WILLIAM BLAKE’S ILLUMINATED BOOKS – THE ULTIMATE REALITY

by

PHAM Xuandung June

Thesis
Presented to the Department of English of

University Paris Diderot – Paris VII

in Partial Fulfilment

of the Requirements

of the Degree of

Research Master in English Literature

Under the supervision of

Professor Jean-Marie Fournier

University Paris Diderot – Paris VII

June 2015
Table of Contents

Abstract ..........................................................................................................................................2

Introduction ...................................................................................................................................3

Chapter 1: The Ultimate Reality – Blake and Tradition ...........................................................9

I. Blake’s fourfold vision ..................................................................................................9

II. Blake, Plato and Neoplatonism ....................................................................................14

III. Blake and Swedenborg ................................................................................................22

IV. Blake and Milton..........................................................................................................27

Chapter 2: Time and Space in Blake’s Illuminated Books ......................................................35

I. Time and Space – the Eternal and the Infinite .............................................................35

II. Blake’s view on nature.................................................................................................43

III. Vortex – the emblem of Eternity .................................................................................47

Chapter 3: Blake and the Issue of Gender – the Androgynous Ideal ....................................56

I. Blake’s view of the body .............................................................................................56

II. Sexuality and gender ....................................................................................................65

III. Blake’s androgynous ideal ...........................................................................................72

Chapter 4: Blake’s Illuminated Books – the Science to/of Eternity .......................................80

I. Blake’s attitude towards science ..................................................................................80

II. Music, Poetry and Painting in Blake’s illuminated books ...........................................85

III. “Reading” Blake’s illuminated books – Act and Performance ....................................96

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................107

Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................111

1
Abstract

The primary goal of this thesis is to explore the conception of the ultimate reality by

William Blake, as well as the role of the illuminated printing medium in communicating and

realising Blake’s eternal vision. Throughout the analysis of Blake’s interaction with tradition and

heritage from the past, his conception of time and space, his view on gender and his conception of

the androgynous ideal, the central significance assigned to Blake’s theory of contraries will be

explicated. As the guiding principle in Blake’s conception of the ultimate reality, this theory of

contraries manifest itself in both the form and content of the illuminated books, the materialisation

of the Science which Blake deems to be essential in helping man regaining his fourfold nature. In

the end, this thesis hoped to demonstrate the uniqueness and relevancy of Blake’s visionary art

and poetry in the twenty-first century for the very emphasis they place on discovering the divinity

within man.

2
Introduction

The concept of the ultimate reality is one that has occupied the central position in almost

every branch of human knowledge, from religion, art, literature, to philosophy and science. Yet,

in the contemporary world, the mentioning of the term is generally associated with spirituality,

mysticism, and theology – the ugly dwarves that must be kept out of sight, to borrow the

vocabulary of Walter Benjamin.1 We now live in the post-Enlightenment age that relies on science

as the primary tools through which mysteries of the universe can be unveiled and human

understanding can progress. Paradoxically, recent development in one of the most advanced fields

of science, quantum mechanics, more than ever, brings science, logic and rational thinking closer

to the very spiritual and theological elements that it has long defied. The holographic principle2, a

property of quantum gravity and string theories, suggests that the entire visible universe is “a

reading of a lower dimensional hologram generated in hyperspace.” 3 Many critics of string

theories and theoretical physics have voiced their concern over the lack of empirical support, which

risks turning the scientific field into philosophy, or even religion. While it is true that predictions

of string theory have no chance to ever be observed experimentally, it is also undeniable that there

has been increasing recognition given to the subject by renowned physicists and scientists. This

development marks a turning point in the science-religion debate which has been running

1
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (New York: Classic Books America, 2009), 2.
2
The holographic principle was originally developed in 1994 by Nobel laureate Gerard Hooft and
Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind.
3
Zoltan Batiz and Bhag Chauhan, “Holographic Principle and Quantum Physics,” NeuroQuantology 7,
no. 4 (2009).

3
throughout history, indicating the limitation of the dualistic, exclusive point of view, and raising

the need to devise a new scientific methodology that is no longer purely empirically-based.

William Blake comes into the picture with his conception of Eternity, Heaven, Divine

Imagination, or any other term which fundamentally means the ultimate reality, that shares the

perspective of other philosophic, religious, and scientific writings on the subject. It affirms that

this indescribable, beyond language and sense perceptions reality is the “original” from which the

physical universe is but an imperfect copy or reflection. What distinguishes Blake, however, is his

belief in the possibility of approaching this ultimate reality from the material world, through a

metamorphic process in the individual energised by creative imagination. If science stumbles at

the improvability of the holographic principle because the hologram and the source are

fundamentally separated spatially speaking, religious teachings also obstruct man from reaching

the ultimate reality by introducing judgment and salvation as something obtained after death, not

in life. The spatial and temporal barriers reinforced by science and religion stand at stark contrast

with Blake’s emphasis on the elevation of imagination, on the freedom of perception acquired as

a result of intellectual but also poetic activities. It is his belief that through poetry – not science,

religion, or philosophy, the Poet – not scientists, priests or philosophers, will make the knowledge

of the ultimate reality accessible.

My decision to work on the ultimate reality in the illuminated books of William Blake is

unquestionably based on academic interests, as an attempt to bring prominence to the uniqueness

and relevancy of Blake’s vision, to give a broader picture on the way various elements in his art

and poetry interact in the dynamism of this vision, as well as to fill in the research gap created by

the increasing specialisation in Blakean studies. By “increasing specialisation,” I infer to the

tendency among researchers to focus on individual elements in Blake’s system: numerous articles

4
and books have been dedicated to the explication of each and every detail in Jerusalem, of the

symbols of his poetry, of his conception of time, of his religious belief or of his political and social

stance. What all these works have in common is that they either take one individual work or one

specific issue in the whole of Blake’s universe, then deal with it separately. Of course, not a small

number of research has been done on his complete works and taking into account all imaginable

relevant aspects. Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry can be named as one classic and successful

example of such attempt. The complexity of Blake’s ideas, the enormous scope of his oeuvres

stretching throughout his life time, and the challenge in employing different methodological

approaches on text and image are but some of the difficulties that may have prevented many from

venturing to research on an all-inclusive topic such as the ultimate reality in Blake. My decision

to work on precisely this topic is not derived from delusional self-confidence, as I am fully aware

of the limitations in my knowledge, nor is it a preposterous manoeuver of courage in diving head-

on to tackle an issue way beyond my capability. If academic interest is the primary reason behind

my choice of topic, the secondary reason would be my personal desire for self-discovery and self-

fulfilment. As Kathleen Raines says, “For those to whom the outer world of the senses alone seems

real, Blake, in common with all symbolic art, offers little; for others “the end of a golden string”

to thread the labyrinth of the psyche.”4 It is one of my main objectives in this research to find a

way through this labyrinth of the psyche using the golden string offered by Blake. Such goal,

ambitious as it may sound, is by no means overweening, as it is in fact the purpose Blake invests

in his illuminated books.

4
Kathleen Raine, William Blake (New York: Praeger, 1970), 8.

5
 My main corpus will include three books, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93),

Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804-10).5 Some

may question the validity of such corpus, as investigating an encompassing topic such as the

ultimate reality in Blake without including Jerusalem is akin to working on Milton without

referring to Paradise Lost. It should be clarified that throughout this research, while the three

mentioned works are the primary target of analysis, references will be drawn from all relevant

sources, Jerusalem and The Four Zoas included. Furthermore, the Marriage, Visions and Milton

represent three stages in the development of Blake’s conceptual formation as well as of his

execution techniques, whose ultimate fruit can be found in Jerusalem. As Blake has always valued

process over final product, in examining the three landmarks in his career, this thesis hopes to

provide important insights that may have been unattainable if Jerusalem was to be the sole object

of research.

The first chapter will be devoted to introducing Blake’s conception of the ultimate reality

and exploring the relationship between Blake and his predecessors, including Plato, Neoplatonic

philosophers, Swedenborg, and Milton. The goal of situating Blake in tradition is not simply to

detect similarities and differences in his ideas and those of his predecessors, or to determine the

extent to which he is influenced by the heritage of the past, but to highlight the dynamism in their

exchange of ideas. It will be noticed that despite the many utopian elements in his vision of the

ultimate reality, Blake’s prophetic books should not be considered as utopian literature, for there

is crucial difference in his conception of space and time compared to the temporal and spatial

settings found in utopian writings.

5
These three works will be referred to as the Marriage, Visions and Milton respectively in their
subsequent appearance.

6
 This remark will lead to the second chapter, in which an analysis on Blake’s understanding

of time and space, eternity and infinity is provided. A look at his view on nature will reveal how

the contradiction in his attitude is used as a means to alert the reader of the restrictive character in

their thinking. This will be followed by an examination of the ouroboros and the vortex, two

important symbols in Blake’s conception of Eternity and two representatives of the fluidity and

instability of meaning in Blake’s use of symbols.

Chapter 3 dives into the issues of gender and the body. In explicating Blake’s attitude

towards the corporeal, I hope to elucidate the idea that in both his poetry and his art, the mentioning

of the human body is done for the purpose of encouraging dialectic thinking rather than depicting

the physical body. The second part of this chapter will work on Blake’s dilemma in his view of

women and how he attempts to solve this dilemma through the concept of the androgynous ideal.

Despite his failure, it is worth noticing that Blake’s attempt shows how involved he is in issues of

the material world, as against the misconception that he is completely detached from life in his

pursuit of an other-worldly eternal vision. In chapter 4, I will further exploit this remark in my

argument of how Blake’s illuminated books are the means through which Blake hopes to realise

his humanistic dream of awakening the nation. Starting with Blake’s view on science, I will move

on to prove that his books are the materialisation of the Science which Blake deems to be essential

in helping man regaining his fourfold nature. The chapter ends with an investigation on reading as

an imaginative act and an analysis of the performative quality of the illuminated books – an aspect

that is directly linked to effecting profound change in the reader but is conspicuously absent in

most of the studies done on Blake.

Before proceeding to the first chapter, there is still one question that is to be answered.

What will be the expected concrete findings of this thesis? There are several goals I wish to achieve.

7
First, I hope to make an affirmation on how Blake is thoroughly consistent in executing his theory

of contraries. Second, I would like to prove that Blake’s ultimate reality, despite being a mental

phenomenon, is not totally detached from daily life. Consequently, his conception of Eternity is

humanistic, practical and relevant. Last but not least, in expounding Blake’s ideas of the book, the

performative aspect of his multi-media form, and the potential of change associated with the act

of reading, I wish to put emphasis on the pivotal role of the illuminated books as a medium through

which Blake’s vision of Eternity is communicated to and realised by his audience.

8
Chapter 1: The Ultimate Reality – Blake and Tradition

His reputation as a revolutionary artist has often led to the assumption that William Blake’s

art and poetry seek to sever all ties with tradition, to break away from the past completely in favour

of new modes of thinking and new forms of expression. The first chapter of this thesis will strive

to correct that common misconception by proving that tradition plays a pivotal role in the

formulation and development of Blake’s system, especially in his vision of reality. That is not to

say that Blake’s attitude towards his predecessors is one of passive reception. He certainly is

influenced by Neoplatonic ideas, by Swedenborg and Milton, and most notably, the Bible;

nevertheless, like a bee making honey out of the flower’s nectar, Blake actively transforms the

heritage handed down to him into his own creation and ideas. Before exploring some of the figures

that may have inspired Blake, including Plato and Neoplatonist philosophers, Swedenborg, and

Milton, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of Blake’s conception of reality as well as to

introduce the accompanied terminology.

I. Blake’s Fourfold Vision

There are four worlds or levels in Blake’s system: Ulro, Generation, Beulah, and Eden. In

short, Ulro, the lowest level of “the isolated individual reflecting on his memories of perception

and evolving generalizations and abstract ideas,”6 is Blake’s hell. Above is the world we live in,

Generation, one that is divided between subject and object, organism and environment. The next

level is Paradise, or Beulah, “a term derived from Isaiah which means “married,” and is used to

6
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2013), 48.

9
describe the relation of land to its people.”7 The highest possible state, Eden, “is not a union of

lover and beloved, but of creator and creature, of energy and form.”8 While being extremely close

to each other, there is one crucial element that renders Eden the more superior state of existence:

continuous activity. Beulah, said to be a “feminine” realm of love that offers “a mild & pleasant

Rest” to “the Sons of Eden,” is “where all Contraries are equally True” (Milton, 580)9. Certainly

ranked higher than Ulro or Generation, Beulah appears to be a place of hoped-for perfection, which

connotes delusion and, to some extent, monotony. That is probably the reason why in Milton Book

the Second, Blake does not stop at this level but sees it as a gateway to enter Eden, “where evil

still exists in dynamic contrary balance with good.”10 Blake’s Eden, far detached from the image

popularised in Christian orthodoxy, is achieved and retained only through on-going mental fight,

in which one must work through the contrary logic and live with the very thing that one finds

intolerable.

In Blake’s illuminated books, Eden, Eternity, Imagination and Heaven are sometimes used

interchangeably. According to Blake, the world of Eternity is “the Divine bosom into which we

shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal,

whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal. There Exist in that Eternal

World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of

7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 49.
9
The number indicates the page number in William Blake, William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed.
Alicia Ostriker (Penguin Classics, 1988). Without specific indication, all quotations from Blake will be
identified by page numbers from this source.
10
Chris Mounsey, Understanding the Poetry of William Blake Through a Dialectic of Contraries: A Study
of the Philosophical Contexts Within Which Blake Developed His Ideas (Edwin Mellen Press, 2011), 249.

10
Nature” (A Vision of the Last Judgment).11 The phrase “the Divine bosom into which we shall all

go after the death of the Vegetated body” is rather misleading, as it gives the impression that

Blake’s Eden is very close to the afterlife Heaven as taught by the church. While the latter

emphasises on the denouncement of all sins, passion included, Blake’s Heaven is only admissible

to men who “have Cultivated their Understandings,” and not because “they have curbed & governd

their Passions, or have No Passions.” In order to enter the latter, faith alone is enough; to enter

Blake’s heaven, Wisdom is an indispensable requirement: “The Fool shall not enter into Heaven,

let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast

out Are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their

lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds.”

Blake’s attitude towards morality, therefore, stands at the other extreme of that of Christian

orthodoxy, which helps explain his hostility against institutional religion12. Among the three books

investigated here, the Marriage is the one in which this rebellious spirit is expressed most vividly.

The book is overloaded with scandalous statements explicitly opposing conventional morality,

such as “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” (183), or “Sooner

murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (185). Visions is also impregnated with

Blake’s antagonistic view upon religious doctrines, as his calls for maximised sensual enjoyment

is communicated through Oothoon, an aspect that will be explored in more detail in chapter 3. Last

but not least, in Milton, time and again, Blake launches head-on attacks against religion, like when

he draws together Satan, priests and churches in their destructive goal to corrupt mankind: “Thy

11
All references from A Vision of the Last Judgment are taken from David Erdman’s The Complete
Poetry & Prose of William Blake (Univ. of California Press, 2008), 554-566.
12
In the same note, Blake accuses the modern church of “Crucif[ying] Christ with the Head Downwards.”

11
purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches/ Is to impress on men the fear of death; to

teach/ Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness” (599).

Nevertheless, Blake’s objective is not simply to invert moral doctrines, as often been

mistaken, especially in the reading of the Marriage. His ultimate goal is to transcend the dualistic

way of thinking, the division between good and evil, male and female, subject and object, reason

and imagination. It is essential to emphasise that Blake’s transcendentalism is not simply nihilistic

in rejecting the binary categorisation of all things, or is Blake satisfied with situating himself in

the middle ground of ambivalence. Mid-way uncertainty is far from being the ideal state of being

Blake has in mind. In his conception of the three classes of mankind existing in this world, the

Redeemed, situated in between the orthodox Elect and the rebellious Reprobate, are those who are

most miserable, perpetually tormented by and suffered from doubts and fears:

… The Elect is one Class: You

Shall bind them separate: they cannot Believe in Eternal Life

Except by Miracle & a New Birth. The other two Classes;

The Reprobate who never cease to Believe, and the Redeemd,

Who live in doubts & fears perpetually tormented by the Elect (Milton, 566-567)

The Elect, although being unable to believe in eternal life except for cases of “miracle”

(used with an unmistakably negative connotation) and “new birth” – the afterlife, are well

grounded in their disbelief. In this sense, their foundation is as strong as that of the Reprobate,

“who never cease to Believe.” Consequently, the Redeemed, stuck in the state of indecisive in-

between-ness, find themselves in the worst situation. The kind of transcendence Blake envisions,

neither nihilistic nor ambivalent, is one followed by the recovery of the eternal world in which the

four zoas are harmoniously reintegrated within the Eternal Man.

12
 The four Zoas represent the four primal faculties of man: Tharmas as corporal senses,

Urizen as reason, Luvah as love/passion, and Urthona as imagination/wisdom. Each of them has

his feminine counterpart – known as Emanation, and his unnamed male Spectre – the selfish part

of a divided personality which seeks domination over the whole. Tharmas’ Emanation is Enion,

Urizen’s Ahania, Luvah’s Vala, and Urthona’s Enitharmon. In Blake’s system, zoas and

emanations are contraries, and as mentioned previously, the state of Eden is only achieved when

the contrary logic is overcome; in other words, when the zoas and their emanations unselfishly

coexist in balance and harmony. As the zoas reside in every man, it can be further translated into

Blake’s vision of humanity regained when the faculties of sensing, thinking, feeling and intuiting

are reunited in man, when he, passing through the Mundane Egg, acquires the fourfold vision

which will liberate him from the restriction and limitation of the “Vegetative Eye.”

The Four Zoas and the Mundane Egg as depicted in Milton

13
 Situated in the middle of the four intersecting worlds, the Mundane Egg.13, stretching “from

Zenith to Nadir, in midst of Chaos” (589), represents the three-dimensional world of time and

space in which fallen man inhabits until he breaks through its shell and re-enters Eternity. As a

common mythological motif that can be found in the creation myths of many cultures and

civilisations, the mundane egg provides the first definite proof of Blake’s indebtedness to tradition,

which will be explored in the following sections. It is necessary to clarify that this investigation of

the link between Blake and tradition is not meant to simply highlight the similarities between Blake

and his predecessors. As mentioned previously, the relationship between Blake and the past is one

of tumultuous nature, and it is this nature that the rest of this chapter hopes to elucidate. In the

complex interaction of their ideas, in his changing attitude towards some figures, and his lasting

affiliation to others, Blake reveals himself to be as much a rebel as he is a traditionalist.

II. Blake, Plato and Neoplatonism

1. Blake and Plato

Despite the fact that Blake condemns the Greek and especially the Platonic spirit in his

later works, such as Milton, the Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris, the remarks on the Laocoon plate,

On Homer’s Poetry and on Virgil, there is an explicit parallel between Plato’s and Blake’s vision

of reality. Their world-views are both founded upon the conviction that the most important human

mental faculty is insight – called “reason” by Plato and “imagination” by Blake.14 The contrasting

13
Blake probably encountered the Mundane Egg when he was an apprentice working with his master on
the designs Jacob Bryant’s New System. See Susanne Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem As Visionary Theatre:
Entering the Divine Body (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 135.
14
Harry Lesser, “Blake and Plato,” Philosophy 56 (1981): 223.

14
nuance caught at first sight between Reason and Imagination will slowly be replaced by realisation

of similarities once it is made clear that the two are only different in terminology, not conception.

What Plato means by Reason is not the same as the “reason” strongly objected by Blake, whose

function is to acquire knowledge through argument and deduction. As expounded in the Seventh

Letter and the speech of Diotima in the Symposium, Plato views the primary use of Reason as “to

see one principle in many different phenomena, to see beyond individual instances of, e.g. man or

beauty or roundness, to the one Form of Man or Beauty or Circle.” 15 In essence, Blake’s

conception of Imagination or Vision closely resembles Plato’s Reason: for instance, in Milton, the

term Form is used with a very Platonic connotation, “Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated

Forms cannot/ The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife/ But their Forms Eternal

Exist, For-ever” (586). Furthermore, in his notes on the painting A Vision of the Last Judgement,

Blake says, “Vision or Imagination is a representation of what eternally exists, really and

unchangeably.” As such, both Blake and Plato perceive the ultimate reality as the original source

of which physical things are merely imperfect copies or distorted reflections. This idea of the

material world as a copy or reflection of a higher reality, elucidated in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave,

is a major thread running through Blake’s art, most vividly in its formal aspect in which the copies

produced by illuminated printing are but the imperfect representations of the Ideal book.

The frontispiece of Visions can be said to be one of the most representative examples of

the Platonic presence in Blake’s art. In this visual depiction of the three main characters of the

book, Oothoon is chained with Bromion, while Theotormon is squatting nearby with his face

buried in his arms. A scene of absolute alienation and abjection, the frontispiece can be read both

as a parody of Aristophanes’ myth as recounted in Plato’s Symposium and as a direct reference to

15
Ibid.

15
the Allegory of the Cave. The cave in which the three characters are situated represents the Platonic

cave that imprisons man and hinders his understanding of the true nature of reality. Blinded by

their own restricted metaphysical perspectives,16 all of them fit perfectly into the description of the

prisoners who mistake shadows for reality. Their inability to liberate themselves from the chains

of convention is a result of their lack of intellectual powers to see beyond the physical to the

eternal; in other words, of Plato’s Reason and Blake’s Imagination.

Frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Tate Gallery

16
An analysis of the three aspects of individual identity embodied in the three main characters of Visions
will be found in Chapter 3.

16
 Blake and Plato, therefore, are compatible in their consensus that intellectual intuition is

essential in reaching the ultimate reality. However, there is irresolvable division in their ideas of

what constitutes the eternal. For Plato, what is eternal is Form, which produces life and Energy;

while for Blake, it is the contrary: what is eternal is Energy, which produces Form. Furthermore,

it should be noted that while there is one form corresponding to each good quality, the Platonic

universe does not include Forms of bad qualities such as evil or ugliness. This stands as the main

contrast to Blake’s highest level of reality, Eden, in which both good and evil exist in a state of

dynamic contrary.

Despite the lack of documented evidence, it is very likely that Blake read Plato. In a letter

to Thomas Butt, written in July 1803, Blake writes:

I consider [Sublime Allegory] as the Grandest Poem that this World Contains. Allegory addressed
to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My
Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry; it is also somewhat in the same manner defin’d by Plato.17

Such statement clearly indicates not only Blake’s familiarity to Plato’s writings but also his

positive attitude towards the philosopher in the sense that he acknowledges the resemblance in

their ideas. Paradoxically, very soon after crediting Plato with the Sublime Poetry, a year later, in

the Preface of Milton Book the First, Blake expresses his undisguised animosity as he writes, “The

Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid: of Plato and Cicero, which all Men ought to

contemn: are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible” (513). It is safe to assume that

their disagreement regarding the relationship between Form and Energy is much more fundamental

to be overcome by other similarities in their world-views.

17
Quoted Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), 316.

17
 2. Blake and Neoplatonism

If it is difficult to characterise the Blake-Plato affinity, then, the claim regarding

Neoplatonism18 presents an equally complicated case, if not more. The extent to which Blake was

affected by Neoplatonic philosophy remains a matter of debate.19 As summarised by Mounsey,

there are generally three different accounts which present three different degrees of Blake’s

association with Neoplatonism. At one extreme stands Kathleen Raine, who argues at length that

he was always a Neoplatonist. At the other extreme, William Richey suggests that while some of

Blake’s early work demonstrated his association with Neoplatonic ideas, he totally rejected them

after 1804. Taking the middle point, George Mills Harper proposes that despite his rejection of

Neoplatonism later in his career, Blake remained indebted to it, particularly in Milton and

Jerusalem.20 This thesis will not attempt to settle the dispute concerning the degree to which Blake

is indebted to Neoplatonic thoughts; instead, it will simply present the pronounced parallels as well

as disparities between Blake’s conception of the ultimate reality and the conception expounded by

Neoplatonist philosophers, as the definite evidence of Blake’s participation in the continuing

dialogue to traditions of Western culture.

18
Neoplatonism refers to a school of thought that emerged in the third century AD, when Plotinus moved
to the capital of the Roman Empire and began teaching his interpretation of Plato’s philosophy. The term
was coined by German scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century, for the purpose of distinguishing the
ideas of later Greek and Roman Platonists from those of Plato himself. Neoplatonism, as a result, contains
aspects different from Platonism, one of which its primary concern with the One – the first principle of
reality – rather than the Platonic cleavage between Ideal and Form. For a more thorough account of
Neoplatonism, see Pauliina Remes, Neoplatonism (Acumen, 2008).
19
The first scholar to suggest Neoplatonic influence in Blake’s work was Foster Damon, in William
Blake: His Philosphy and Symbols, followed by Milton O. Percival’s William Blake’s Circle of Destiny.
20
Mounsey, Dialectic of Contraries, 20.

18
 Blake’s possible affiliation with Thomas Taylor is often regarded as the access point to his

Neoplatonic inspiration 21. Taylor, known as “the English Pagan,” is a prominent Neoplatonist

among the Romantics, whose translations of Plotinus and Proclus may have influenced Blake

greatly. It has been observed that the Neoplatonic theme of The Book of Thel (1789) – the descent

of the soul into generation – was largely drawn from Taylor’s recently published paraphrased

translation of Plotinus’ On the Beautiful.22 The influence of Plotinus does not stop at the thematic

level but infiltrates further into Blake’s formation of worldview, for instance, in his vision of Hell.

In the same essay, Plotinus writes:

We must enter deep into ourselves, and, leaving behind the objects of corporeal sight, no longer
look back after any of the accustomed spectacles of sense… For, by thus embracing and adhering
to corporeal forms, he is precipitated, not so much in his body as in his soul, into profound and
horrid darkness; and thus blind, like those in the infernal regions, converses only with phantoms,
deprived of the perception of what is real and true.23

The similitude between the above description and Blake’s conception of Hell or Ulro is striking.

In Milton, Ulro is described as “a vast Polypus/ Of living fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space

growing,/ A self-devouring monstrous Human Death Twenty seven fold” (588); it is a dark place

of “cruelties,” whose inhabitants “wail Night & Day” (The Four Zoas, 305). For both Plotinus and

Blake, hell is not an external situation into which human is subject but an internal state generated

by ourselves. Thus, it is safe to assume that the Marriage, engraved about a year after the

21
Taylor was a friend of George Cumberland, who was a close friend to Blake till the end of his life. It is
suggested that through Cumberland, Blake must have acquainted Taylor and many of his translated
works.
22
Raine, William Blake, 52.
23
Plotinus, An Essay on the Beautiful (From the Greek of Plotinus), trans. Thomas Taylor (London: John
M. Watkins, 1917).

19
publication of On the Beautiful, in connecting Evil with Energy and Eternal Delight, is set to

implicitly argue for the fact that it is the real hell of Ulro of which man should fear, not the hell

propagated by churches and priests.

There are several other places in the Marriage in which the Neoplatonic thoughts

adumbrated by Plotinus can be detected. For instance, when Blake says that the body is a portion

of the Soul, he is echoing Plotinus’ belief that the soul is not imprisoned in a container but on the

contrary “as the superior reality contains the sensible universe.”24 Plotinus’ understanding of the

Soul as an essentially creative being whose experience can be said as an analogue of the entire

Cosmos must have fascinated Blake profoundly. In the Plotinian system, the Soul comes to know

itself in relation to its acts and eventually attains full self-consciousness through a dialectic process

that “takes its own expressions into account, no matter how faulty or incomplete they may appear

in retrospect, and weaves them into a cosmic tapestry of noetic images.” 25 This emphasis on

activity, on the necessity of self-realisation is almost identical to Blake’s insistence on Mental

Fight as the only solution for the redemption of humanity:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green & pleasant land. (Milton, 514)

Next to Plotinus, Proclus is the most accomplished and rigorous of the Neoplatonists.

Proclus’s understanding of the movement of existence is surprisingly close to Blake’s: in the

24
John Deck, Nature, Contemplation, and the One: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Larson, 1991),
32.
25
“Neoplatonism,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

20
beginning there is an abstract unity, which then passes into a multiplicity that is identified with

Life (Generation in Blake’s system), and eventually returns to unity – no longer abstract but

actualised as an eternal manifestation of the godhead.26 In this respect, Proclus also inherits from

Plotinus; however, they differ at one fundamental point: when Plotinus stresses on salvation and

regards human existence in the physical world as a transitory stage, Proclus considers the whole

process as a natural order of things without seeing the need to emphasise on salvation. Blake begs

to differ with both: for him, human life is not a mere stepping stone to eternity, and passing through

Generation to Eternity far from being a natural order, requires extensive intellectual effort which

makes the path a dynamic and violent process.

Despite this division, Blake and Proclus are of like mind in viewing religion as a product

of human creation, furthermore, as an obstruction to man in his return to divine origin. On plate

11 of the Marriage, Blake writes:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names
and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and
whenever their enlarges senses could perceive

And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country. Placing it under its mental deity.

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.

… Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. (186)

This appears to be a quotation, or at least, a paraphrase from Proclus, who writes:

The ancient priests, when they considered that there was a certain alliance and sympathy in
natural things to each other, and of things manifest to occult powers, and by this means
discovered that all things subsist in all, they fabricated a sacred science, from this mutual

26
Ibid.

21
 sympathy and similarity. Thus they recognized things supreme in such as are subordinate…
Hence the authors of the ancient priesthood, discovered from things apparent, the worship of
superior powers, while they mingled some things, and purified others.27

These resemblances as well as disparities in Blake’s and Neoplatonic philosophers are solid

evidence of Blake’s participation in Neoplatonism – the “underground river that flows through

European history.”28

III. Blake and Swedenborg

About 1788, Blake read and annotated Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning

Divine Love and Divine Wisdom, which later became a possible source of inspiration for Thel’s

Motto in The Book of Thel, as Blake writes, “Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?/ Or Love in a

golden bowl?” (78). If Swedenborgianism is one of the first and most obvious starting points in

the study of Blake’s religious influences, it is not because of him being a devoted follower of the

prophet or that he was brought up a Swedenborgian – which is in fact a mistaken belief,29 but

mainly because similar to the case of Plato and Neoplatonism, Blake’s association with

Swedenborg is complicated and it is this complexity that requires explanation. In his youth, he

27
Thomas Taylor, trans., Mystical Initiations; or Hymns of Orpheus (London, 1787), 74-5, 80. My italics.
28
Kathleen Raine, “Blake’s Debt to Antiquity,” The Sewanee Review 71, no. 3 (1963): 353.
29
It is one of the many biographical myths that have been demonstrated to be inaccurate or irrelevant by
David Erdman in Blake: Prophet against Empire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977). In 1789, Blake
in fact did delve into Swedenborgianism by attending a five-day Conference of the New Jerusalem
Church during which passages from the Master were read aloud and resolutions embodying doctrinal
points were discussed. Blake’s reading of Divine Love and his brief participation in the conference led
him to assume that “The Whole of the New Church is in the Active Life & not in Ceremonies at all,”
which he initially believed to be exactly what set it apart from other religious institutions.

22
certainly holds positive opinion toward the prophet, probably nowhere close to enthusiasm but at

least with a sense of affinity. Swedenborg’ anticlerical and politically radical position as

manifested through his claim that his new revelation was a return to ancient knowledge of the
30
divine, liberating man from the corruption and hypocrisy of the Christian churches,

understandably must have seemed to be very appealing to William Blake, who possesses an akin

spirit. Gradually, however, Blake’s attitude grows more and more sceptical, as has been

documented in his chronological annotations of Swedenborg’s work, and finally, in realising how

limited their affinity is, he denounces Swedenborgian ideas altogether.31 Nonetheless, one should

keep in mind the fact that, even in his most relentless attack against Swedenborg, even after his

split with the New Church, there still exist clear traits of Swedenborg’s “influence” on Blake. As

Schorer remarks, throughout his writings, from his early Songs to his last epic Jerusalem, one finds

in every place some fragment of his debt to Swedenborg, “now so slight that it exists only in the

use of a strange word, now so major as to underlie the whole structure of a long poem.”32 The

Marriage is a perfect example to illustrate this complex Blake-Swedenborg relationship, as it

encompasses the opposing opinions Blake holds of the prophet.

30
Robert Rix, William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (Ashgate, 2007), 47.
31
Blake’s commentary in Heaven and Hell (1784) made before 1788 was scant. Later, with the
publication of Swedenborg’s Concerning Divine Providence (1788), Blake discovered the more
conservative side of his ideas and concluded that Swedenborg was “a Spiritual Predestinarian” supported
by “Lies & Priest-craft.” Finally, his annotation on Divine Providence (1790), probably done in the year
of the publication, clearly demonstrated Blake’s indignant denunciation of the prophet and marked the
end of his affiliation to Swedenborgianism. See Erdman, Prophet against Empire, 142 and Rix, Blake and
the Cultures of Radical Christianity, 49.
32
Mark Schorer, “Swedenborg and Blake,” Modern Philology 36, no. 2 (1938): 160.

23
 The title Marriage of Heaven and Hell is obviously deriving from Swedenborg’s Heaven

and Hell, and the concepts in this early prophetic book also arise from Swedenborgian teaching.

The Marriage begins with the pronouncement that a new age is begun – the New Age that

Swedenborg declared had begun in 1757: “As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three

years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the

tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up” (181). It has been further speculated that Blake’s

“Memorable fancies” in the Marriage is a borrowing from Swedenborg’s illustrative “Memorable

relations” in which both men recount their experiences with angels and other spiritual creatures in

a casual, conversational tone.33 One crucial element that distinguishes Blake from Swedenborg is

the behaviour of their angels: if Swedenborg’s angels are the conventional projection of pedantic

theological truths, Blake’s are both unpredictable and unconventional. 34 In addition, even when

both men insist on revolutionary action, they differ vastly in their perception regarding the

uniqueness of their own revolutionary acts.

Most critics have read the Marriage as a criticism of Milton and Swedenborg; however, it

should be remarked that the nature of criticism against each figure is qualitatively different. While

Milton is the subject of the Devil’s mild ironies, Swedenborg is the object of harsh ridicule. 35

33
Mark Schorer, “Swedenborg and Blake,” 164. Not all scholars agree upon this point, though. While
Arthur Symons takes these “Fancies” to be parodies of Swedenborg (William Blake [New York, 1907],
94), Foster Damon does not subscribe to this opinion in his William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols.
34
By the end of the Marriage, the Angel becomes a Devil and friend of Blake, who joins him in their
reading of the Bible of Hell: “This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend: we often
read the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well”
(194).
35
Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 200.

24
Blake’s attitude is a logical reaction; if Milton, identifying himself in early life with orthodoxy,

steadily moves away from it into the divine vision of Paradise Regained, Swedenborg, starting off

with religious humanism, gradually becomes a new kind of priest as his imaginative and subversive

powers are replaced by his acceptance of Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, as he joins the

rank of the angels who “have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.” This explains

why, proclaiming Swedenborg the angel of the millennium in the beginning of the Marriage,

Blake’s attitude towards him changes radically by the end of the book. The prophet’s growing and

pernicious conviction of his uniqueness acts as a symbolic manifestation of the triumph of nature

over the integrity of vision, the kind of self-deception that Blake mercilessly condemns. As Bloom

rightly observes, “Whatever faults of passion Blake possessed, and he recognized each of them in

turn as they became relevant to his poetry, he never allowed himself to believe he was “the single

one on earth that ever broke a net” of religious orthodoxy.”36

In his most direct charge against Swedenborg’s self-deception of uniqueness, writes Blake:

Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth: Now hear another: he has written
all the old falsehoods.

And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, & conversed not with
Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions.

Thus Swedenborgs writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the
more sublime, but no further.

Have now another plain fact: Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus
of Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s. and from those
of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number.

36
Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970),
71.

25
 But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds
a candle in sunshine. (Marriage, 192-93)

This passage not only dismisses Swedenborg and all systematic reasoners in spiritual matters with

him as merely “any man with mechanical talents” but also implies a sort of hierarchy in Blake’s

system, for Dante and Shakespeare are valued infinitely above the theosophists Paracelsus and

Boehme (Behmen): the poet is great sunshine against whom any mystical writer is only a candle.

Much research has been done on the relationship between Blake and mysticism, and while there

is no denying the existence of the mystical aspect in Blake’s art, it should be stressed that William

Blake is, first and foremost, a Poet. Consequently, all teachings handed down to Blake, including

that of Swedenborg, are freely taken over into his own doctrine and transformed into concepts

which serve the cause of poetry.

In one example, Blake adopts the Swedenborgian Grand Man theory and further connects

the divinity of humanity – the “Human Form Divine” – with Imagination, also known as the Poetic

Genius. The relationship between the form of man’s body and the form of heaven is a central

aspect in both Swedenborg’s and Blake’s systems. In Swedenborg’s, heaven is in the form of a

Grand Man, whose parts have some correspondence with every particle of the human body:

That heaven, viewed collectively, is in form as one man, is an arcanum which is not yet known in
the world: but it is well known in the heavens… As [the angels] know that all the heavens, together
with their societies, are in form as one man, they also call heaven the Grand and Divine Man.37

This Swedenborgian Grand Man finds its parallel in Blake’s One Man, or true Man:

We live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses

We behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one,

37
Quoted Mark Schorer, “Swedenborg and Blake,” 167.

26
 As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man

We call Jesus the Christ: and he in us, as we in him,

Live in perfect harmony in Eden the land of life,

Giving, receiving, and forgiving each other trepasses. (Jerusalem, 699)

The One Man, or true Man, from the very first days of Blake’s career, has been identified with the

Poetic Genius: “That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that the body or outward form of Man

is derived from the Poetic Genius,” and “The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius”

(All Religions Are One, 77). Blake holds an unshakable belief in the power of the Poetic Genius –

the spiritual/mental entity which is the motive force behind human creativity. It is the only remedy

for the inescapable dualistic nature of all things, which constitutes the never-ending circle of

entrapment: “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” (There Is No Natural Religion, 75). Thus, according to Blake, it is through

poetry and poetic creation, not philosophy, theology or religion, that an approach to the ultimate

reality is made possible. For this reason, compared to other affiliations explored previously, the

Blake-Milton relationship is one of relatively more significance.

IV. Blake and Milton

According to Bloom, Blake read little with any care besides the Bible and Milton.38 In

setting Milton side by side with the Bible, he is probably making an indirect claim regarding the

central position the poet occupies in the Blakean universe. Milton is Blake’s idea of a great poet;

38
Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 77.

27
his passionate study of the work of his predecessor, his stunning illustration of Paradise Lost, as

well as his attempt in Milton to save the poet’s teaching from the erroneous interpretation it has

been subject to are but some of the proof showing his enthusiasm towards Milton. However, once

again, the Milton-Blake affiliation is one which has occupied the thought of many critics but

remained controversial. For one reason, the literary relationship between the two poets was not

attended until the twentieth century, and once it became an object of interest, scholars are divided

between those who wish to emphasise the knit of identity between Blake and Milton and those

who prefer to stress their differences. Belonging to the first groups, Denis Saurat and Northrop

Frye have explored the biographical parallels and literary patterns that associate the two poets.39

In the second group, Jackie DiSalvo has identified the ideological divisions that distinguish Blake

from Milton, while Harold Bloom further highlighted the dissociation by psychology, between an

overly confident Milton and an anxiety-ridden William Blake.40 For another reason, in order to

identify the exact degree to which Blake is influenced by Milton, one’s knowledge of Milton must

match that of Blake, which is not always achievable.

The solution for the difficulty in identifying the Blake-Milton relationship lies in our

understanding of the word “influence.” While Milton’s presence in Blake is literal and forceful, it

will be misleading to claim that Milton influences Blake, for the term implies a passive position at

Blake’s end and a monumental but stagnant “finish” of achievement at Milton’s. In reality, the

39
See Denis Saurat, Blake and Milton (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1935), and Frye, Fearful
Symmetry.
40
See Jackie DiSalvo, “William Blake on the Unholy Alliance: Satanic Freedom and Godly Repression in
Liberal Society,” The Wordsworth Circle 3 (1972): 212-22 and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:
A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), esp. 5-45.

28
Miltonic characters are often transfigured in Blake’s work. That is to say, while some of his

conceptions are drawn directly from Milton, a larger part of his ideas are elaborated out of Milton,

often through contesting and contradiction. As Denis Saurat comments, “Milton’s ideas are data

for Blake’s mind which Blake uses as intellectual food, partly assimilates, partly transforms nearly

past recognition, arid partly rejects.”41 The true essence in the Blake-Milton relationship is, rather

than the extent to which Blake’s ideas are similar to Milton’s, the process of recasting the

conventional universe through Miltonic situations, characters and images.

Blake’s main interest in Milton lies in the presentation of Satan. Milton’s Satan has its

counterpart in Blake’s Urizen, not because of similarity in characters, but more for their shared

position: both attempt to seize the Supreme Power; after their befalling, they establish dominion

on Earth over all men by means of false religions, and are finally conquered by Jesus. Both Blake’s

Urizen and Milton’s Satan are the embodiment of reason, law and order, but if Blake holds an

unfavourable opinion toward the oppressive side of Urizen, Milton is rather sympathetic to his

Satan. This difference in opinion towards Reason affects their attitude towards Desire as well.

Despite their consensus over the necessity of Reason and Desire and the fact that both of them

strive to establish harmony between the two antagonistic aspects in man, they part in their views

on the primacy of one element over the other. For Milton, this harmony is achieved only when

Desire is led by Reason, otherwise it will be the Fall:

For understanding rul’d not; and the will

Heard not her lore! both in subjection now

To sensual appetite, who from beneath

41
Saurat, Blake and Milton.

29
 Usurping, over sovereign reason claim’d

Superior sway … (Paradise Lost, IX, 1128)42

Blake, on the contrary, wants Desire to be free from the domination of Reason. Plates 5 and 6 of

the Marriage can be read as Blake’s criticism of Milton’s Paradise Lost and as the highlight of

their different attitude towards Reason and Desire. He writes:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer
or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call’d Messiah.

And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is called the Devil
or Satan and his children are call’d Sin & Death

But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call’d Satan.

… in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!
(182)

Milton is willing to restrain the desires of Satan and Eve, letting them being punished for not

submitting to such restraints, only because his own desires for knowledge and for the complete

fulfilment of his imaginative potential have become weak enough to be governed. Paradise Lost,

written out of Milton’s despair of his earlier apocalyptic hopes, conveys his acceptance of the

fallen world’s restraint of human desire. As a result, the exuberance of his visionary powers is

reduced “until it is only the shadow of the power that creates the opening books of Paradise Lost

and the past prophetic glory of Areopagitica.”43 Valuing reason over all else, Milton sees no terror

in the unknown world, as his will and his pride of Intellect are powerful forces constituting his

42
Quoted in Saurat, Blake and Milton, 26.
43
Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 80.

30
logical hard vision of things. On the contrary, Blake “lets himself go to the violence and the

incomprehensible longings of his desire, and his imagination is ever striving after “Thoughts

beyond the reaches of our sould”.”44 In Blake’s view, Milton has almost succeeded in emulating

the pattern of Christian apocalyptic poetry, but his emphasis on reason over desire has prevented

him from making the final step into Eternity. That explains Blake’s famous remark in the Marriage,

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils

& Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” (182). It also

explains Blake’s intention in Milton: he sets forth to redeem his favourite poet not only from

erroneous interpretations by later generations but also from his own failure in realising his

apocalyptic vision.

It is tempting to regard William Blake as a synthesiser who simply brings together different

ingredients he has collected from various sources, who overcomes the contradictory aspects in

ideas by resolving to the Hegelian solution in which opposites are raised to a higher power where

they are transcended by synthesis. Once again, what is central to the Blakean universe is not

bridging over contraries or blending different ideas to end up with some in-between alternative.

The relationship between Blake and Milton, similar to those between Blake and Plato, Neoplatonic

philosophers and Swedenborg, is characterised by dynamic interactions whose underlying

principle is the theory of contraries according to which Blake formulates his conception of the

ultimate reality. Blake’s ultimate reality/Eden/Eternity can be said to be the product of intellectual,

44
Saurat, Blake and Milton, 20.

31
poetical, and theological traditions brought forward by Blake’s own imaginative vision. 45 As

pointed out by Wittreich, Blake undeniably did resort to traditional techniques of eighteenth

century illustrators and the common themes with which they worked, as well as developing his

subjects from a biblical or a Miltonic context, but his invocation of tradition is always accompanied

by radical transformation, with the final goal of fabricating something uniquely his out of the

available material.46

It should be noted that Blake’s conception of Eden encompasses certain elements that fulfil

the criteria of literary utopian genre, one of which is the Christian prophetic form of utopia. In the

Marriage, the influence of prophetic biblical writers can be detected in the scene in which the poet

Blake dines with two prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel (Plate 12). Isaiah, the first apocalyptic book in

the Bible, includes clear predictions of the shakings and eventual disintegration of the earth on the

day of resurrection which are alluded to in many passages in The Four Zoas, such as “And it shall

come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet shall be blown, and they shall come which were

ready to perish” (27:13). The book of Ezekiel, on the other hand, contains one of Blake’s most

pertinent symbols, the wheel within a wheel: “and their appearance and their work was as it were

a wheel within a wheel” (2:16). While the presence of such utopian elements are unmistakable,

there are reasons as for why one should not read Blake’s prophetic books as literary utopia.

Blake’s ultimate reality is not a utopian vision in the sense utopian literature has us

imagined. Firstly, utopia as depicted in the Bible and other literary works such as Thomas More’s

Utopia is a perfect place where no problems exist; it is very much in essence a non-violent world

45
Blake’s attitude towards history and tradition will be revisited in the analysis on Blake’s distinction
between imaginative time and destructive time in chapter 2.
46
Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, xvi.

32
without any warring forces. Compared to Blake’s system, it is similar to Beulah or Paradise, not

Eternity. Secondly, as utopia comes from the Greek words that mean no place or good place, there

is an emphasis on locational feature. Heaven in orthodox religious imagery is often associated with

“above,” while for Blake, it is identified as “within.” As suggested by Grimes, “The door to eternity

is not in the sky but inside man himself. Blake chooses the image of an expanding circumference

to suggest the imaginative space within the self; and the goal of such spatial motion is eternity, a

temporal category.”47 Lastly, the utopian world of literature is almost always set in an unknown

future, sometimes with specification as of the exact year, other times left to speculation.

Nevertheless, this future, regardless of its exactitude, obeys the linear flow of time; in other words,

the notions of “before” and “after” are all that is relevant. Such is not the way how Blake views

time in his eternal reality. Damrosch provides an important insight when he states that Blake’s

myth is “above all else psychological. His cosmology, theology, and even epistemology are all

transportations of the central inquiry into the self.” 48 Accordingly, the fall, the apocalypse,

salvation and Eden happen not in the temporal and spatial world but inside human’s mind. It is

through addressing the individual creative power in every man that his vision is expanded, his

selfhood and identity annihilated, and his conception of being and existence transformed. This

47
Ronald Grimes, “Time and Space in Blake’s Major Prophecies,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory, ed. Stuart
Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 76.
48
Leopold Damrosch Jr., Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980),
122. Sharing his opinion, Magnus Ankarsjo writes, “Blake believes that the fall is mainly a mental state
of aberration and therefore one has to interpret his view of the fall metaphorically. As a consequence the
apocalypse also takes place in the mind of individual man, which is a radical divergence from the
orthodox reading of the Bible. According to Blake the fall has never actually taken place and is only a
mental state. The fall is a fall in man’s consciousness, and therefore we first have to recover the paradise
of Eden on the mental level” (William Blake and Gender [Macfarland, 2005],19).

33
mentioning of temporal and spatial settings that are essential in understanding Blake’s ultimate

reality will lead us to chapter 2, in which Blake’s particular conception of time and space is

explored.

34
Chapter 2: Time and Space in Blake’s Illuminated Books

I. Time and Space – the Eternal and the Infinite

It should be clarified that this chapter does not aim to give a thorough treatment of Blake’s

understanding of time and space, as such an enormous task is beyond the scope of this research.

In order to perform that task, it must be included a careful study of his employment of verb tense

in relation to time, his use of prepositions in relation to space, and his use of connective devices in

relation to the unity of space and time in his major prophetic books, if not all. That is not to mention

the need to explore the relationship between artistic space of Blake’s illuminated books and space

as described in his poetry, or the integration between what is said of time and the larger questions

of the chronology, unity, and “plot” of the prophecies.49 As this thesis is dealing mainly with three

works, the Marriage, Visions, and Milton, what it is capable of covering is only a very small

portion of the scope outlined above.

There are two modes of time in Blake’s system: imaginative time and earth time (also

known as destructive time). However, Blake’s distinction is very different from the distinction

sometimes made between mythical and historical time. While the main criterion for the latter two’s

distinction is the recoverability of events, Blake’s criterion lies in the attitude toward what is

known as the past. One distinguishes mythical time – often characterised as primordial time made

present, from historical time – that which is said to be unique – by the indefinite possibility of

repeatability, or recoverability in the first and the lack of such possibility in the second.

49
Grimes, “Time and Space in Blake’s Major Prophecies,” 59-60.

35
 The time of the Satanically dominated earth is atomically divided; it is but a shadow of the

reality upon which it is patterned - eternity. There is chaos imbedded within this seemingly ordered

temporal system, as nothing is connected with anything else but mechanically following a fixed

sequence. On the contrary, imaginative time in the Blakean universe is not static, nor does it flow

in uniform unit. It is flexible and can be bent under the impact of men like Milton who leave their

“lineaments” impressed upon it; at the same time, it resists total subordination in the sense that it

is impossible to change the past. Based on these definitions, it is still quite difficult to conceptualise

the two types of time as distinguished by Blake, because of the inherently contradictory aspects in

each type: earth time is both chaotic and ordered, while imaginative time is both flexible and

resistant. This problem of conceptualisation may be resolved by looking at some instances in which

Blake expounds what he means by “imaginative time.” The first example can be found in his

attitude towards tradition, in his interaction with ideas of his predecessors. Being unable to prevent

the past from influencing him at all, Blake is nonetheless able to will, with his imaginative power,

how history’s course can be affected by the present. To live the past again is Satanic, while living

the past forward is visionary. In Milton, the imaginative Los/Blake “live forward” the history of

John Milton in such a way that both the historical Milton and the contemporary Blake acquire

freedom from temporal restraint. It is in this epic poem that Blake has demonstrated most vividly

how being unable to choose his own past, one still always have the choice of whether to be

immersed in the eternal hell of repetition or to be liberated into eternity.

In the structure of Milton, we get another example of Blake’s imaginative time. As

representation of Blake’s Vision, the poem does not attempt to provide readers with any narrative

that accommodates allegorical meaning or to sustain any plot. In order to understand Milton, one

must realise that it all takes place in a moment of time and that there is no real sequence of events.

36
Therefore, all events, including the descent of Milton to the fallen world, his struggle with Urizen,

his entrance as a falling star into William Blake’s left foot, Blake’s becoming one with Los, and

Milton’s reuniting with his own emanation, the virgin Ololon, should be apprehended

simultaneously as symbolical phases in the process of regeneration. 50 The kind of form the poem

displays, as pointed out by Paley, closely resembles what Joseph Frank, writing about modern

poetry, has called “spatial,” defining this as “meaning-relationship … completed only by the

simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each

other when read consecutively in time.”51 In other words, Milton’s structure embodies the eternal

perspective that Blake wishes to communicate to his audience. Elaborating on this, Gourlay writes,

“From a truly eternal perspective, all events happen simultaneously and all space is the same

infinite space. Much of the vertigo that attends reading Blake’s prophecies diminishes when one

recognizes that they are in part intended to make something like an eternal perspective available

to us.”52

In all of the above remarks, it is easy to notice the presence of space in the conception of

time. In Blake’s system, time and space have no absolute existence; “they are twin aspects of

Eternity, as perceived by our limited senses in this world of matter”53. The separation of space and

time in itself is symptomatic of the fallen world. In his essay The Over-Soul, Emerson appears to

50
Morton Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1970), 239.
51
Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in The Widening Gyre (NJ, 1963), 13.
52
Alexander Gourlay, “A Glossary of Terms, Names and Concepts in William Blake,” in The Cambridge
Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 276.
53
Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Dartmouth College Press,
2013), 404.

37
echo Blake’s conception of space and time as he writes, “The influence of the senses has, in most

men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the walls of time and space have come to look

solid, real, and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of

insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. A man is capable of

abolishing them both.”54 The kind of time which man is capable of abolishing Emerson implies

here is, in Blake’s term, the destructive Satanic earth time; as for space, it is the locational Female

Space.

Similar to time, there are two types of space in Blake’s prophetic books: one is known as

Female Space, which is a purely locational category; the other being imaginative space, which is

anthropomorphic and perceptual.

The nature of a Female Space is this: it shrinks the Organs

Of Life till they become Finite & Itself seems Infinite

And Satan vibrated in the immensity of the Space! Limited

To those without but Infinite to those within… (Milton 531)

Female Space as depicted above is analogous to Satanic time in their destructive impact on one’s

path towards Eternity. If the temporal restraint of Satanic time induces man into the eternal hell of

repetition, the locational fixity of Female Space is deceptive in the sense that it reduces infinite

“Organs of Life” into something finite by creating the illusion of its own immensity. Imprisoned

within this treacherous space, the fallen man is fooled into believing that he is dwelling in Infinity.

The physical universe, no matter how immense it appears to be to the “Vegetative Eye,” is in fact

54
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s Essay (London: Dent, 1967), 152. My italics.

38
enclosed in the Mundane Egg, and it is only by breaking through the Mundane Shell that man is

freed from spatial containment.

The particularity in Blake’s conception of space and time makes it essential to reconsider

the notions of eternity and infinity in his illuminated books. As pointed out by Northrope Frye, the

meaning of the two words “eternal” and “infinite” in the Blakean sense is very different from

convention, as “Eternity is not endless time, nor infinity endless space: they are the entirely

different mental categories through which we perceive the unfallen world.”55 Blake’s Eternity and

Infinity (imaginative time and space) are, speaking differently, elements of a structure that governs

the ultimate reality. Change is essential to eternity as much as dynamic activities are essential to

Eden. If conventional notion of eternity always associates it with changelessness, something is

eternal for Blake only when it is capable of continually participating in time’s flow as a renewing

factor. Blake’s eternity “can be defined as “time which is flexible and open to change.” Eternity is

a continual process that forever depends upon flux… Eternity, therefore, should be understood as

a quality of time.”56

Two problems arise here. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the term Eternity is not only

employed in discussion on time but can also stands for Blake’s ultimate reality, as it is used

interchangeably with Eden and Heaven. If we say that Eternity is a quality that constitutes Blake’s

ultimate reality; at the same time, Eternity is the ultimate reality, we are faced with a paradox of

something that can be simultaneously an essence and a structure. The second problem has to do

with Grimes’ claim that eternity should be understood as a quality of time, which is the opposite

of the notion of time as a shadow of eternity brought up earlier. What is called paradox in the first

55
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 46.
56
Grimes, “Time and Space in Blake’s Major Prophecies,” 65-6.

39
problem is, in fact, derived from the human mind’s obstinate desire to attribute locational feature

to the ultimate reality. In making the distinction between essence and structure, one implies that

there is a form to Eternity, and that this form must be situated somewhere in space. This space,

perceived as separated from Eternity, as something that encloses a structure, is no other than the

destructive Female Space. As such, the whole attempt to understand Eternity is dismantled. It is

crucial to be reminded that for Blake, time and space should be understood as human phenomena.

Heaven is not “above” as taught by religion but is “within”; it is not a place where the soul can go

to “after” the apocalypse, revelation, or death, but is a mental state in which there is no “before”

or “after.” The second problem concerning the relationship between time and eternity is, at the

most fundamental level, similar to the first one in the sense that it opposes essence against structure.

The solution for this problem, therefore, can be found in the same explanation.

Still, it is undeniable that the nature of Blake’s Eternity is almost impossible to be fully

grasped, which comes as no surprise since any attempt to understand Eternity is carried out within

the fallen state of the material world, with the use of fallen language. We face a seemingly

irresolvable dilemma: in order to make something as inapprehensible as eternity apprehensible,

one has no choice but to bring eternity into time; but in doing this, there is the imminent risk of

reducing the infinite down into finite human perception. Fortunately, Blake found a solution,

which lies in the “Moment,” “a Pulsation of the Artery.”

But others of the Sons of Los build Moments & Minutes & Hours

And Days & Months & Years & Ages & Periods; wondrous buildings

And every Moment has a Couch of gold for soft repose,

(A Moment equals a pulsation of the artery)

… Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery

40
 Is equal in its periods & values to Six Thousand Years.

For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great

Event of Time start forth & are conceivd in such a Peiod

Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery (Milton, 576-77)

In the reconfiguration of the whole of historical time into the physiological phenomena of “a

Pulsation of the Artery,” Blake’s visionary poetics is simmered down to its central tenet: the

moment of poetic existence encompasses all existence. In short, in the infinitestimal duration, the

infinite and eternal find their expression in the form of a rupture of creativity. Instead of creating

some intermediary state where time and eternity can be reconciled, Blake conflates them into a

single, prophetic moment in which “the Poets Work is Done.” Northrop Frye appears to agree on

this analysis as he suggests that in every imaginative act space and time are reunited, eternity and

infinity are perceived simultaneously as one. The locus of union is the here and now of imaginative

vision, or, as Frye notes, “the eternal Now” and “the eternal Here.” 57 When Blake claims that

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time” (Marriage, 183), it is art and poetry that he has

in mind. Art and poetry, as long as they are produced by mortals, are “productions of time”;

nevertheless, the creative imagination that regulates their creation is a force capable of producing

new time, of conciliating Eternity and fallen time in a Moment imbued with epiphanic

apprehension.

While it is clear that Blake assigns negative characteristics to earth time and Female Space

– the two constituent elements in the structure that encompasses the fallen physical world, it will

be wrong to assume that his attitude towards “the Sea of Time and Space” is one of outright

rejection. Staying true to his theory of contraries, Blake sees in the limitations of destructive time

57
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 46-8.

41
and space the opportunity that will make it possible to transcend these very limitations. According

to Harper, “The Neo-Platonic position, with which Blake agreed whole-heartedly, may be

summarized in the words of Proclus: “Everything which is measured by time is generation.” And

generation, approaching matter in the descending series of emanations, is always a derogatory

term with both Blake and Taylor” 58 . Blake himself declares in The Proverbs of Hell in the

Marriage, “The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom, no clock can measure”

(183). Nevertheless, time is also the “mercy of eternity,” one that is created to keep human from

falling into the state of non-entity and oblivion: “Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time’s

swiftness,/ Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment” (Milton, 565). Blake’s

conception of time is a fine combination of Neoplatonism and Christianity: the soul, a portion of

the Divine Mind, is set upon a circular path of descent into generation; through time, it is able to

purify itself and eventually be unified with its original eternity. In other words, the creation of man

is in itself the Fall, since bound in the realm of time and space in his body of five senses, man fails

to perceive things in the infinite proportions59; however, it is in this world of generation that he is

58
George Mills Harper, “The Neoplatonic Concept of Time in Blake’s Prophetic Books,” PMLA 69, no.1
(1954): 146. Blake’s conception of time is influence by both Plato and Neoplatonists. His view on time as
a “movable image of eternity” has obvious connection with Plato’s Theory of Forms: Eternity is the ideal
of which time is a copy. However, his tendency to look upon time (as well as the creation of the world) as
a degeneration of the divine essence and a division of the divine unity is a Neoplatonic, especially
Plotinian, addition, little grounds for which can be found in Plato (Harper, “The Neoplatonic Concept of
Time,” 142-144).
59
Blake is not unique in this anti-natal point of view. Jacques Lacan shares a similar opinion in his
conception of the lamella. According to Lacan, the lamella “is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to
say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is
precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of
sexed reproduction” (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

42
to overcome blind reason and re-achieve his imaginative power; it is in the fallen world that the

Moment is to arrive. The mundane time, as much as it is different from imaginative time, is a

veritable gateway to Eternity. Understanding this, one will realise that there is no logical flaw in

Blake’s approach to nature and the material world, an approach that is often deemed puzzling and

incomprehensible as it contains many contradictory ideas.

II. Blake’s view on nature

The opinion holding that Blake is nature’s poetic adversary largely derives from the

Blakean standpoint constructed by Northrop Frye, in which nature is simply “there for us to

transform” or it is “all very well to abuse nature.” For that reason, it has become common for Blake

to be labelled an anti-materialist, whose depiction of nature is remarkably Hobbesian. It is

dangerous to make such association, not only from the ecological standpoint, but also from the

damage it may cause to our understanding of Blake. As Hutchings remarks, “If Blake’s poetry and

art do indeed advocate something like the irrevocable transcendence or transformation of the

natural world, then Blake’s project surely involves what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra condemns as a

betrayal of the earth, and Blake, far from being a liberated and liberatory visionary prophet, is the

dupe of a highly questionable, unwittingly internalized ressentiment against the things of this

world.”60 As an outspoken critic of orthodox spirit and advocate of a sublime annihilation of man’s

Selfhood, as someone who writes “every thing that lives is Holy,” it is unimaginable that Blake

[New York: W.W.Norton, 1998], 198). In other words, one’s birth is one’s loss of immortality, the Fall
from the indestructible life before birth.
60
Kevin D. Hutchings, “William Blake and “The Nature of Infinity”: Milton’s Environmental Poetics,”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25, no. 1 (2003): 56.

43
can advocate such an ecologically destructive scenario of the human will to power over nonhuman

nature. The misconception regarding Blake’s attitude towards nature is founded, as many other

misconceptions regarding Blake’s attitude, upon the dualistic way of thinking that makes it

obligatory to either agree or disagree with certain opinion, to appreciate or to disregard certain

element. Blake’s view of nature complies closely with his governing contrary logic, which implies

that in order to understand it, one must adopt the very same mind-set.

In his letter to Dr. Trusler written around 1799, Blake writes:

I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every Body does not see alike… Some see Nature all
Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & some scarce see Nature
at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he
sees… To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination…

Blake’s idea that in nature the ideal is incarnated and made available to the sensible is not

far removed from that of other Romantic poets who saw in nature the suggestion of spiritual reality.

Nevertheless, their belief differs considerably at one point: if Romantic poets such as Wordsworth

seem to idolise nature as such and are much attached to sensory objects, Blake believes that there

is value in nature as far as it is used to communicate some metaphysical concept. It is through

nature, not in nature, that one acquires the vision of eternity. This helps explain why Blake is

always cautious and keeping distance from the sensory world but he never loses sight of it entirely.

In other words, nature per se holds no interest in him; what is of great significance is perspective

with which one looks at nature. To elaborate further, let’s have a look at an extract from Milton

which is extremely relevant to my current argument:

Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer

Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance

Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave:

44
 Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance,

To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & return

These are the Children of Los; thou seest the Trees on mountains

The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksome sky

Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons

Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity

But we see only as it were the hem of their garments

When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond’rous Visions. (Milton 569)

It may have been the very first time in literary history that the flies are given such pleasing

and enchanting depiction: their humming which in everyday life might be perceived as annoying

becomes rich music, their rather distasteful swarming intricate and graceful dance. Few people

would view flies under such positive light, fewer would think about them as the children of Los

the imagination. On the contrary, it is much more common to be inspired by trees dancing in the

wind. By juxtaposing the two seemingly opposite phenomena and attribute the same quality to

them, Blake has emphasised the fact that nature and the physical world, by themselves, are not

obstruction to Eternity. It is “the insistence of man, in his fallen state, on contemplating the eternal

energy in a “contracted” and “opake” form”61 that has made the world limited and divided as such.

Gleckner further explicates on this point in writing that, even though Blake views the natural world

as hindering perception of the eternal realities, he is also aware of the fact that the world is a

“continuing” source of poetic metaphor with which to communicate his vision62. The prerequisite

to seeing a world in a grain of sand or seeing heaven in a wild flower is that the seer must start by

61
Lesser, “Blake and Plato,” 226.
62
Robert F. Gleckner, “Blake’s Religion of Imagination,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14,
no.3 (1956): 363.

45
being aware of these very sand and flower63. Afterwards, it is up to each individual whether he can

only perceive the particular or open up to the universal.64

The imagery of the sand is one of crucial significance in Blake’s system, through which

his holistic vision is expressed most vividly. In the essay tittle The Over-Soul, Emerson provides

a passage that is remarkably alike to Blake’s position, “We live in succession, in division, in parts,

in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty,

to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which

we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every

hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object,

are one” 65 . In this respect, Blake and Emerson are similar in their humanistic belief that it is

63
The reference is taken from Auguries of Innocence, a poem from Blake’s notebook. It reads,
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 (506)
64
Against the vision of the prophet who is capable of seeing a world in a grain of sand, Blake relentlessly
attacks the perception of Rousseau and Voltaire:
Mock on, Mock on Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, Mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
On the other hand, Blake’s advocacy for intellectual vision through the process of internalisation
echoes Plotinus’ idea: “All that one sees as a spectacle is still external; one must bring the vision within
and see no longer in that mode of separation but as we know ourselves; thus a man filled with god –
possessed by Apollo or by one of the Muses – need no longer look outside for his vision of the divine
being; it is but finding the strength to see the divinity within.” See Plotinus, “On Intellectual Beauty,” in
Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 105.
65
Emerson, Emerson’s Essays, 150.

46
possible for all human to access this universal beauty, not just a handful of the selected ones.

Consequently, any claim made on the secretive or elitist nature of Blake’s creation is greatly

misguided. As Rose rightly points out, “Blake’s poetry is mythopoeic and not mythological

precisely because it is a structure of images, symbols, and metaphors which contain conceptual

implications and incorporate a point of view; it is not a secretive cabala or mystery open only to

the initiate. Blake conceives of himself, and of poets in general, as prophets who reveal, but do not

clothe in mystery, the truth that is reality”66. His creation, despite all its confusion and difficulties,

is not meant to clothe the truth in mystery or to obstruct the understanding of his readers but is

intended to be a stimulation, an encouragement to seek freedom of imagination, by disengaging

the readers from the epochal perspective and alerting them to the restrictive character of their

thinking.

III. Vortex – the emblem of Eternity

An examination of Blake’s conception of eternity will be incomplete without investigating

the ouroboros, the ancient symbol depicting a serpent eating its own tail which often stands for

eternity, the universe, cyclicality or the eternal return. An archetypal image, the formation of the

ouroboros in Blake’s mind may have been unconscious, for he possesses the visionary powers

from which archetypes arise, even though it is also possible that he encounters the mandala in

Boehme or in Agrippa.67 Commenting on the appearance of the ouroboros, Blakean scholars tend

66
Edward J. Rose, “Mental Forms Creating: Fourfold Vision and the Poet as Prophet in Blake’s Designs
and Verse,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no.2 (1964): 173.

67
Mark Greenberg, “Blake’s Vortex,” Colby Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1978): 207.

47
to share the same view: they interpret it as either “a perfect emblem of the Self-hood: an earth-

bound, cold-blooded and often venomous form of life imprisoned in its own cycle of death and

decay”; “an image of the dull mechanic round of unliberated existence and the repeated natural

cycle”; or a figure used “to represent the natural and the earth-bound.”68 However, Blake’s use of

the ouroboros is polysemous, especially when it is transformed into the vortex symbol.

The only clear cut ouroboros figure in Blake’s illuminated work can be found on page 73

in The Four Zoas. As observed by Christopher Hobson, this ouroboros is incomplete – the snake’s

head has almost caught up with its tail, without fully closing up as in the traditional imagery of the

ouroboros 69 . This bears two implications: first, it proves how instead of relying on cliché of

mythical motifs, Blake always prefers fresh imagery; second, that Blake is not satisfied with the

idea of a closed circle of eternity and infinity – in his mind, those two concepts are not the limits

of creation but the final goal of creative imagination. Northrop Frye holds a similar opinion as he

writes, “Writers with a strong sense of apocalyptic vision, like Blake and Shelley, who feel that

man’s destiny is to smash all his squirrel cages, because he originally built them himself for the

pleasure of getting caught in them, speak of ouroboros and similar imagery mainly with

contempt” 70 . Instead of this conventional symbol, Blake finds a more satisfying concept to

68
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 135; Daniel Hughes, “Blake and Shelley: Beyond the Ouroboros,” in William
Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. Alvin Rosenfeld (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1969), 72; H.
B. DeGroot, “The Ouroboros and the Romantic Poets,” English Studies L (1969): 562.
69
Christopher Hobson, “The Myth of Blake’s Orc Cycle,” in Blake, Politics and History, ed. Jackie
DiSalvo, George Rosso and Christopher Hobson (Taylor & Francis, 1998), 15. Furthermore, Hobson adds
that on Europe 10, to illustrate the “image of infinite/ Shut up in finite revolutions,” Blake “significantly
rejects” the obvious emblem of the ouroboros.
70
Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991 (University of
Toronto Press, 2006), 288.

48
represent his ideas of infinity and eternity: the Vortex. A detailed description of the vortex is

provided in Milton:

The nature of infinity is this! That every thing has its

Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro’ Eternity

Has passd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind

His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun:

Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,

While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth

Or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent.

As the eye of man views both the east & west encompassing

Its vortex; and the north & south, with all their starry host;

Also the rising sun & setting moon he views surrounding

His corn-fields and his valleys of five hundred acres square.

Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent

To the weak traveller confin’d beneath the moony shade.

Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth

A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveller thro’ Eternity. (Milton 542)

This passage has attracted most commentary from critics than any single passage in Blake’s

corpus, and notoriously, no two readings coincide.71 This comes as no surprise, since it is a well-

known fact that most of the symbols and terms created by William Blake are difficult to be defined

as their meaning does not remain static but evolves throughout his career; thus invested with

71
Vincent de Luca, Words of eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1991), 81.

49
complexity and instability. While working on Blake, one should be constantly reminded that any

attempt to establish the limits of symbols and terms only serves to reduce their meaning, to destroy

the open possibility which invites imaginative participation, and consequently to betray the

principles that are of crucial importance to Blake's art.

Scholars generally agree upon the fact that Descartes may very well be the source of Blake's

vortex.72 In his Principles of Philosophy, Descartes proposes a mechanistic system to account for

the operation of matter and cosmic phenomena. In what is known as Theory of Vortices, he

suggests that God created the universe as a perfect clockwork mechanism of vortical motion.

Without intervention, this mechanism will continue to function deterministically according to the

way it had been designed. As such, the Cartesian vortex comprehends within it the mechanical and

chaotic world of limiting time and crushing space, the material world in which body opposes to

soul, in which action is determined by whirling masses hurtling heedlessly through space. In short,

Descartes’s mental construct creates a world that destroy all imaginative life – the kind fervently

opposed by Blake. Blake’s use of the term “vortex” in a mock-Cartesian setting can be seen in The

Four Zoas, in which the vortex signifies the jealous and consuming selfhood. In addition to

Descartes’s Theory of Votices, Lavater’s Aphorisms on Man is another possible source from which

Blake develops the image of the vortex into a symbol of the destructive and solipsistic operation

whose final product is Hell or Ulro. Writes Lavater:

What is a man’s interest? What constitutes his God, the ultimate of his wishes, his end of existence?
Either that which on every occasion he communicates with the most unrestrained cordiality, or
hides from every profane eye and ear with mysterious awe; to which he makes every other thing a

72
Kathleen Raine suggests that rather than having read about vortices in Descartes, Blake made their
acquaintance in a work of popular science called A Voyage to the World of Cartesius translated from
French and published in England in 1692.

50
 mere appendix; - the vortex, the centre, the comparative point from which he sets out, on which he
fixes, to which he irresistibly returns; - that, at the loss of which you may safely think him
inconsolable; - that which he rescues from the gripe of danger with equal anxiety and boldness.73

The vortex in the above passage represents the object of love, one’s reason for existence and one’s

point of return and completion. In exploiting Lavater’s potential of union between the love object

and the self, Blake pushes it one step further in predicting solipsism as a result of this congruence

of lover and loved. As explained by Greenberg, “When the imagination fails to invest itself in

other but becomes exclusively self-directed, its vortex describes for Blake only its inward passage

toward self-destruction.”74 This is precisely what happens to Urizen as described in The Four Zoas:

Oft would he sit in a dark rift & regulate his books

Or sleep such sleep as spirits eternal wearied in his dark

Tearful & sorrowful state. then rise look out & ponder

His dismay voyage eyeing the next sphere tho far remote

Then darting into the Abyss of night his venturous limbs

Thro lightnings thunders earthquakes & concussions fires & floods

Stemming his downward fall labouring up against futurity

Creating many a Vortex fixing many a Science in the deep

And thence throwing his venturous limbs into the Vast unknown

Swift Swift from Chaos to chaos from void to void a road immense. (Night the Sixth, 364-65)

73
Quoted Greenberg, “Blake’s Vortex,” 201.
74
Ibid.

51
Creating “a Vortex fixing many a Science,” only to be trapped within his own creation later on,

Urizen becomes a representative figure of those who deny imagination and submit to their own

metaphysically created hell.

While the vortex in The Four Zoas can be used interchangeably with the ouroboros symbol,

in Milton, the vortex image is invested with a completely different meaning. No longer carrying

the negative connotation of a destructive selfhood, the vortex here represents an individual’s

existence within mental state, a passage leading inward into perception that opens up onto eternity.

To cite a well-known account on the nature of vortex in Milton written by Fyre:

When we focus both eyes on one object, say a book, we create an angle of vision opening into our
minds with the apex pointing away from us. The book therefore has a vortex of existence opening
into its material reality within our minds. When Milton descends from eternity to time, he finds that
he has to pass through the apex of his cone of eternal existence, which is like trying to see a book
from the book’s point of view; the Lockian conception of the real book as outside the mind on
which the vision of the fallen world is based. This turns him inside out, and from his new
perspective the cone rolls back and away from him in the form of a globe. That is why we are
surrounded with a universe of remote globes.75

What the vortex is capable of generating is the ability “to see a book from the book’s point of

view.” Consequently, passing through a vortex can be equated to passing through thresholds of

consciousness – a positive process of self-annihilation, reintegration and rebirth. In Grimes’s

analysis, the image of the vortex symbolises one’s perspective from a particular space-time

complex. 76 The fact that Milton can pass through this vortex suggests the possibility of

75
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 350.
76
Grimes, “Time and Space,” 79. Sharing Grimes’s point of view, Jules van Lieshout writes, “the vortex
involves a change in perspective: the perceiver goes in on one end and out the other, and in the course of
his passage centre and circumference, or subject and object of perception, are either reversed or united.
What happens inside the vortex, however, is a continual displacement of centre and circumference in a

52
transcending particular space-time situations, provided that one remained situated within that

situation. In other words, the traveller through eternity does not escape from space or time

altogether; what he escapes from is the limitation of single perspective, the sort that has imprisoned

Urizen in his single vortex. The fallen world, therefore, is a prerequisite starting point. Emerging

from one vortex, the traveller will enter into another; at all time, he must envision the ultimate

reality from a space and a time without being bound by any one perspective. If Eternity can be

understood as a continual process, then, the vortex can be viewed as emblem of Eternity.

In the words of Greenberg, “the ouroboros-vortex compounds psychic, physical, cultural,

and perceptual experience in a symbol that reaches towards the harmony of conscious and

unconscious response in the perceiver, towards the limits of visionary art.”77 In reading Blake, we

participate in what Blake calls “Truth” or fourfold vision by acquiring various perspectives at once.

Blake's art undermines, reconstructs, and remarriages the “pitiless divorce which the literary

institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its

customer, between its author and its reader.”78 Blake's reader, instead of being “plunged into a

kind of idleness,” of becoming “intransitive,” possesses the ability to function himself, through

which he may gain access “to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing.”79 Taking Frye's

comment into account, “The imaginative mind … is the one which has realized its own freedom

and understood that perception is self-development. The unimaginative is paralyzed by its own

process that enacts Eternity’s dynamic interaction and that accounts for various views that “a traveler thro
Eternity” perceives once he “Has passd that Vortex” (Within and Without Eternity: The Dynamics of
Interaction in William Blake’s Myth and Poetry, [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994], 154).
77
Greenberg, “Blake’s Vortex,” 208.
78
Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 1974), 4.
79
Ibid.

53
doubts, its desire to cut parts of the mind off from perception and parts of perception out of the

mind, and by the dread of going beyond the least common denominator of the “normal”,” 80 the

symbol of the vortex in Blake's illuminated books is one of the many elements whose ultimate goal

is to provide readers with the opportunity of self-development, through which the imaginative

mind can emerge. It is probably the reason why the poems of William Blake are ones which can

be read multiple times and are still capable of providing new insights, as each reading is a new

experience and what is read each time is not the real text but a plural text.

The susceptibility to rereading of Blake's illuminated books is one of the elements that

make it plausible to associate his art with performance. Rereading, according to Roland Barthes,

“saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story

everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal

chronology (“this happens before or after that”) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or

after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is primary, naïve,

phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to “explicate,” to intellectualize.”81 It is

in rereading that approaching the text ceases to be an act of consumption but becomes a sort of

performance, of acting on a play which is “the return of the different.”82 While rereading highlights

the performance aspect located within Blake's readers, the form of the illuminated books

emphasises the performativity of Blake's art itself. As observed by Frye, “Blake's engraved poems...

not only continue the tradition of the illuminated book, put present, ideally, a unified version of

the three major arts (poetry, music, and painting) to the individual as the musical drama, with its

80
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 23.
81
Barthes, S/Z, 16
82
Ibid.

54
combination of speech, sound and setting, presents it to the audience.”83 His comparison of Blake's

illuminated books to musical drama is highly relevant to the topic investigated in the last chapter.

Before diving into that topic, however, we will first spend some time to explore Blake’s solution

to the problems related to gender and the body in Eternity and in the material world.

83
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 186.

55
Chapter 3: Blake and the Issue of Gender – The Androgynous Ideal

I. Blake’s view of the body

A look at Blake’s illuminated books will immediately testify the claim that the human

figure occupies a central position in his art. His preoccupation with the body, however, does not

stem from a confident admiration of it, rather, it can be seen as a troubled obsession. As pointed

out by Connelly, Blake has “a love/hate relationship with his favourite image; he at once reviles

and glorifies the human body.”84 This claim on the significance of the body in Blake seems to be

at odds with what has been written up to the current point in this thesis, in which the primacy of

mental activity has been stressed time and again as the most crucial element in Blake’s conception

of the ultimate reality: from the need to consider the Blakean Eternity and Infinity as mental

categories, the four zoas as four mental faculties, to the prerequisite of mental fight in achieving

and sustaining the eternal vision. It also conflicts with Blake’s own insistence that “Mental things

are alone Real.” The strong emphasis on the mental aspect of man can potentially lead to regarding

the corporeal body in Blake’s system as something inferior which is to be transcended in the pursuit

of imaginative vision or to be improved upon through the maximisation of sensual enjoyment. This

opinion, while being true in certain cases, for instance, in the following passage from the Marriage,

does not represent truthfully Blake’s approach to the human body. In perceiving the body as

instrumental or obstructive to mental unification, one falls into the trap of traditional binaries of

body versus soul, or matter versus spirit. This section will be devoted to argue that Blake’s view

on the body, in both his poetry and his visual art, is equivocal, but it is a wilful equivocality

intended to communicate certain messages.

84
Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), vii.

56
 In one of the most often written about passages in the Marriage, Blake drafts an antithesis

to the older theological dissociation of body and soul:

All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy. called Evil. is alone from the Body. & that Reason. called Good. is alone from the
Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five
Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of
Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight (181)

Inadequate as it may be, the body is still “the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” Blake’s attitude

towards the corporeal, like his attitude towards nature, appears contradictory at first sight. On the

one hand, he believes that “the figure of the body, imposed as it may be, allows for the illusion of

knowledge and understanding. Without that figure, there would be no knowledge, no way either

to conceptualize or perceive the world.”85 Speaking differently, the body according to Blake, is

not separated from Imagination, and thus provides a means to cultivate the faculty of seeing beyond

the sensible world. On the other hand, the body also limits the world that is available to be known,

acting as a hindrance in obtaining the completeness of the Soul. For that reason, Blake concludes

that it is by an expansion, not restriction, of sensual enjoyment that man may trace his way back

to Eternity, to the former age when his more numerous and enlarged senses were capable of

85
Erin M. Goss, “What Is Called Corporeal: William Blake and the Question of the Body,” The
Eighteenth Century 51, no. 4 (2010): 427.

57
discerning a larger portion of the soul than the five senses can in the fallen world. Later on in the

Marriage, he repeatedly affirms the primacy of sensuality and calls for the exuberance of the body:

from “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God,” “The nakedness of woman is the work of God,”

to “As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on

the fairest joys.” However, it is not until Visions, in Oothoon’s struggle, that Blake’s advocacy for

Energy and Eternal Delight from the Body is fully captured.

They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.

And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle.

And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red round globe hot burning

Till all from life I was obliterated and erased. (199)

In this passage, Oothoon delivers Blake’s attack on orthodox Christian dogma, the “they”

who wish to enclose man’s infinite brain into a narrow circle until his sense of being is destroyed

completely. Oothoon in Visions exemplifies the triumph of energy over nature, of Imagination

over religious and moral restraints. Over the course of the poem, she progresses from being

“obliterated and erased” by the imperative that taught her to accept the imprisonment of the five

senses to recognising the delusional quality of such bondage and finally, calling for a

transcendence of the bodily experience with the infinite capacity of vision. In the words of Bloom,

“by her increase in sensual enjoyment Oothoon has done what Thel failed to do – broken through

the philosophy of the five senses, not by ascetic avoidance, but by expanding the crucial sense

towards an infinite of desire.”86 If Thel’s attempt to pass from Innocence to Experience fails as she

flees back to the Val of Har, Oothoon has successfully carried her Innocence after passing through

86
Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 110.

58
the sexual gate. In responding to Blake’s call for the exuberance of the body, she finds “a new and

unlimited means of access to the world around her.”87

Blake’s approach to the corporeal body in the Marriage and Visions, as expounded above,

suggests the necessity of rejecting, or at the very least, transcending the body, in exchange for

liberated vision. Similarly, in Milton, Albion’s body must be sacrificed to imaginative clarity. The

notion that the body is “an opacity transcended in the annihilation of apocalypse to make Vision

possible”88 is, therefore, present in all of the three works examined here. However, if we take a

look at their endings, we soon realise that the act of rejecting or transcending the mortal body does

not lead to Eternity: Blake ends the Marriage not with a promise of his own oncoming world, but

with an emblem of the negation of vision: Nebuchadnezzar89; ending with a refrain of echoed sighs,

Visions seems ultimately to have resolved nothing90; and Milton stops short at the apocalyptic

87
Goss, “What Is Called Corporeal,” 424.
88
Ibid., 425.
89
Nebuchadnezzar, according to Damon’s A Blake Dictionary, is the most powerful of the Babylonian
kings who captured Jerusalem thrice, destroyed it and deported all its inhabitants. In the height of his
glory, Nebuchadnezzar went insane: “he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body
was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’
claws” (Daniel iv:33). In Blake’s work, he signifies the madness of the materialist with single vision who
in his final end, becomes bestial. In plate 24 of the Marriage, Nebuchadnezzar is depicted as naked,
crawling on all four, wearing a terrified expression. Through this image, Blake warns us against extreme
pride and self-confidence, but also against the limited perception of the material body in the material
world, for they can reduce us to animalistic madness.
90
Visions ends with:
Thus every morning wails Oothoon. but Theotormon sits
Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire.
The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, & echo back her sighs. (207)

59
moment when Milton and his emanation are reunited, but they do not achieve the final stage of

male-female togetherness characterised of Eden.

Plate 24 of the Marriage with the depiction of Nebuchadnezzar

Here, we start to realise that there is something more to Blake’s approach to the body and

that his equivocal attitude is more than merely the manifestation of the irresolvable conflict in

ideas. Commenting on the attitude towards the body as expressed in the Marriage and Visions,

Because of this ending, there is a tendency to regard Oothoon as a failed prophet. The grim scenario
depicted here provides no solution: Oothoon’s sighs and wails are the only outlet for her sorrow and
dissatisfaction.

60
Goss writes, “The body is built precisely in order to obstruct, and its construction seeks to provide

a figure for shadow that remains unknown and unknowable. To seek to escape the body…, to

respond to the body as if it is other than an imposed and phantasmatic figure is to accept the initial

figural imposition… as if it were fact.”91 Consequently, any attempt to escape or transcend the

body is an inadvertent confirmation of our submission to this fabricated constraint. Facing this

dilemma, we should keep in mind that Blake’s account of the corporeal reveals not a body that

must be overcome but a body whose limitations must be acknowledged in order to arrive at the

ultimate understanding of existence. The object of Blake’s investigation is not the body as a

material object situated in the limited space and confined by linear, atomically divided time but

the body as a sign: the represented body marks the failure of signs to refer to embodied experience,

the “inability of comprehension to catch up with the lived experience that the body makes

possible.” 92 Blake, as many other Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, displays the

physicality of bodies as a result of dynamic interaction rather than a fact of static existence, a

becoming rather than a being. In short, what Blake wishes to achieve through his depiction and

conceptualisation of the body is to encourage us to adopt a dialectic mode of thinking. The body,

as much as it is familiar and commonplace, is equally alien and unfathomable. As a sign, there is

a gap between the body as it is named and the body as it is lived, something which is quite similar

to the relationship between the signifier and the signified in linguistic terms. In admitting that

“what is Called Corporeal nobody knows of its Dwelling Place,” in claiming that there is much

more to the body than its physical appearance and its nominal function, Blake calls for a

91
Goss, “What Is Called Corporeal,” 425.
92
Ibid., 414.

61
reconsideration of our conventional perspective, a perspective that makes what is called corporeal

becomes all that can be understood to be corporeal.

To further elucidate this statement, we will move into examining Blake’s visual rendering

of the body. His depiction of the human figure, often enough, has been compared to that of

Michelangelo. If in the literary field, Milton is Blake’s idea of a great poet, in the pictorial realm,

Michelangelo is without doubt Blake’s master. Blake’s many debts to Michelangelo have been

mentioned by art historians who all seem to agree upon the fact that Blake’s borrowings do not

stop at mechanical imitation but, just like the way he transforms ideas of his predecessors, Blake

also transforms the pictorial heritage of Michelangelo to suit his purpose. Differentiating Blake’s

practice of copying from Reynolds’ concept of imitation, Blunt notes, “In fact, we may say that

whereas Reynolds recommends the painter to imitate other artists, what Blake advises is simply

that he should copy them. He means this, moreover, in the most literal sense of the word. Copying

is for him a process by which the artist learns the language of art, not the source from which he

derives ideas.” 93 For this reason, in most cases, Blake’s borrowings from Michelangelo in

depicting the human figure are appropriated and used in newly created contexts – a process that

stays true to his conception of imaginative transformation in creation.

At first glance, Blake’s admiration for Michelangelo, the purest representative of High

Renaissance humanist painting, seems to conflict with his view of art as a non-rationalist and

visionary activity. It is necessary to elaborate upon this point that the main source of his inspiration

is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, a work that is best characterised as an attempt to break away

from the dominant style of Michelangelo’s time. In addition, Blake has never seen any of

93
Anthony Blunt, “Blake’s Pictorial Imagination,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute VI
(1943): 210.

62
Michelangelo’s original works; his knowledge of the master comes indirectly through engravings

which were executed by Michelangelo’s Mannerist followers, who tend to exaggerate the non-

classical features in their work. Therefore, it will be more accurate to say that Blake’s closest

sympathy lies not in High Renaissance humanism but in Mannerism. 94 Another example what

shows the influence of Mannerism on Blake can be found in Glad Day, one of Blake’s most famous

prints. An early work dating from about 1780, Glad Day is based almost exactly on an engraving

found in Scamozzi’s Idea dell’Architettura Universale that illustrates the proportions of the human

figure.95

Like Blake, Michelangelo often portrays the body in situations beyond normal human

experience and perception, pushed to the extreme of agony or ecstasy. That helps explain why

muscular contortion plays a vital part in both painters’ work. Nevertheless, while Michelangelo’s

figures are often well-balanced and at ease in their postures, Blake’s always find themselves in

impossible poses, which is another feature that renders him closer to Mannerist art. There is an

unmistakably theatrical quality in the way Blake positions the body. In the frontispiece of Visions,

Theotormon is seen buried his face in his arms while squatting on tiptoe, holding balance on one

leg. Similar examples of equally impossible postures can be seen in plates 29 and 33 in Milton

which depict Blake and his brother, Robert leaning back, once again, balancing the weight of their

whole body on their toes. Such postures, which are impossible to hold by mortal body, are radiating

with grace in Blake’s image. It is because his depiction is not of the mortal body but of the ideal

body perceived by imagination.

94
Blunt, “Blake’s Pictorial Imagination,” 201.
95
Ibid., 202.

63
 Blake’s attention to musculature is linked to another aspect that should not be forgotten in

a discussion on Blake’s visual image of the body: the grotesque. Not to mention the distorted facial

expressions or the twisted limbs, many of his human figures are depicted as if they are turned

inside out; their revealing muscles and veins make it seem like they are parts of Blake’s anatomical

drawing practice. One can immediately conjure up the image of The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819-20)

to attest to the remark. As much as he is capable of exhibiting the human figure in its most

appealing, heavenly beautiful state, Blake is no less efficient in displaying the most monstrous,

repugnant side that is concealed inside each body. From his perspective, gracious or grotesque, the

body possesses a divine origin and the judgmental way of thinking about it is but the most obvious

evidence of the fallen state of mind.

Plates 29 and 33 in Milton with the figures of William Blake and his brother Robert

64
 As Connelly eloquently puts it, “The exposed physical systems of Blake’s graphic bodies,

their muscles and fibres, have a contradictory significance: they can enable intimate connection

through visual penetration and sympathetic uniting, yet they can also indicate the imprisonment of

the human in the restriction and isolation of the body.”96 Blake endeavours to demonstrate that the

shape of the body as we know it is not absolute through a graphic rendering containing elements

that are meant to reach out to some and to repulse other. His ultimate goal is to make possible a

vision of a transformed body, and to raise awareness of the fact that the human form can exceeds

its potentiality in representation. This is precisely what I meant when I referred to Blake’s call for

a reconsideration in our conventional perspective that makes what is called corporeal becomes all

that can be understood to be corporeal. Invested with textual bodies, Blake’s characters reflect his

vision of the eternal body: they are energy expressed in form. And as there should be no restraint

imposed on energy, the body as depicted by Blake is always found in the state of perpetual

becoming.

II. Sexuality and Gender

While Blake’s view on the body is complex, there is one point of certainty that can be

drawn from the first section: his promotion of bodily and sensual enjoyment. This leads us to

question Blake’s attitude towards sexuality and gender, which constitutes a crucial part in our

understanding of his vision of the ultimate reality. In the above analysis, it has been noted how

Blake’s advocacy for freedom of desire – sexual desire included – is voiced through Oothoon. As

a figure who is often thought of as being “able to transcend the consciousness of her fellow women

96
Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 65.

65
absolutely,”97 Oothoon’s progress in perception deserves further examination. In another equally

important passage, she declares:

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: and Theotormon is a sick mans dream

And Oothoon is the crafty slave of selfish holiness.

But Oothoon is not so, a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies98

Open to joy and to delight where ever beauty appears

If in the morning sun I find it: there my eyes are fix’d

In happy copulation; if in the evening mild. wearied with work;

Sit on a bank and draw the pleasure of this free born joy.

The moment of desire! the moment of desire! The virgin

That pines for man; shall awaken her womb to enormous joys (204-205)

Deploying a sexual metaphor for her encounter with beauty, Oothoon uses terms such as “open to

joy” and “copulation” to communicate a sort of spiritual message in her speech. According to

Hutchings, figures of openness and copulation “anticipate Jerusalem’s highly privileged and

implicitly sexualized concept of Eternal emanational encounter, wherein discreet and integral

97
D. Aers, “William Blake and the Dialectics of Sex,” ELH 44, no. 3 (1977): 505.
98
Comparisons have often been made on the similarities between Blake’s Visions and Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with specific parallels between Wollstonecraft’s critique of
hypocritical feminine “modesty” and Blake’s critique of the pernicious effects of “chastity” upon human
relations. Oothoon’s affirmation that she is still “a virgin fill’d with virgin fancies” and not “a whore”
after being raped by Bromion squarely illuminates both Blake’s and Wollstonecraft’s opinion.

66
individuals meet in a process of “mutual exchange,” “comingl[ing]” ecstatically “from the Head

even to the Feet”.”99 Likewise, in using the eye as a sexual organ of touch, Oothoon articulates an

alternative to the oppositional subject/object dynamic so often associated with the gaze. Through

touch, the distance between the perceiver and the perceived diminishes, resulting in a mutually

affective relationality. Last but not least, by conceptualising aesthetic appreciation in terms of

copulative communion, her metaphor mitigates against the dualism of Enlightenment philosophy

that sees the most characteristic expression of human in mentality rather than biology. The body

of senses and the mental aspects, thus, are brought into a kind of reconciliatory unison.100

In witnessing Oothoon’s new found freedom, the two male characters display rather

different reactions. While Theotormon, brainwashed by the “knowing, artful, secret, fearful,

cautious, trembling hypocrite” of modesty, outright denies the reality of her experience, Bromion’s

attitude is more complicated, if not more sinister. His acknowledgement of Oothoon’s reality is

accompanied by an eloquently delivered speech filled with moral justification.

Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit;

But knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth

To gratify senses unknown – trees, beasts, and birds unknown;

Unknown, not unperceiv’d, spread in the infinite microscope,

In places yet unvisited by the voyager, and in worlds

Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown?

Ah! Are there other wars, beside the wars of sword and fire?

99
Kevin Hutchings, “Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters
of Albion,” Romanticism and Ecology (2001), accessed June 1, 2015, Romantic Circles.
100
Ibid.

67
 And are there other sorrows beside the sorrows of poverty?

And are there other joys beside the joys of riches and ease?

And is there one law for both the lion and the ox?101

And is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains

To bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? (201)

If Oothoon’s expression represents Blake’s advocacy for sensual experience, Bromion’s speech

and attitude symbolise the traditional dogma of sexual repression which Blake harshly condemns.

Bromion does not deny Oothoon’s experience, what he fears is not the fact that Oothoon has seen

the ancient trees that once were visible to unfallen men but the implication of that reality. With her

awakened sense, Oothoon “has opened a Pandora’s box of chaotic experience that will upset the

perilous balance by which the eighteenth century has learned to live.”102 Bromion’s reasoning, in

short, adumbrates the religious doctrines appealing to man’s supposed necessity for uniform laws

to govern the chaos of experience, which is all very logical, but also devoid of humanity.

Faced with the issue of desire and sexuality, at least in Visions, Blake’s male and female

characters are clearly divided in their reaction. Indeed, male versus female is one of the most

fundamental polarities in Blake’s theory of contraries. But once again, his stance on the gender

issue is made obscure by ambiguities and misconceptions. Commenting on this, Fox writes,

“Blake’s poetry has been represented both as a sexless abstraction of a universal human mentality

divided metaphorically into sexual factions and as a profound study of human relations, including

the sexual, in which metaphors of gender suggest not universal abstractions but the minute

101
Blake already answered to this question in the Marriage when he writes, “One Law for the Lion & Ox
is Oppression” (194).
102
Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 113.

68
particulars of daily life.”103 Those who focus on the second aspect outlined by Fox usually find

Blake on the side of the patriarchal society against women. More than once, he has been

condemned of being a misogynist whose unrelieved libidinal drives led him to increasingly

outrageous sexual fantasies including female characters being subject to horrendous treatment.104

It has been observed that even in his most sympathetic depiction of his female character Oothoon,

there is undeniable elements of which modern feminist critics consider as evidence of Blake’s

misogyny. As pointed out by Susan Fox, “On one level [Visions] is an outcry against this

victimization, a passionate denunciation of the oppression of women. But on another level it

exploits that victimization symbolically to make a second and equally central political point.”105

This political point has to do with Oothoon, being “the soft soul of America,” is a slave. As such,

she was chosen as the heroine of the poem not only because of her wisdom and braveness but also

because she is a powerless female who could be raped and tied down and suppressed without

recourse. Furthermore, many have pointed out the scene in which Oothoon has to persuade

Theotormon not to blame her for Bromion’s rape on her as undeniable proof of Blake’s

ambivalence towards women. Disturbing as it may appear, such detail is absolutely understandable

when taking into account Blake’s own time, in which the female was most often viewed as the

primary bearer of the burden of guilt when it comes to the issue of sex. In recounting it, Blake

simply gives a truthful reflection of the situation as it was in his society. Nonetheless, these critics

103
Susan Fox, “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 3 (1977):
508.
104
This opinion is voiced by Brenda Webster in Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (Athens: Univ. of Georgia
Press, 1983), in which Blake is diagnosed as a neurotic whose deeply disturbed psyche is imprinted on his
works, particularly those in the late years of his career.
105
Fox, “The Female as Metaphor,” 513.

69
are right in saying that Blake admires women enough to cry out against their oppression, but not

enough to imagine them as autonomous human beings. Oothoon, until the end, despite having been

liberated in her perception, is still unable to be independent. On multiple occasions, she pleads for

Theotormon’s acceptance:

Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent.
If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;
How can I be defild when I reflect thy image pure? (200)
Or

But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoo spread,

And catch for thee girls of mild silver, or of furious golf;
I’ll lie beside thee on a bank & view their wanton play
In lovely copulation bliss on bliss with Theotormon:
Red as the rosy morning, lustful as the first born beam,
Oothoon shall view his dear delight, nor e’er with jealous cloud
Come in the heaven of generous love; not selfish blightings bring. (206)

The second passage, despite its main objective of demonstrating Oothoon’s ideas of non-

possessive, generous love, can also be interpreted as a proof of her obsession with and dependence

on Theotormon, as she is willing to do anything to be with him, including helping him seducing

other women. Furthermore, it is very much at odds with the emancipatory politics she articulates

earlier in the poem in her willingness to deny the gratification of her own sexual desire: “I’ll lie

beside thee” can obviously be read as her abandonment of the participatory touch in the encounter.

This feminist reading, while being legitimate it its own right, is also overly literal.

Approaching Blake’s prophetic books, one must always keep in mind that his work is invested

with a multilayer of meanings, literal, metaphorical, and allegorical. To read Visions as a narrative

of male oppression and violence, or of female victimisation is but to look at the most obvious level

of meaning. Mark Bracher, in his research on the metaphysical ground of oppression in the poem,

70
provides us with another level of significance in regarding the three main characters as embodying

three distinct aspects of individuality and three corresponding metaphysical perspectives: the

empirical, the ideal, and the organic. 106 Bromion, a rapist at the most obvious level, is an

embodiment of empiricism, whose perspective is limited to only that which affects the senses.

Theotormon stands for morality and the type of Platonic and Christian idealism which demands

that actual existence conforms to a pure, abstract ideal. The free spirit Oothoon exemplifying

liberation and libidinal freedom can be seen as “the proponent of an organicist metaphysics of

individual sovereignty and intrinsic being.” 107 Understood this way, Blake’s attack against

oppression is not simply meant for gender oppression but on the metaphysical level, it is meant for

oppression of the organic existence by the immediate, tangible world (Bromion) and the ideal

standards of religion and morality (Theotormon).

Nevertheless, even in his metaphorical use of females, Blake intentionally or not, has

produced negative impact on the way women in the material world are perceived. The case of

Oothoon is one example. Another example can be found in Blake’s conception of Beulah. As the

only realm in which females are both powerful and constructive, Beulah still remains a limited

state without activity, not to mention that the positive image of femaleness is tainted by

condescension: ascending to Eden, females cease to have any independent power. Blake must have

been aware of the damage he caused, for in Milton, he attempts to rescue the female element from

the stigma of weakness and failure:

Into this pleasant Shadow all the weak & weary

106
Mark Bracher, “The Metaphysical Grounds of Oppression in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of
Albion,” Colby Quarterly 20, no. 3 (1984): 165.
107
Ibid., 166.

71
 Like Women & Children were taken away as on wings

Of dovelike softness, & shadowy habitations prepard for them

But every Man returnd & went still going forward thro’

The Bosom of the Father in Eternity on Eternity (581)

In this passage, Blake provides a clarification for his previous derogatory representation of Beulah.

Explains Fox, “it is not that women fail the rigors of existence in other realms, but that anyone

who fails appears frail and feminine. Femaleness is thus not a synonym for failure in Blake’s late

poetry, but a metaphor for it.”108 Whether such explanation is convincing is a matter of personal

judgment. Still, it is undeniable that Blake invests much effort in addressing the sexual contraries

between male and female, whose expression is most discernible in his conception of the

androgynous ideal in Eternity.

III. Blake’s Androgynous Ideal

The male-female reunion is the most important stage in Blake’s prophetic writing since it

is Blake’s threshold to eternity. The reunion between Milton and Ololon, as celebratory as it is, is

not complete, and the ending of Milton does not gives a description of the Edenic state but simply

marks the apocalyptic moment of transformation. Ankarsjo rightly detects the existence of a

progressive development in Blake’s conception of the androgynous state of Eden. Compared to

The Four Zoas, in which there is no explicit symbol of male-female togetherness besides the

individual reunions of zoas and emanations, Milton has moved one step further; but it is not until

108
Fox, “The Female as Metaphor,” 510.

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Jerusalem that Blake successfully achieves the ultimate goal of giving an appropriate

representation of his poetic and philosophical ideal of the androgynous.109

According to Judith Butler, “The presuppositions that we make about sexed bodies, about

them being one or the other, about the meanings that are said to inhere in them or to follow from

being sexed in such a way are suddenly and significantly upset by those examples that fail to

comply with the categories that naturalize and stabilize that field of bodies for us within the terms

of cultural conventions.”110 Blake’s conception of gender, especially his androgynous ideal, can

be said to be one of those examples that resist the naturalised categorisation of society. Even among

his closest friends, Blake’s unconventional way of thinking about the ideal state of sexuality and

gender is sometimes regarded as incomprehensible. In recording a conversation with Blake around

1825, Crabb Robinson writes:

“In particular he [Milton] wished me to shew the falsehood of his doctrine that the pleasures of sex
arose from the fall – The fall could not produce any pleasure.” I answered the fall produced a state
of evil in which there was a mixture of good or pleasure. And in that Sense the fall may be said to
produce the pleasure – But he [Blake] replied that the fall produced only generation & death. 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.111

Robinson’s confusion is not surprising; in fact, such reaction may be shared by most people. While

the idea of the union of sexes has a long tradition, Blake’s own formation is particular in many

aspects. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes puts forward a creation myth that accounts for

sexuality: in primal times people had double bodies with three sexes – male, female, and

109
Ankarsjo, William Blake and Gender, 3.
110
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble – Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), 110.
111
G.E. Bentley, Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), 316. My italics.

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androgynous. Because they offended Zeus, they were punished by being cut in half, and were

forced to run around all their life looking for the other half with the hope of restoring their primal

nature. In their fallen state, the women separated from women and the men split from men love

those of the same sex, while those came from androgynous beings engage in heterosexual

relationship. The Platonic state of primal wholeness, as such, cannot be achieved in the material

world for the union of separated bodies is merely gluing together two broken fragments without

being able to regenerate the harmony in the original. Accordingly, it implies an act of forceful

merging, which is completely different from Blake’s “Union of Sexes in Man as in God.”

The image of the androgyne is envisioned in Blake’s poetry as “a paradisal state of

consciousness that has resolved all dichotomies so that “man” possesses that complete harmony in

which “he” is Albion-Jerusalem, both God and all external, “feminine” reality.” 112 However,

despite its pivotal role in Blake’s conception of the ultimate reality, the term “androgyne” has

never been used in his poetry even though its features are infused in his formulation of the “Human

Form Divine.” Early in his career, Blake’s interest in the androgyny is already reflected throughout

Poetical Sketches: in the song “Love and harmony combined,” he avoids specifying the sex of

either the speaker or the beloved who is spoken to.113 Instead of directly depicting the androgynous

ideal, Blake uses the profane image of the hermaphrodite as a point of reference for what the image

of redeemed sexuality is not. In this respect, he follows the long tradition of contrasting the

hermaphrodite and androgyne as opposites, in viewing the hermaphrodite as a sterile fusion of the

112
Diane Hoeveler, “Blake’s Erotic Apocalypse: The Androgynous Ideal in Jerusalem,” Essays in
Literature 6, no. 1 (1979): 29.
113
Warren Stevenson, Romanticism and the Androgynous Sublime (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press,
1996), 24.

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fallen male and female in the physical sense, while the androgyne transcends sexual divisions in

the spiritual and psychic realms.114 It is not asexuality that makes the hermaphrodite monstrous

and evil but its forceful merging of the two sexes in their fallen form. On the contrary, the

androgynous ideal is “an apocalyptic union within the self that redeems the internal and external

worlds.”115

In Milton, the Hermaphrodite is mentioned as they stand glowing before Milton in

Entuthon:

The Twofold form Hermaphroditic: and the Double-sexed;

The Female-male & the Male-female, self-dividing stood

Before him in their beauty, & in cruelties of holiness!

Shining in darkness, glorious upon the deeps of Entuthon. (549)

Entuthon, as explained by Damon, is the physical frame of the generated man, “a world of deep

darkness, where all things in horrors are rooted” (The Four Zoas, Night the Third, 329). Within

this realm, the hermaphrodite emerge in “beauty” but also in “cruelties of holiness.” There is a part

in Blake’s attitude towards the hermaphrodite that is unmistakably hostile as he sees embedded in

it the attempts made by Satan to form a substitute androgyne, to parody in a perverted manner the

spiritual ideal in the duality of the sexes. Hence, the hermaphrodite exemplifies the horrors of

cruelty and jealously that are symbolic of the fallen world; it is Blake’s ultimate confounding

symbol of historical error, both sexual and nonsexual, natural and unnatural. Some twenty-first

114
See Peter Thorslev, “Some Dangers of Dialectic Thinking, with Illustrations from Blake and His
Critics,” in Romantic and Victorian, ed. W. Paul Elledge and Richard L. Hoffman (Madison, New Jersey:
Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1971), 64-66 for a brief discussion of the theme of the Angelic
Androgyne versus the Hellish Hermaphrodite.
115
Hoeveler, “Blake’s Erotic Apocalypse,” 33.

75
century critics may take on this point and criticise him for the potential damage his view on the

hermaphrodite may have caused to real hermaphroditic individuals. Such risk does exist, if one

reads Blake literally. Just as the main subject in his investigation of the body is not the material

body but the body as a means through which dialectic thoughts can develop, here, the main subject

of Blake’s aversion is not the real hermaphrodite in the physical sense but the hermaphrodite as

symbolic of sexual warfare.

Blake’s concept of androgyny emphasises its imaginative rather than its physical aspect,

but it is not to say that he abandons the latter completely. If he does not mention the term

“androgyne” in his poetry, he makes up for it in his pictorial depiction. Blake’s allusions to

androgyny generally appear in his representations of celestial beings, effected by the omission,

veiling, or displacement of genitalia. For instance, in one printing usually known as The Good and

Evil Angels (1795), both angels are depicted without any distinct sexual organs. Many details in

the depiction of their body can be attributed to both male and female in the real world.

The Good and Evil Angels (1795), Tate Gallery, London.

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 Phallic Woman (Hermaphroditic Monster), after 1821, British Museum

Blake clearly understands that “sexual equality cannot be achieved by simply

acknowledging the difference between masculine and feminine traits and allocating to each a

positive mutual identity, because in many binary oppositions – aggression/passivity,

intellect/emotion, spirit/flesh, culture/nature – men have secured the first quality, thus leaving

women to be aligned with the second quality.”116 And yet, many would point out that he seems to

contradict himself in assigning the first and most divine quality to men: his depiction of human’s

original nature is characteristically male. Furthermore, if he dedicate the male characteristics to

the androgyne, the monstrous hermaphrodite is represented as a menacing yet seductive phallic

woman, as can be seen in the late and enigmatic sketch above. If the androgyne is rendered

116
Hayes, “Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal,” 146-47.

77
beautifully, Blake’s portrayal of the hermaphrodite is grotesque, with exposed genitals as the most

obvious attestation of its forceful merging of the two sexes. Even in his ultimate attempt to resolve

the problems caused by gender division – his concept of the androgynous ideal – Blake is still

unable to eliminate the stereotypes and discriminations towards women.

But maybe his goal has never been to solve the gender problem through complete

elimination of stereotypes and discriminations as such. More than anybody, Blake is acutely aware

of the impossibility of his gender utopian project within a patriarchal society of nineteenth century

England. That is the reason why instead of advocating for gender equality, instead of enacting his

androgynous vision of eternity outwardly in the political and social spheres, he decides to focus

on psychic reintegration at the individual level, as expressed in Milton’s reunion with his

emanation in the end of Book Two:

Terror struck in the Vale I stood at that immortal sound

My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon the path

A moment, & my Soul returnd into its mortal state

To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body

And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side (606)

The androgyne, as Blake’s many other conceptions and symbols, should be understood as a

concept that combines contradictions and attempts to grasp the ideal as imaginative reality. The

apocalypse Blake endorses is one in which sexes cease and vanish in the psyche, resulting in

humanity assuming is spiritualised “body.” It becomes clear to Blake that political reform of

society could not be effected until a spiritual took place in very heart, when each individual

78
becomes androgynous and overcomes the flaws inherent in each sex. 117 Putting aside all

controversies, Blake’s concern with the inequalities of his time, his anger at oppression and his

support for the struggle of the individual against tyranny are solid proof that he is very much

grounded in his world, and not advocating a purely other-worldly vision, absolutely detached from

everyday life as often been misunderstood. Man in the material world occupies his thought as

much as the Eternal Man, for the simple reason that his work is created for an audience comprising

of living men with living bodies.

117
Hoeveler, “Blake’s Erotic Apocalypse,” 29.

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Chapter 4: Blake’s Illuminated Books – The Science of/to Eternity

I. Blake’s attitude towards science

At this point, to claim that Blake’s attitude towards science is contradictory, presumably

will no longer produce any bewilderment, for it only fits too well into the framework of his theory

of contraries that has been exhaustively examined throughout this thesis. The sense of awe, if there

is any, is from the realisation of how thoroughly consistent his approach is. From his view on the

relationship between time and Eternity, on nature, on the body, on gender, and now on science,

Blake has demonstrated unwavering confidence in the need to preserve conflicting ideas when

faced with any issue. As he writes “Without Contraries is no progression” (Marriage, 181), or

“Opposition is true Friendship” (Marriage, 192), he is not merely preaching empty words but

actually incorporating such belief into each and every aspect of his work. If there is one thing that

is clear among all the ambivalence and complexity of his ideas, it is Blake’s conviction in the

necessity of oppositional thinking, or paradox. As concluded by Fairer, his poetry is an

oppositional discourse which “prioritises the engagement of opposites with each other; … keeps

conflicting ideas in play, so as to sustain a field of force within which the mind can work.”118

With respect to what he thought of as materialist science, Blake display unreserved hostility.

He loathes Francis Bacon, as can be seen in his derogatory annotations to Bacon’s Essays Moral,

Economical, and Political119: nowhere does he have a good word for anything Bacon says. Bacon

is not only deemed wrong but he is also a liar and a hypocrite. 120 While Blake’s contempt for

118
David Fairer, “Pope, Blake, Heraclitus and oppositional thinking,” in Pope: New Contexts, ed. David
Fairer (New York: Harvester, 1990), 170.
119
Blake annotated Bacon’s Essays shortly after publication of the edition of 1798.
120
Hazard Adams, Blake’s Margin: An Interpretive Study of the Annotations (McFarland, 2009), 82.

80
Bacon is founded on many reasons ranging from political, economical, religious and

philosophical,121 it is Bacon’s analytical approach to scientific enquiry that exasperates Blake most.

Bacon’s notion of induction begins with the hypothesis that what is known is unchanging, which

imprisons the inductive acts that are to be performed. Harry White describes Blake’s view:

Blake contended to the contrary that from “already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire
more” (All Religions Are One). If science is to progress, the ratio of what we know must not be
established so as to fix, circumscribe and limit all future knowledge. Scientific knowledge cannot
be based, as Bacon claimed, on past experience. The acquisition of new knowledge comes through
new experience.122

Materialist science, invested with the ideology of mechanical materialism, is what Blake calls the

“Tree of Death.” This science does not contribute to the progression of humanity, on the contrary,

it is a radical diminution of vision whose one-dimensional analysis, measurement and comparison

denies and obliterates the twofold and fourfold visions that constitute Blake’s mental world.

Without these visions, the human intellectual activity cannot prosper but ends up being smothered

by the past, suppressed by past knowledge and experience, becoming the “Tree of Death.”

Together with Bacon, Locke and Newton complete the Satanic trinity that Blake harshly

condemns. In Milton, the redeemed poet is determined “to cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from

Albion’s covering (41:5, 604). According to Damon, Blake read and annotated Locke’s Essay

Concerning Human Understanding (1690) when he was very young, along with Burke’s On the

121
One example of the differences between Blake’s and Bacon’s political opinion is the issue of
monarchical absolutism. While Blake, a tireless advocate for individual freedom, is against absolute
authority of any form, Bacon, on the other hand, believes that the monarch has absolute prerogative, some
prerogatives even derive directly from God. See Adams, Blake’s Margins, 89.
122
Harry White, “Blake’s Resolution of the War Between Science and Religion,” Blake: An Illustrated
Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2005-06): 116.

81
Sublime and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. Blake must have seen Locke’s denial of any innate

knowledge or instinct as a mockery against Inspiration and Vision.123 He devotes a long passage

in Visions to attack Locke’s philosophy of the five senses:

With what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?

With what sense does the tame pigeon measure out the expanse?

With what sense does the bee form cells?

… Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave, and why her spires

Love to curl round the bones of death; and ask the rav’nous snake

Where she gets poison: & the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun

And then tell me the thoughts of man, that have been hid of old. (199-200)

Even in animals, one cannot deny the presence of intuition and instinct, and yet, Locke outright

discards the existence of such qualities in man. Blake, therefore, implies that Locke’s philosophy

degrades man to a less-than-animal condition.

Compared to Bacon and Locke, Newton is probably much less vilified in Blake’s view. If

towards the other two, Blake finds nothing of value in their ideas, towards Newton, he attacks the

scientist’s error while still acknowledging his genius, particularly in his supreme feat of laying the

foundation of modern astronomy. Blake’s main conflict with Newton lies in their conception of

the nature of the universe. The Newtonian universe is perceived as one neat, self-sufficient, three-

dimensional and impersonal machine.124 Leaving out God, man, life and the values which make

123
Damon, A Blake’s Dictionary, 243.
124
Ibid., 298. In Milton, Blake renounces Milton for perversely championing the “Not Human” in his
reliance on the “rotten rags of Memory” and the fallacy of “Rational Demonstration.”

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life worth living, this vision of the universe troubles Blake greatly. His mixed feelings towards

“the greatest of natural philosophers” is expressed most eloquently in his colour print Newton.

Newton, 1795-c. 1805, Tate Gallery

The naked Newton is seated on a rock covered with moss. He is leaning forward and gazing down

at the geometrical design drawn by his left hand with a compass. Immersed in the activity, his

muscular body appears to merge into the rocky background. The compass, as featured in the

frontispiece of Europe a Prophecy, is a symbol associated to the act of creation. However, this

creation is not done by God but Urizen; as a result, the compass stands for imposed laws and

restrictions by Reason. On the other hand, Newton’s design is not drawn on a stone tablet or in a

83
book, but on a scroll, which always signifies imaginative creation.125 Blake sees in Newton both

the manifestation of Urizen’s single vision and the potentiality of Imagination.

In fact, Blake’s opinion on the three philosophers/scientists is not wholly negative. In

Jerusalem, the Satanic trinity, in their essential genius, is seen by Los as the counterbalance of the

three great poets Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. In turns, their philosophy is perceived as the

necessary prelude to the revelation of truth:

… if Bacon, Newton, Locke,

Deny a Conscience in Man & the Communion of Saints & Angels

Contemning the Divine Vision & Fruition, Worshiping the Deus

Of the Heathen, the God of this World, & the Goddess Nature

Mystery Babylon the Great, The Druid Dragon & hidden Harlot[,]

Is it not that Signal in the Morning which was told us in the Beginning (93: 21, 838)

In other words, the trinity represents the contraries that are essential for progress. The culmination

of their errors makes it possible for the false Science to be overthrown and replaced by Blake’s

true Science.

For Blake does have in mind a vision of Science that is not “the Tree of Death”:

But in Eternity the Four Arts: Poetry, Painting, Music,

And Architecture which is Science: are the Four Faces of Man.

Not so in Time & Space: there Three are shut out, and only

Science remains thro Mercy: & by means of Science, the Three

Become apparent in Time & Space, in the Three Professions

125
Ibid., 299.

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 Poetry in Religion: Music, Law: Painting, in Physics & Surgery:

That Man may live upon Earth till the time of his awaking,

And from these Three, Science derives every Occupation of Men. (Milton 574)

According to the above passage, Science is accredited as one of the four arts in Eternity. Moreover,

it is the only art survives in the fallen world, thanks to Mercy, and through Science, man is to be

able to master again the other three arts in the space-time structure. Blake’s view on Science, as

such, is in fact extremely favourable. In the perfect city of Golgonooza constructed by Los and

Enitharmon, Blake maintains that there is both Art and Science. The Science of Golgonooza is one

in which the law of passivity of the human receptor is replaced by the tradition of a body emitting

energy, often in the form of light.126 There is a clear disparity between the science Blake condemns

and the science he celebrates: the former, in its promotion of passive reception, its reliance on

materiality and the senses, restricts human intellectual development and imprisons us within the

single vision of empiricism; the latter, on the contrary, is open up to possibilities and expands

man’s creativity along the way of scientific enquiry. This understanding will provide the basis for

my next investigation on the technical aspect of Blake’s illuminated books, through which his

approach to printing technologies emerges as another aspect in which the theory of contraries can

be discerned.

II. Music, Poetry and Painting in Blake’s illuminated books

It is no coincidence that many of Blake’s poems are actually sung, read, and seen

simultaneously, as he has certainly been inspired by the divine aura and his creation, being one of

126
Alan Wall, “Lux, Lumen and the Lights of Science,” The Fortnightly Review (November, 2013).

85
the best copies, necessarily embraces all aspects of its source. As mentioned above, the three arts

of poetry, painting and music are lost to man in the fallen world, and it is with the help of Science

that he will be able to regain these “Faces of Man.” In this section, I will argue that Blake’s

illuminated books present themselves as the materialisation of this Science in providing a means

through which Blake’s reader may acquire fourfold vision. Writes Blake in the Marriage, “But

first 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” (188), the illuminated printing

method described in the Printing house in Hell is his solution for unveiling the hidden infinite of

his poetry.

The relationship between the verbal and visual elements in Blake’s illuminated books is a

topic that has been written on exhaustively. Most studies concur with the assessment that the

interaction of these two aspects in Blake’s work is unique and difficult to characterise. While

Blake’s poetry is more widely appreciated, his skills as a painter or artist remain controversial. It

is true that compared to contemporaries such as Joshua Reynolds, Blake’s art is much less pleasant

to the eyes, and the medium he chooses to execute his work – illuminated printing – only heightens

this sense of discomfort ingrained in the design itself. As pointed out by Trodd, “Even those most

sympathetic to his art, including Gilchrist, the Rosetti brothers, Swinburne and Symon, tended to

trace in his works the uneasy relationship between aesthetic exuberance and compositional

coherence.” 127 In fact, just as Blake constantly adjusts his ideas throughout his career, he

consciously works to destabilise the relationship between text and image in his works. There is a

127
Colin Trodd, Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830-1930 (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ.
Press, 2012), 20.

86
discernible evolution in the three books included in the main corpus: if in the Marriage, the text

predominates and the design merely attends to what is written; in Visions, as the text is occasionally

broken in the middle by images, an important step has been taken towards the free interpenetration

of the two that signals the turn towards a more balanced exchange, whose final fruits are

manifested in Milton, as Blake works on his texts and his pictorial ideas simultaneously. Images,

from being mere illustrations, evolve and assume an almost independent life. They become the

equal counterpart rather than complimentary assistant to the written texts.

While much effort has been devoted to researching the sister arts of poetry and painting in

Blake, few scholars have considered the musical aspect of his multi-media practice in detail. One

reason that may have caused such lack of research interest is the problem of accessibility. If we

have to rank the degree of difficulty with access among the three arts, music would be placed at

the highest place, followed by painting, while poetry placed last. Textual studies account for the

majority of research on Blake for the simple reason that his poetry is the easiest to be reproduced

and thus, is the one made most available. Due to the limited number of copies, Blake’s illuminated

books were not always accessible to the public (to be accurate, they were mostly unknown to the

public); however, there has been significant improvement in making his pictorial genius known to

a larger audience, first through facsimiles, then through digitalised versions.128 With the aid of the

Internet, a twenty-first century reader who is interested in Blake is no longer prevented from

gaining access to both the textual and pictorial components of his books. The same sort of

facilitation process, unfortunately, has not happened in the musical aspect. In one rare instance,

Kevin Hutchings recorded his musical performances of some of Blake’s poems in his CD Songs

128
The online William Blake Archive is a remarkable example in utilising technology for the purpose of
making his works available to a wider public.

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of William Blake in 2007. Hutchings’ attempt, despite its sound intent, is not particularly successful.

Reviewing on this CD, Brent Kinser writes:

Although Hutchings declares in the accompanying booklet that “the effort to set Blake’s songs to
music will always be audacious” and that “Blake’s creative theory… provides me with the poetical
license necessary to make of his Songs something new and perhaps unforeseen” (9-10), it is hard
to discern either audaciousness or newness on a CD that is best described as a conventionally
polished, over-intellectualized folk recording, one that decidedly lacks, especially in the vocal
performances, the raw energy and the soulful depth that give traditional folk music its penetrating,
heartrending identity.129

Even though failing to communicate the “raw energy and the soulful depth” of Blake’s music,

Kinser adds that “Hutchings must be thanked, and one hopes that musicians will continue to turn

to Blake and his works for inspiration, for it is in the processes associated with these creative turns

that one finds the keys to the doors of perception.”130 What Kinser criticises most is not the failure

in recreating the original music but in Hutchings’ overestimation of the role music plays.

Hutchings, in his effort to promote interests in the musical aspect, falls into the trap of

simplification when he claims that access to Blake’s original melodies would provide us with

interpretative cues to resolve the ambiguities in Blake’s system. Explains Kinser, “If we had

Blake’s music, or even samples of his singing, we would not be any closer to a definitive

interpretation of the ambiguities at the center of his works. There is, after all, no reason to believe

that Blake’s music would be any more explicit to idiots than his words or his images.” 131

Accordingly, any attempt to recover Blake’s lost melodies – the missing component in a creative

129
Brent E. Kinser, “Review: Kevin Hutchings. Songs of William Blake,” William Blake An Illustrated
Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2009): 65.
130
Ibid., 66.
131
Ibid.

88
triad of words, imagery and music – is highly valued, nevertheless, one should not go as far as to

claim that it would help to settle the debate surrounding Blake’s paradoxical vision.

The above discussion on music opens up another crucial point regarding the hierarchy of

the three arts in studying Blake. As a true Poet, Blake must have been well aware of how the act

of creation ought to be one which encompasses writing, music, and image – the three aspects

corresponding to naming, breaths, and forms as stated by Emerson, “The condition of true naming,

on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and

accompanying that.”132 The question of hierarchy among these three elements will yield no answer,

since despite their difference in terminology and in human conception, they are essentially one and

the same in eternity. More research has been done on Blake’s poetry does not mean that the texts

are more valuable to our understanding of his vision; similarly, the recovery of his missing

melodies by itself would not resolve the riddle of meanings and the complexity in his works.

Up to this point, it has become clear that Blake’s illuminated books are the converging

point of the three arts; nevertheless, it remains unclear as of what exactly is achieved by the method

of illuminated printing. To answer this question, I propose three answers: resemblance, uniqueness,

and freedom – resemblance to the divine origin, uniqueness of each copy, and freedom for the

reader. In one of the most important passages in The Poet, Emerson writes:

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can
penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to
write them down, but we lose ever anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own,
and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more
faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.133

132
Emerson, Emerson’s Essays, 217-18.
133
Ibid., 207.

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Commenting on Blake’s work, Gleckner echoes similar observation, “His creation already existed

in eternity, and the conscious coalescence of present sensation was only to facilitate a presentation

of that creation in concrete form”134. In other words, the finest works of art known in the material

world is by no means “original” but merely the best imitations of these “primal warblings.” And

being imitations, they are inevitably imperfect. Consequently, the imperfection in works of art, in

both form and content, should not be viewed under a negative light, but beheld as the evidence of

their divine, perfect origin.

Comments as these provide the basis for understanding the misconception and limited way

of approaching Blake’s illuminated books that was quite common among his contemporaries.

Consisting of the relief etching technique whose product is later coloured by hands, the method

termed “illuminated printing,” invented by William Blake in 1788, is considered to be one “which

combines the Painter and the Poet” in a style “more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any

before discovered.” 135 Undoubtedly, Blake has been inspired by the medieval art of illuminated

manuscripts; nonetheless, his newly devised method also employs the recent development of

printing technology of his time to facilitate the reproduction process. As a result of this “marriage,”

no two copies from one plate are the same: each bearing the unmistakable resemblance to the

“original” relief etching it has derived from; simultaneously, each copy is unique and fully

qualified as an independent work of art in itself. On the other hand, the method also produces a lot

of blurs and blots in the final work, something that was generally regarded by his contemporaries

as “mistakes” or “defects.”

134
Gleckner, “Blake’s Religion of Imagination,” 361. Italics mine.
135
Prospectus of 1793, quoted in Erdman, Complete Poetry & Prose, 692.

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 Joseph Viscomi holds the opinion that differences or variations among edition copies are

the inevitable result of Blake’s mode of production, which includes the assistance of Mrs. Blake,

against the more general view that they may signify deliberate revision or independent printing

dates.136 Here, I would argue that while it is partially true that different copies are created for

practical reasons, they are also disreputably parts of Blake’s intention. There is no denying that his

illuminated printing is a labour intensive means of production - a great disadvantage from the book

publishing perspective as it renders him unable to produce a sufficient number of copies for a

general sale; however, from the artistic perspective, illuminated printing helps him secure a

different group of audience as well as solidify his reputation as an artist accustomed to producing

unique works. The blots and blurs, viewed under this artistic light, further contribute to the one-

of-a-kind aspect of his work while simultaneously, in presenting the imperfect side of his creations,

bring prominence to the divine origin from which they derive. As explicated by Emerson, “We use

defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, - so expressing our sense that the evils of the world

are such only to the evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to

divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, and the like, to signifies

exuberances.”137 Any imperfection in a work of art is perceived as evil not because they are evil

in themselves, but because we label them as such. Once again, we are brought back to the central

role of multiple and flexible perspectives which has so frequently emerged in our discussion as the

only plausible approach to contraries.

The uniqueness of the work of art is but one of the many preoccupations that weigh in

Blake’s mind as he dedicates himself to the novel method of illuminated printing. Blake’s method

136
Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, xxiv.
137
Emerson, Emerson’s Essay, 213.

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is a reversion of the more traditional etching process which includes the following steps: the copper

plate is covered with a layer of wax; a design in scratched on with a pointed tool; the plate is then

dipped in acid, which bits into the exposed metal leaving behind shallow grooves; the wax is wiped

off and ink is added for printing. In Blake’s relief etching, instead of incising designs into the metal,

words and pictures are painted directly on to the copper plate with acid-resistant medium. The

plate is then dipped into vitriol bath, from which the design emerges, standing proud of the etched

surface. 138 His method has been termed “reversed engineering” and taken up by modern

scientists,139 for the insight it conveys: by looking in intense detail at an existing practice, Blake

invents a new and improved method that is very much based on tradition but at the same time

novel and revolutionary. From ideas, pictorial design, to technical execution, Blake never departs

from his principle when it comes to handling traditional heritage: he always lives the past forward.

From a different perspective, illuminated printing is Blake’s way to demonstrate his

frustration and resistance towards the technological advancement of his day in printing, which not

only annihilated the “aura” of artistic creation through the process of mass production, to borrow

Walter Benjamin, but also severed the union between the author and the printer. As commented

by Gutbrodt, “He composed his illuminated printings by etching text and pictures directly on the

copperplates, uniting invention and execution in a creative process that performs writing as

printing. It is this performance that turns the workrooms in the “Printing house in Hell” into a

visionary space where Blake breaks with, and mocks, traditional modes of literary production that

138
Steve Jones, “View from the lab: Science’s debt to William Blake,” The Telegraph, November 27,
2007, accessed June 05, 2015.
139
Ibid. According to Jones’ article, Blake’s reversed engineering has been an inspiration for some
software pirates and biochemists.

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separate the author from the printer and set up the press as an instrument of mere reproduction and

transmission.”140 It is now time to look at what Blake writes about his Printing house in Hell in

detail.

I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from
generation to generation.

In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a
number of Dragons were hollowing the cave.

In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the cave, and others adorning it with
gold silver and precious stones.

In the third chamber was an Eagle with wings and feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave
to be infinite, around were numbers of Eagle like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.

In the fourth chamber were Lions of flaming fire raging around & melting the metals into living
fluids.

In the fifth chamber were Unnam’d forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.

There they were receiv’d by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books
& were arranged in libraries. (Marriage, 188-89)

On the surface, the six chambers can be seen as plain description of the printing process

invented by Blake: preparing the plate in the first chamber, executing the design in the second,

etching with acid in the third, inking the plate in the fourth, printing and colouring impression in

the fifth, and making into books in the last chamber. However, many commentators have also

suggested that the five chambers in the printing house’s cavern represent the five senses. This

would make the third chamber, whose “Eagle with wings and feathers of air… caused the inside

140
Fritz Gutbrodt, “The Genius as Compositor: Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition and the
Imprimatur of Romanticism,” in Imprints & Re-visions: The Making of the Literary Text, 1759-1818, ed.
Peter Hughes and Robert Rehder (Gunter Narr Verlag Tubingen, 1996), 16.

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of the cave to be infinite,” the site of touch. As such, Blake follows the Aristotelian tradition in

accrediting the phenomenon of touch the basis of all perception. In addition to Blake’s advocacy

for sensual enjoyment, for the exuberance of the body, we had a brief glance at Blake’s

appreciation of the sense of touch in chapter 3, in the analysis of the sexual metaphor used to

account for Oothoon’s encounter with beauty. Just like the infinite is stored inside a physical

cavern in the third chamber, there is infinite potential in the physical touch. Blake’s emphasis on

the touch is essentially link with his concern over the physicality of the book. The “Unnam’d forms”

of the fifth chamber cast the fourth chamber’s living fluids “into the expanse” – the realm of the

visible. These forms are then received by Men who occupied the sixth chamber, taking up the

forms of books and are arranged in the libraries. As suggested by Cooper, “the order of the

chambers in the Marriage plate 15 implies that a book is the outward tip of a vortex leading into

an infinite third chamber located inside the reader, where the ideas perceived in reading acquire

form and presence to the mind.” 141 The touch here, from being a physical act, through the

materiality of the book, is transformed into a mental touch, in the sense that Blake’s creation

“touches the mind” of the reader. As a result of this mental touch, the reader acquires the

unprecedented freedom of interpretation. The “knowledge transmitted from generation to

generation” by the method of illuminated printing, therefore, does not comprise of a set of

predetermined ideas or doctrines, but is the fruit of each individual comprehension. As Blake

writes in Milton, “Every Mans Wisdom is peculiar to his own Individ[u]ality” (518), his

illuminated books are the means through with every man gains his own wisdom.

The accusation made against Blake as a man who intentionally devise his work

incomprehensible to his audience for the purpose of self-promotion is not unheard of. It is true that

141
Andrew Cooper, William Blake and the Productions of Time (Ashgate, 2013), 98.

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to a certain extent, Blake consciously works to maintain his appearance as an enigmatic figure;

nevertheless, it would be wrong to assume that he would go all the way to sacrifice his reader’s

fulfilment for such purpose. The lack of any definite interpretation, meaning, or conclusion in

Blake’s illuminated books should not be viewed as obstacle but as opportunities. In an interesting

passage in Milton, Blake writes:

Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?

It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell,

Withinside wondrous & expansive; its gates are not clos’d,

I hope thine are not: hence it clothes itself in rich array;

Hence thou art cloth’d with human beauty O thou mortal man.

The fly, already mentioned previously in chapter 2 in the discussion of Blake’s view on nature,

reappears, this time as a comparison to Blake’s reader. A traditional emblem of chance, accident,

and death, here the fly becomes the epitome of life’s freshness and freedom. It is Blake’s utmost

concern that his audience has “a brain open to heaven & hell withinside wondrous & expansive.”

Following the same line of reasoning, van Lieshout comments, “The openness of Blake’s narratival,

perspectival, symbolic, syntactic, and semantic structure place interpretive bifurcation points in

virtually every line. As a result, a relatively limited number of lines carry an infinite narrative

potential within a mythological setting that specifies the scope and range of possibilities.”142 In

reading Blake, readers construct their own myths through an interactive process characterised by

flexibility. The structure of the illuminated books allows our eyes to move freely, one moment

reading the texts, another scanning the images, pronouncing the lines we love aloud or reading

142
van Lieshout, Within and Without Eternity, 185.

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silently – there is no fixed order or rule to follow in our exploration of the three arts of Eternity

made available by the Science of illuminated printing.

III. “Reading” Blake’s illuminated books – Act and Performance

In his note to A Vision of the Last Judgment, Blake writes:

The Nature of Visionary Fancy, or Imagination, is very little Known & the Eternal nature &
permanence of its ever Existing Images is considered as less permanent than the things of
Vegetative & Generative nature; yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but Its Eternal Image &
Individuality never dies, but renews by its seed. Just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed
of Contemplative Thought. The Writings of the Prophets illustrate these conceptions of the
Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine Images as seen in the Worlds of Vision.

Imagination holds a central position in Blake’s system as it has appeared frequently in all of his

works, from his earliest poems to his last creation. Yet, nowhere in his works is there a systematic

exegesis of what he means by “imagination.” For one reason, “the Nature of Visionary Fancy, or

Imagination, is very little Known”; for another, even the very little that is known of Imagination

cannot be communicated, as it varies among individuals. From what is present in his writings, it

can only be assumed that Blake’s concept of the imagination is fourfold, corresponding to the

fourfold vision of reality: “On the lowest level is the unimaginative perception of the fool, single

vision; then double vision or imaginative perception; then the creative imagination; and finally the

all-inclusive Body of the Imagination, the ultimate union of creator and creature.” 143 Blake’s

unshakable belief in the supremacy of imagination and his intolerance to any form of restraint give

rise to the notion of energy as the most fundamental quality that characterises not only his art but

143
Gleckner, “Blake’s Religion of Imagination,” 364.

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also all of life. Declares Blake in Mitlon, “The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence

itself” (586). And as Human Existence, imagination ought to be active and fuelled with energy.

For Blake, imagination as abstract esoteric rumination can be immediately eliminated as a

possible answer for Eternity. Imagination must be acted out, becoming imaginative act, in order

for it to have any meaning. Blake’s definition of an act is briefly implied in the Marriage, but it is

in his 1788 annotation to the aphorisms of his contemporary, the Swiss poet and theologian Johann

Kaspar Lavater that it is expressed most clearly:

There is a strong objection to Lavater’s principles (as I understand them) & that is He makes every
thing originate in its accident; he makes the vicious propensity not only a leading feature of the
man, but the stamina on which all his virtues grow. But as I understand Vice it is a Negative. It
does not signify what the laws of Kings & Priests have call’d Vice; we who are philosophers ought
not to call the Staminal Virtues of Humanity by the same name that we call the omissions of intellect
springing from poverty.

Every man’s leading propensity ought to be call’d his leading Virtue & his good Angel. But the
Philosophy of Causes & Consequences misled Lavater as it has all his Cotemporaries. Each thing
is its own cause & its own effect. Accident is the omission of act in self & the hindering of act in
another; This is Vice, but all Act [from Individual propensity] is Virtue. To hinder another is not
an act; it is the contrary; it is a restraint on action both in ourselves & in the person hinder’d, for
he who hinders another omits his own duty at the same time.

Murder is Hindering Another.

Theft is Hindering Another.

Backbiting, Undermining, Circumventing & whatever is Negative is Vice. But the origin of this
mistake in Lavater & his cotemporaries is, They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin; in consequence
all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin.144

144
Erdman, The Complete Poetry, 600-601.

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The above passage, in associating Vice with Negative, provides an insight for the distinction

between Negation and Contrary that will appear in Milton some years later:

There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary

The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries

The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man

This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off
&annihilated always

To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by Self-examination.

To bathe in the Waters of Life; to wash off the Not Human (603)

While Contraries are positive and essential for progress, a Negation is not a Contrary. Contraries

produce imaginative manifestation, whereas Negation merely brings forth finite consciousness.

For Blake, Negation is the worst evil of all. Negation is perceived not in the conventional sense of

evil against good, ugliness against beauty (these are all contraries), but in the void of quality, the

absence of activity. It is the Spectre, the Reasoning Power in Man, the Selfhood. The passive

reception approach of materialist science, the passive attitude of a reader in approaching a text,

and the passive reception of heritage from the past are some of the examples of what Blake means

by “Negation.” In other words, Blake condemns the inactivity arisen from certainty as the result

of a fixed perspective, which in turns is the manifestation of reason and rationality, of man’s firm

conviction in the existence of his selfhood. Finally, we come to understand why Blake calls for

self-annihilation as the ultimate solution for breaking free from Generation:

I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration

To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour

To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration

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 To cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton from Albions covering

To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with Imagination

To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration

… & now shall wholly purge away with Fire

Till Generation is swallowed up in Regeneration (Milton 604)

In Milton, the event of Milton descending from Eternity and entering Blake’s left foot is one of

crucial significance in our understanding of the self-annihilation process examined here. Entering

Blake’s left foot, Milton forges an intimate relationship with his successor; at the same time, this

relationship is initially based on anonymity as Blake fails to recognise that the celestial star was

Milton: “I knew not that it was Milton.” The role of anonymity in the transmission of critical

thought, hence, is very much emphasised by Blake. If identity is the most recognisable expression

of the self, then Blake’s focus on anonymity is his way of dismantling this self. Writes Goldsmith,

“Blake is presenting literary history as an affective transmission that works through persons but

without belonging to anyone. Transformed by Milton…, Blake simultaneously transforms Milton.

Mutual incorporation divests both poets of fixed identity.”145 As such, the whole of Milton ties one

poet’s reading of another to an act of redemptive transformation.

Here, we arrive at the point where Blake’s appeal for self-annihilation and the act of reading

converge. What can be further inferred from the above analysis on the transmission of literary

history between Blake and Milton is that such process is not limited to the two poets but is in fact

open to all readers. In other words, Blake urges his reader, in approaching him and his work, to

adopt the same attitude he had when he approached Milton, to aim for self-annihilation. To

facilitate this phenomenon, Blake resorts to the instability of meaning in his use of symbols, the

145
Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation, 26.

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ambivalence of his opinion, the contradictions in his ideas and conception to rouse the reader’s

faculties into action. His tactics are to encourage us to critically engage with his work, at the same

time, resisting generalisation and conventional understanding, which eventually leads to agitation

and turbulence. The reader’s subjective turbulence, as “the sign of his closer approach to something

much larger than his individual or personal embodiment,” 146 indicates an advancement in the

eradication of selfhood that Blake desires. As long as we remain to be agitated by the

impenetrability of the enigma of Blake’s prophecies; as long as we come back again and again

upon an irresolvable problem in Blake’s system, each time with a fresh perspective; we continue

to participate in Blake’s process of imaginative transformation. Here, I would like to revisit the

claim I made at the end of chapter 2, regarding the susceptibility to rereading of Blake’s

illuminated books. In relation to Attridge’s proposal that “the art work is not an object but an event,

and that it comes into existence, again and again, always differently, each time a reader, listener

or viewer experiences the arrangement of sounds or images as a work of art,”147 the reading and

rereading of Blake’s illuminated books are in themselves the union of creator and creature, the

state Blake uses in his description of Eden. This should be adequate proof to support my previous

argument that the illuminated books are the materialisation of the Science Blake deems to be

capable of helping man to regain his fourfold vision.

The mentioning of rereading evokes another of my previous remarks, “It is in rereading

that approaching the text ceases to be an act of consumption but becomes a sort of performance,

of acting on a play which is the return of the different.” So far, this thesis has revealed the

146
Ibid., 4.
147
Derek Attridge, “Once More with Feeling: Art, Affect and Performance,” Textual Practice 25, no. 2
(2011): 332.

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performative element embedded in various aspects of Blake’s work: from the structure of his

illuminated books, the production process of these books, to the act of imaginative reading.

Concerning structure, already mentioned points include the theatrical quality of Blake’s depiction

of the human figure, which is his appropriation of Mannerist style; and Frye’s comparison of

Blake’s illuminated books to musical drama, which are presented to the audience as a combination

of speech, sound, and setting.148 As for the production process, Gutbrodt suggests that Blake’s

unification of invention and execution in his illuminated printing method can be read as a form of

performance.149 Last but not least, as briefly sketched in chapter 2 and further explored in the

previous section, through the process of constructing meaning for themselves, Blake’s readers

participate in this larger scheme of performance as they immerse themselves in the universe of

“Visionary forms dramatic.” In addressing the performative quality in Blake, I do not merely wish

to demonstrate the widely-known fact that his art is a revolutionary art that anticipates the trend of

multimedia art among contemporary artists, but on a different level, to draw attention to the

conspicuous absence of Blake in most analyses of Romantic drama and performance – an absence

which, made present, is capable of significantly contributing to our understanding of Blake’s vision.

A more detailed analysis of the theatrical techniques found in his illuminated books, therefore, will

be of great help for the purpose of this thesis.

Blake directly links performance to effecting profound change. Just as the Bard’s

performance incites Milton, the theatrical nature of Blake’s illuminated books has the power to

prompt action. The way Blake constructs his multimedia art objects as gateways through which

the audience can enter his world and in return, his creation can reach out to the audience has been

148
Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 186.
149
Gutbrodt, “The Genius as Compositor,” 16.

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noticed by many scholars. Blake’s emphasis on entrances seems to be symptomatic of this

intention. For instance, in the title page of Milton, the eponymous hero is seen from behind, his

face partly turns out towards the audience, his right hand placed on the vortex and his left foot

lifting, apparently about to enter the vortex. In this depiction, Milton is performing the same action

we, as readers, inevitably perform when we pick up the poem. His body language seems to beckon

us to follow him into the journey of regaining Eternity. In other words, the figure of Milton here

functions as a bridge uniting the spectator to the world that sits before him waiting to be

explored.”150

The title page of Milton

150
Diane Piccitto, Blake’s Drama: Theatre, Performance and Identity in the Illuminated Books (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2014), 86.

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 In another example that bears remarkable resemblance to Milton’s title plate, the

frontispiece of Jerusalem also depicts a figure in the middle of an entering act. Los, the

personification of the poetic imagination, is seen passing through a Gothic arch, his left hand

pushing the door, his right carries a lantern (which turns out to be a miniature sun). On the simplest

level, the door represents the beginning of the poem, and just like Milton, Los is inviting us to

enter the world of the book. Nevertheless, entrances in Blake’s illuminated books are not always

as inviting as those found in Milton and Jerusalem. The frontispiece of Visions is one of those

depictions of entrance that suggest a more problematic relationship between the two worlds of the

book and of the audience than a call for involvement. The three main figures, situated in the front

of a cave, are undoubtedly in a state of utmost alienation, each immersing in his/her own limited

world. Oothoon and Bromion, despite being tied together, face two opposite directions,

manifesting no emotional connection. Theotormon is seen a little further to the right, squatting on

a rock with his face buried in his arms. None of the characters attempts to make any eye contact

with the spectator; there is no warm welcoming, no waving in. Yet, there exists another eye staring

out from the frontispiece, giving a direct, almost angry gaze at us. This eye, right above Bromion’s

head, is formed by the lines distinguishing the clouds from one another and from the sky, with the

sun taking the place of the pupil. As Piccitto suggests, this disembodied eye functions “as a direct

address, distancing but also drawing in the spectator as if he/she has some crucial agency in the

drama that unfolds.”151 Blake’s use of entrances, therefore, manifests his intention to constantly

shift between alienation and immersion in the reading experience.

At the other extreme, Blake’s theatrical techniques are sometimes surprisingly comparable

to Brecht’s alienation effect. The presence of this Brechtian alienation can be detected in the

151
Ibid., 87.

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structure of the Marriage. It has been observed that in the Marriage, Blake assiduously follows

the principles set out by Saint John’s prophecy. Both prophetic books are composed of seven

separate panels, each containing a vision framed by a prologue and an epilogue. In both the

Marriage and the Book of Revelation, the seventh vision distinguishing itself from the rest by its

special clarity. Both serve as commentary on older prophecies by invoking the contexts that they

interpret and projecting a vision that in turn, requires interpretation from successive prophecies.

Commenting on the structure of the Revelation (and thus, of the Marriage), Wittreich calls

attention to its dramatic characteristic in the way it “replaces confrontations of character with

confrontations of perspective and creates an antagonism between the prophet and his audience,

who relate to one another in the same way that the prophet relates to the source of his vision. Just

as the prophet was made to struggle to receive a vision and then to translate it, so his audience,

being extended a vision, is made to struggle to comprehend it.”152 As a result of its structure, the

Marriage creates a tension that denies easy access to its world and meaning.

Similar to Brecht, the aim of Blake’s technique is to create an active spectatorship, to make

the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the event. Nonetheless,

it must be noted that Blake’s use of alienation is distinct from Brecht’s alienation effect. If

Brechtian theatre does not include the interpenetrative vision of performance and reality, the

performative aspect in Blake’s illuminated books creates distance with the audience for the final

goal that they can consciously choose to see the two worlds as inter-penetrable and move through

them. If Brecht’s alienation effect is permanent, without any prospect of entrance being gained,

Blake’s alienation is frequently interchanged with immersion. According to Piccitto, for Blake,

“the world of the imagination – the performance of the illuminated books – is not virtual or severed

152
Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, 191.

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from material reality, thus an eventual entrance is both desired and possible… Blake’s call to action

is not about creating a better future; it is about seeing the infinite world of the imagination that

already exists in our own, perhaps as the legibility of mirrored writing is just within our grasp after

an aggressive intervention.”153

This remark calls attention to Blake’s understanding of the relationship between artistic

representation and the boundary between imaginative and real spaces. Unsurprisingly, we

encounter once again his contrary theory in its manifested form. On the one hand, Blake

emphasises the fact that the illuminated books, being parts of the imaginative world, is not severed

from material reality. On the other hand, he employs numerous self-referential methods to bring

prominence to the gap between these two worlds. Characters sometimes push upon the frame of

the design as if they are aware that they are enclosed by such an artificial border; conversely, the

frame sometimes seems to push back and shape the movements of the figures within the design,

implying that the world of the audience is apparently distinct from the space of the characters.

Characters can directly address the audience, acknowledging our existence and incorporating us

into their imaginative world, such as when they repeatedly reach out for us in Milton, “Mark well

my words. they are of your eternal salvation.” Yet, the audience are constantly made to be aware

of the fact that they are effectively barred from participating in the events happening in the book.

It becomes clear that Blake’s theatrical techniques are neither meant to evoke purely

sentimental effect by inviting the audience to participate and identify with the characters, nor are

they employed to create a permanent Brechtian alienation. What Blake hopes to achieve in his use

of various performative means is for his readers to replace their stable, singular identity with

153
Piccitto, Blake’s Drama, 80-81.

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unstable or manifold identities; in short, to perform the deed of self-annihilation. The various

perspectives come as a result of the on-going interaction with the illuminated books facilitate the

process of altering our views of ourselves and of our relation to the world. For Blake, being a

spectator who watches and listens to a performance has active potential, and in realising this

potential, one can acquire the eternal vision that Blake resolutely tries to communicate through his

work.

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Conclusion

Some scholars declare that there is no such thing as a Blakean system, for the word “system”

itself implies the existence of a certain set of rules and a certain form of mechanistic function, thus,

betrays Blake’s most basic principles against restriction and predestination. Against such claim, I

would argue that Blake’s system certainly does exist, formulated from a prosaic complex of

historical ideas inferred with a set of poetic principles developed by Blake himself. But it is not a

closed one which prohibits further insights; on the contrary, Blake’s system is “a means, a poetic

method, of relating concepts of universality and of individuality in such a way as to remind the

world that the two are inextricable.”154 As a means and method, it is created to be used, to be

transformed and adjusted along the way – in other words, it is not dead but very much alive. In

approaching Blake’s system, one needs to adopt the same mind set he has when he approaches the

teachings and ideas of his predecessors, in his attitude towards the past.

Throughout this thesis, I hope to have succeeded to some extent in my attempt to bring

prominence to the pivotal role of the theory of contraries in the Blakean universe. Contraries, as

Blake perceives, are both inevitable and necessary for existence. Consequently, he does not

endeavour to neutralise the nature of contraries by bringing them together; rather, he aims to calls

for the recognition of their respective characters and differences without the need for any labelling.

The state of the ultimate reality as Blake envisions, therefore, is characterised not by the

elimination of opposing forces but the annihilation of division and categorisation. From his

conception of time and space, his understanding of the relationship between representation and

meaning, to his attitude towards nature, gender, science, Blake has been thoroughly consistent in

154
Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1946), 460.

107
his approach which preserves the essence of contraries within a mode of dialectical inquiry. The

main problem of studying Blake’s theory, understandably, arises from the impossibility of

formulating any definite answer to any of the questions regarding Blake’s stance on those subjects.

After all, it has always been Blake’s desire for his reader to gain multiple perspectives in

approaching his work, to constantly adjust one’s opinion and assume various identities. Fixity,

changelessness, and passivity, according to him, are the worst evil that restrain man from reaching

the infinite hidden inside every man.

That is to say, the eternal vision Blake propounds, despite being a mental phenomenon, is

not without practical implications. Blake’s profound concern for social and political change is

prone to misinterpretation, most of the time because of his equivocal attitude. It is not rare for

Blake to be labelled as a misogynist, an anti-materialist and anti-nature poet, an anti-technology

artist, and an atheist, both by his contemporaries and by later generations. A man whose life and

art evolve around contradictions, there will be no difficulty in finding evidence to back up such

claims. Nevertheless, to place Blake under these categories is to completely disregard the ultimate

intention of his poetic activity. To be a misogynist, one must value men over women; an anti-

materialist, the spiritual over the material; to be an anti-technology artist, one must renounce

modern advancement in favour of ancient methods of production; and to be an atheist, one must

not believe in the existence of god. With some knowledge of Blake’s theory of contraries, we can

immediately affirm that Blake is none of these. The division between male and female, matter and

spirit, body and soul, science and art is precisely symptomatic of the fallen world, of which Blake

wishes to redeem. Blake realises that there will be no use in fighting for gender equality, or for

bodily exuberance as long as categorisation and division still exist. In order to effect any

meaningful change in the world, it is essential that each and every individual must overcome his

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limited perception, that contraries exist in harmony within each man. Only there and then will

there be real progress and humanity is to be redeemed.

The illuminated books are the means Blake chose to communicate this vision of the Last

Judgment on earth. Through this medium, the poet can precipitate visionary perception in his

reader by reuniting space and time, masculine and feminine, body and mind, poetry and painting.

The performative quality in these books considerably contributed to the formation of reading as

an experience, an event, through which imaginative transformation occurs instead of passive

reception. Blake’s readers, in participating the constructing of the book’s universe, effectively

acquire the co-author status. The multi-perspectives made available by these books enable the

audience to experience that Moment equals “a Pulsation of the Artery,” the prophetic moment in

which “the Poets Work is done.” To live forward the Blakean heritage, we are continuing the work

Blake has started in his approach to Milton and his other predecessors.

The extent to which Blake’s visionary art and poetry have actually effected change is

difficult to measure, for improvement in personal perception is not a quantitative entity. To make

up for this, many Blakean enthusiasts have proposed that Blake should be celebrated as a pioneer

of modernity in his anticipation of the principle of relativity and the modern science of quantum

mechanics. Such argument, fascinating as it may be, is fundamentally ahistorical and misleading.

For one, many of his ideas have much more ancient origin. For instance, Blake is not the first in

propounding the notion of space-time continuum. The four-dimensionalist analysis of time in fact

started with Saint Anselm (circa 1033 – 1109) centuries before.155 If one must assign a name to be

155
Anselm’s conception of four-dimensionalism is opposed to presentism: “On a presentist theory of
time, all that there is the present moment of time with all its contents. The past and future are absolutely
non-existent. The four-dimensionalist view holds that all times and all their contents have equal

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celebrated for this conception, it would not be William Blake. But most important, to claim that

Blake is able to predict the future as such is to completely betray the essence of his prophetic

writings. Blake’s prophecy is not a crystal sphere in which one may get a glimpse of the future –

it is not what he meant by “visionary power.” The Blakean fourfold vision is not one that can

enable man to know in advance what will happen to the external world, but to see the divinity

within each man.

This thesis, in its exploration of the concept of the ultimate reality in Blake’s illuminated

books, particularly in the three works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters

of Albion, and Milton: A Poem in Two Books, has managed to achieve most of the expected results

set out in the beginning. Certainly, there remain a lot of ideas to be improved upon, even some

mistakes to be addressed. As for my part, I am still very much in the process of finding a way

through the labyrinth of the psyche using the golden string offered by Blake. Yet, working on

Blake has continued to be an invaluable experience in which Blake’s genius and humanity never

cease to be a source of amazement and energy.

ontological status. Past, present and future are indexed to the perspective of a given perceiver at a given
point of time, rather like here and there are relative to a given perceiver at a given point in space. God is
“outside” of time in the sense that He does not exists as stretched out across the moments of time the way
temporal creatures do. But he is not “apart” from the temporal world. Rather all times and all they contain
are immediately present to God, kept in being by His unified act of thinking.” See Katherin Rogers and
William Hasker, “Anselm and the Classical Idea of God: A Debate,” in Philosophy of Religion: The Key
Thinkers, ed. Jeffrey J. Jordan (London: Continuum, 2011), 11.

110
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