prints Milton (three copies). 1815 For next five years, more watercolors of Milton’s poetry for Butts. Engraves 185 dishes for Wedgewood’s catalogue. 1818 Illuminated printing includes reissue of Thel, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Songs, Urizen, Milton. 1819 Draws Visionary Heads for Varley. 1820 First edition of Jerusalem (three copies). 1823 The Ancients name Blake’s house on Fountain Court “House of the Interpreter.” 1826 Produces twenty-two engravings of illustrations for the Book of Job. Surrounds his 1815 Laocoön engraving with inscriptions. Annotates Wordsworth. 1827 Work on Dante while ill; creates “The Ancient of Days.” Dies singing of visions.

General bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Blake: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print. Adams, Hazard. Blake’s Margins: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Print. ———, ed. Critical Essays on William Blake. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991. Print. ———. The Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic. Tallahassee, FL: Florida State UP, 1983. Print. ———. “Synecdoche and Method.” Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Eds. Miller, et al. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. 41–71. Print. ———. William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1963. Print. Aers, David. “Representations of Revolution: From the French Revolution to the Four Zoas.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 244–70. Print. Atwood, Craig. “Christ and the Bridal Bed: Eighteenth-Century Moravian Erotic Spirituality as a Possible Influence on Blake.” Re-Envisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. 160–79. Print. Ault, Donald, Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning “The Four Zoas.” Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1986. Print. Beer, John. “Blake’s Changing View of History: The Impact of the Book of Enoch.” Historicizing Blake. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 159–78. Print. ———. Blake’s Humanism. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968. Print. Behrendt, Stephen. “Blake’s Bible of Hell: Prophecy as Political Program.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 37–52. Print. ———. Reading William Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print. Bellin, Harvey F. and Darrell Ruhl, eds. Blake and Swedenborg: Opposition Is True Friendship. New York: Swedenborg Society, 1985. Print. Bentley, G. E. Blake Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Print. ———. Blake Records. 2nd Edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Print. ———. The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Bindman, David. Blake as an Artist. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977. Print. ———. “Blake as a Painter.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 85–109. Print. Blackstone, Bernard. English Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949. Print.

232  General bibliography Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument. New York: Anchor, 1965. Print. ———. “Commentary.” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 894–970. Print. Brisman, Leslie. Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984. Print. Bruder, Helen. “ ‘The Bread of Sweet Thought & the Wine of Delight’: Gender, Aesthetics and Blake’s ‘Dear Friend Mrs Anna Flaxman.’ ” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 1–11. Print. ———. William Blake and the Daughters of Albion. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Print. ———, ed. Women Reading William Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. ——— and Tristanne Connolly, eds. Sexy Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Print. Burke, Joseph. “The Eidetic and the Borrowed Image: An Interpretation of Blake’s Theory and Practice of Art. The Visionary Hand. Ed. Essick. 1973. 253–302. Print. Butlin, Martin. Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981. Print. Chandler, Eric. “The Anxiety of Production: Blake’s Shift from Collective Hope to Writing Self.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 53–79. Print. Chayes, Irene. “The Presence of Cupid and Psyche.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John E. Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 214–43. Print. Chevalier, Tracy. “Peeking over the Garden Wall.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 12–15. Print. Clark, Steve and David Worrall, eds. Historicizing Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Print. Colebrooke, Claire. “Blake, Literary History and Sexual Difference.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 16–25. Print. Connolly, Tristanne J. William Blake and the Body. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print. Cox, Stephen. Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Print. Crosby, Mark and Angus Whitehead. “Georgian Superwoman or ‘the Maddest of the Two’? Recovering the Historical Catherine Blake, 1762–1831.” ReEnvisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 83–107. Print. ———, et al., eds. Re-Envisioning Blake. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Curran, Stuart and J. A. Wittreich, eds. Blake’s Sublime Allegory. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1973. Print. Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1965. Print. ———. “Blake and Milton.” The Divine Vision. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Gollancz, 1957. 89–96. Print. ———. Blake’s Job. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969. Print.

General bibliography 233 ———. William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1924. Print. Damrosch, Leopold. Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. ———. Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. Davies, Keri and David Worrall. “Inconvenient Truths”: Re-Historicizing the Politics of Dissent and Antinomianism.” ReEnvisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 30–47. Print. De Luca, Vincent. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. De Sola Pinto, Vivian, ed. The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. New York: Haskell House, 1968. Print. Den Otter, A. G. “The Question and the Book of Thel.” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 4 (1991): 633–55. Print. Dent, Shirley and Jason Whittaker. Radical Blake: Afterlife and Influence from 1827. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. Di Salvo, Jackie. War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Print. ———, G. A. Rosso and Christopher Hobson, eds. Blake, Politics, and History. New York: Garland, 1998. Print. Dorrbecker, D. W., ed. William Blake: The Continental Prophecies. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 4. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton University Press, 1995. Print. Doscow, Minna. Structure and Meaning in William Blake’s Jerusalem. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson UP, 1982. Print. Eaves, Morris, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. ———. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. ———, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=thel.f. illbk.02&java=yes. Web. ———, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 3. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1993. Print. ——— and Michael Fischer, eds. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1986. Print. Ellis, Edwin John and William Butler Yeats, eds. The Works of William Blake. 3 Vols. London: B. Quaritch, 1893. Print. Emery, Clark. “Introduction.” Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1963. 1–99. Print. Erdman, David. “America: New Expanses.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. Erdman and Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 92–114. Print. ———. Blake: Prophet against Empire. New York: Dover, 1991. Print. ———, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Print. ———, ed. A Concordance to the Writings of William Blake. 2 Vol. Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1967. Print. ——— and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. Print.

234  General bibliography ——— and Donald K. Moore. The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. Print. Erle, Sibylle. “William Blake’s Lavaterian Women: Eleanor, Rowena and Ahania.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 44–52. Print. Essick, Robert. “Blake, Catherine Sophia (1762–1831).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. ———. “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 251–71. Print. ———, ed. The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics. Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973. Print. ———. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. ———. William Blake Printmaker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980. Print. ———. “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 189–212. Print. ——— and Joseph Viscomi, eds. Milton: A Poem. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Ferber, Michael. “In Defense of Clods.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 51–66. Print. ———. “The Finite Revolutions of Europe.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 212–34. Print. ———. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985. Print. Fisher, Peter. The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary. Toronto, OH: University of Toronto Press, 1961. Print. Fox, Susan. “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 507–19. Print. ———. Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976. Print. Freeman, Kathryn. Blake’s Nostos: Fragmentation and Nondualism in the Four Zoas. New York: State University of NY Press, 1997. Print. Frosch, Thomas R. “The Risen Body.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991. 79–89. Print. Frost, Everett C. “The Education of the Prophetic Character: Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a Primer in Visionary Autography.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Alexander Gourlay. 2002. 67–95. Print. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. ———. “Notes for a Commentary on Milton.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. New York: Haskell House, 1968. 97–137. Print. Gallant, Christine. Blake and the Assimilation of Chaos. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1945. Print. Glausser, Wayne. Locke and Blake: A Conversation across the Eighteenth Century. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print. Gleckner, Robert. Blake and Spenser. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. Print. ———. Blake’s Prelude: Poetical Sketches. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print.

General bibliography 235 Gourlay, Alexander. “A Glossary of Terms, Names, and Concepts in Blake.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 272–87. Print. ———. “ ‘Idolatry or Politics’: Blake’s Chaucer, the Gods of Priam, and the Powers of 1809.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 97–147. Print. ———, ed. Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2002. Print. Grant, John E. “Envisioning the First Night Thoughts.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 304–35. Print. Greer, Germaine. “ ‘No Earthly Parents I Confess’ ” the Clod, the Pebble and Catherine Blake.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 78–90. Print. Hagstrum, Jean. “Blake and the Sister Arts Tradition.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. David Erdman and John Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 82–91. Print. ———. “The Fly.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin Rosenfeld. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. 368–82. Print. ———. “William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991. 67–78. Print. ———. “William Blake’s ‘the Clod and the Pebble.’ ” Restoration and EighteenthCentury Literature. Ed. Carroll Camden. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. 381–88. Print. Halloran, William F. “The French Revolution: Revelation’s New Form.” Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic. Eds. Erdman and Grant. 1970. 30–56. Print. Hamlyn, Robin and Michael Phillips. William Blake. London: Tate Gallery, 2000. Print. Heffernan, James A. W., “Blake’s Oothoon: The Dilemmas of Marginality.” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 3–18. Print. Helmstadter, Thomas. “Blake and Religion: Iconographical Themes in the Night Thoughts.” The Visionary Hand. Ed. Robert Essick. Los Angeles, CA: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973. 381–418. Print. Henry, Lauren. “Sunshine and Shady Groves: What Blake’s ‘Little Black Boy’ Learned from African Writers.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (Summer 1995): 4–11. Print. Heppner, Christopher. Reading Blake’s Designs. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Hilton, Nelson. “Blake’s Early Works.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.191–209. Print. ———, ed. Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970–1984. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986. Print. ———. “The Spectre of Darwin.” Review of the Garland Facsimiles of the Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. BIQ 15 (1981): 37–48. Print. Hobson, Christopher. Blake and Homosexuality. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Print. ———. “Normalizing Perversity: Blake and Homosexuality in 2013. Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. 221–34. Print. Holmes, Richard. “The Greatness of William Blake.” New York Review of Books (December 3, 2015): 71–73.

236  General bibliography Howard, John. Infernal Poetics: Poetic Structures in Blake’s Lambeth Prophecies. Cranbury, NJ: Assoc Univ Presses, 1984. Print. Hutchings, Kevin. Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics. Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print. Jackson, H. J. Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015. Print. Jaensch, E. R. Eidetic Imagery. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1930. Print. Johnson, Mary Lynn. “The Death and Assumption of Blake’s Mary: Anomalous Subjects in the Biblical Watercolour Series for Thomas Butts.” Re-Envisioning Blake. Eds. Mark Crosby, et al. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 144–59. Print. ———. “Milton and Its Contexts.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 231–50. Print. ——— and John E. Grant, eds. Blake’s Poetry and Designs. New York: Norton, 1979, 2008. Print. Keynes, Sir. Geoffrey, ed. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. New York: Orion Press, 1967. Print. Kiralis, Karl. “William Blake as Intellectual and Spiritual Guide to Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims.” Blake Studies I (1969): 139–90. Print. Korshin, Paul. Typologies in England, 1650–1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1982. Print. Kruger, Katherine. “The Trimurti Meets the Zoas: ‘Hindoo’ Strategies in the Poetry of William Blake.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 109–17. Print. Levinson, Marjorie. “ ‘The Book of Thel’ by William Blake: A Critical Reading.” ELH 47 (1980): 287–303. Print. Lincoln, Andrew. “From America to The Four Zoas.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 210–30. Print. ———. Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala or The Four Zoas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Print. Linkin, Harriet Kramer. “Revisioning Blake’s Oothoon.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 23 (1990): 184–94. Print. ———. “Transfigured Maternity in Blake’s Songs of Innocence: Inverting the ‘Maternity Plot’ in ‘A Dream.’ ” Blake, Politics, and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 325–38. Print. Lister, Raymond. Infernal Methods: A Study of William Blake’s Art Techniques. London: G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1975. Print. ———. The Paintings of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print. Magno, Cettina and David Erdman, eds. “The Four Zoas” by William Blake. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1987. Print. Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s. Chicago: U Chicago P, 2003. Print. Maniquis, Robert M. “Holy Savagery and Wild Justice: English Romanticism and the Terror.” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 365–95. Print. Marsh, Nicholas. William Blake: The Poems. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print. Matthews, Susan. Blake, Sexuality and Bourgeois Politeness. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.

General bibliography 237 McCalman, Iaian. “The Infidel as Prophet: William Reid and Blakean Radicalism.” Historicizing Blake. Eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 24–42. Print. McClenahan, Catherine L. “Albion and the Sexual Machine: Blake, Gender and Politics, 1780–1795.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo et al. 1998. 301–24. Print. ———. “No Face Like the Human Divine? Women and Gender in Blake’s Pickering Manuscript.” Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Eds. G. A. Rosso and Daniel P. Watkins. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. 189–207. Print. McNeil, Helen. “The Formal Art of The Four Zoas.” Blake’s Visionary forms Dramatic. Eds. Erdman and Grant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1970. 373–90. Print. McNeil, Maureen. Under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin and His Age. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1987. Print. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Print. ———. “ ‘The Doom of Tyrants’: William Blake, Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, and the Millenarian Public Sphere.” Blake, History, and Politics. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 98–114. Print. ———. “ ‘As Portentous as the Written Wall’: Blake’s Illustrations to Night Thoughts. Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 171–203. Print. Mellor, Ann. Blake’s Human Form Divine. Berkeley, CA: U California Press, 1974. Print. Michael, Jennifer Davis. “Blake’s Feet: Toward a Poetics of Incarnation.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 205–24. Print. ———. “Framing Eve: Reading Blake’s Illustrations.” Women Reading William Blake. Ed. Helen P. Bruder. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 159–69. Print. Miller, Dan, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault, eds. Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978. Print. ———. “Blake’s Radical Comedy: Dramatic Structure as Meaning in Milton.” Blake’s Sublime Allegory.” Eds. Curran and Wittreich. Madison, WI: U Wisconsin P, 1973. 281–307. Print. ———. “Poetic and Pictorial Imagination in Blake’s The Book of Urizen.” The Visionary Hand. Ed. Essick. 1973. 337–80. Print. ———. “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing.” Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Eds. Eaves and Fischer. 1986. 46–95. Print. Morton, Timothy. “Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles: Romanticism and Disaster. January 2012. http://www.rc.mud. edu. Web. Nanavutty, Piloo. “William Blake and Hindu Creation Myths.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Victor Gollancz, 1957. 165–82. Print. Norvig, Gerda. Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake’s Illustrations to the Pilgrim’s Progress. Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1992. Print. Otto, Peter. Blake’s Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in the Four Zoas. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

238  General bibliography ———. Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print. ———. “From the Religious to the Psychological Sublime: The Fate of Young’s Night Thoughts in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 225–62. Print. Ostriker, Alicia. “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality.” Critical Essays on William Blake. Ed. Adams. 1991. 90–110. Print. Pagliaro, Harold E. Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1987. Print. Paley, Morton. “Blake’s Night Thoughts: An Exploration of the Fallen World.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin Rosenfeld. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. 131–57. Print. ———. Energy and Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Print. ———. “Introduction.” William Blake: Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. ———. “Spectre and Emanation.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.150–63. Print. ———. The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake. New York: Oxford, 2003. Print. ———. “William Blake and Dr. Thornton’s ‘Tory Translation’ of the Lord’s Prayer.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 263–86. Print. ——— and Michael Phillips, eds. Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973. Print. Peterfreund, Stuart. “The Problem of Originality and Blake’s Poetical Sketches.” ELH 52 (1985): 673–705. Print. Pierce, John B. “Typological Narrative in the Reuben Episode of Jerusalem. SEL 33 (Autumn 1993): 755–70. Print. ———. The Wond’rous Art: William Blake and Writing. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. Cambridge, 2003. 37–62. Print. Phillips, Michael. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/videos/william-blakeprinting-process. Web. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and Tradition. I & II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1968. Print. ———. “The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul.” The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto. New York: Haskell House, 1968. 17–63. Print. Rawlinson, Nick. William Blake’s Comic Vision. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Print. Richey, William. Blake’s Altering Aesthetic. Columbia, MO: U Missouri Press, 1996. Print. Robinson, Henry Crabb. Reminiscences of Blake (1825–27). Ed. Edith J. Morley. New York: Longmans, 1922. Web. Roe, Albert. “The Thunder of Egypt.” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. 158–95. Print. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon. Providence, RI: Brown UP, 1969. Print. Rosso, George. Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of “The Four Zoas.” Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1993. Print.

General bibliography 239 ———. “Empire of the Sea: Blake’s ‘King Edward the Third’ and English Imperial Poetry.” Blake, Politics and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 251–72. Print. ———. “The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in Its Biblical Contexts.” Prophetic Character. Ed. Gourlay. 2002. 287–326. Print. ——— and Daniel P. Watkins, eds. Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990. Print. Rubenstein, Anne and Camilla Townsend. “Revolted Negroes and the Devilish Principle: William Blake and the Conflicting Visions of Boni’s Wars in Surinam, 1772– 1796.” Blake, Politics, and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 273–98. Print. Ryan, Robert. “Blake and Religion.” Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 150–68. Print. Ryscamp, Charles. “Introduction.” The Pickering Manuscript of William Blake. New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1972. Print. Sato, Hikari. “Blake, Hayley, and India: On Designs to a Series of Ballads (1802).” The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Eds. Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki. New York: Continuum, 2006. 134–44. Print. Saurat, Denis. Blake and Modern Thought. London: Constable 1929. Print. Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Blake’s Tiriel and the Regency Crisis: Lifting the Veil on a Royal Masonic Scandal.” Blake, Politics, and History. Eds. Di Salvo, et al. 1998. 115–35. Print. Shaviro, Steven. “ ‘Striving with Systems’: Blake and the Politics of Difference.” Boundary 2, 10, no. 3 (1982): 229–50. Print. Singh, Charu Sheel. “Bhagavadgita, Typology and William Blake.” The Influence of the Bhagavadgita on Literature Written in English. Ed. T. R. Sharma. Meerut, India: Shalabh Prakashan, 1988. 23–36. Print. Spector, Sheila. “Glorious Incomprehensible”: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Language. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2001. Print. ———. Wonders Divine: The Development of Blake’s Kabbalistic Myth. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2001. Print. Swinburne, Augustus Charles. William Blake: A Critical Essay. London: John Camden Hotten, 1868. Print. Tannenbaum, Leslie. Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1984. Print. Tayler, Irene. “The Woman Scaly.” Bulletin of the Midwest MLA 6 (1973): 74–87. Print. Thompson, E. P. Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law. New York: New Press, 1993. Print. Tolley, Michael J. “Blake’s Songs of Spring.” William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Eds. Morton Paley and Michael Phillips. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973. 96–128. Print. Vine, Steven. Blake’s Poetry: Spectral Visions. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Print. Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. ———. The Evolution of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [Part I]. http://siteslab.unc.edu/viscomi/evolution.htm#_endn0. Web. ———. “Illuminated Printing.” Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge, 2003. 37–62. Print.

240  General bibliography Vogler, Thomas and Nelson Hilton, eds. Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality. Berkeley, CA: U California Press, 1986. Print. Wacker, Norman. “Epic and the Modern Long Poem: Virgil, Blake, and Pound.” Comparative Literature 42 (Spring 90): 126–43. Print. Wada, Ayako. “Visions of the Love Triangle and Adulterous Birth in Blake’s The Four Zoas.” Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 35–46. Print. Wagenknecht, David. Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973. Print. Ward, Aileen. Ward, Aileen. “Canterbury Revisited: The Blake-Cromek Controversy.” BIQ 22 (1988–89): 80–92. Print. ———. “Who Was Robert Blake?” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly XXVIII (1995): 84–9. Print. ———. “William Blake and His Circle.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 19–36. Print. Wardle, Judith. “Satan Not Having the Science of Wrath But Only of Pity.” Studies in Romanticism 13, no. 2 (1974): 147–54. Print. Webster, Brenda. “Blake, Women, and Sexuality.” Critical Paths. Eds. Miller, et al. 1987. 204–24. Print. Whitehead, Angus and Joel Gwynne. “The Sexual Life of Catherine B.: Women Novelists, Blake Scholars and Contemporary Fabulations of Catherine Blake.” Sexy Blake. Eds. Helen Bruder and Tristanne Connolly. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 193–210. Print. Whittaker, Jason. William Blake and the Myths of Britain. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999. Print. Wicksteed, Joseph. Blake’s Vision of the Book of Job. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1924. Print. Wilkie, Brian and Mary Lynn Johnson. Blake’s “Four Zoas”: Design of a Dream. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978. Print. Williams, Nicholas M. Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print. Wilson, Mona. The Life of William Blake. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Print. Wittreich, Joseph. Angel of the Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Print. Wolfson, Susan. “Blake’s Language in Poetic Form.” The Cambridge Companion to William Blake. Ed. Morris Eaves. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.63–84. Print. Worrall, David. “Blake and the 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture.” Blake in the 90s. Eds. S. Clark and D. Worrall. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. 194–211. Print. ———, ed. William Blake: The Urizen Books. Blake’s Illuminated Books. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: The William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1995. Print. Wright, Julia. Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2004. Print. Youngquist, Paul. Madness and Blake’s Myth. University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1989. Print.