IV.

The Prophetic Books

The so-called Prophetic Books were the major project of Blake’s life. In a series of poems written from 1789 onward, Blake created a complex personal mythology and invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought and expression, he declared in one of these poems “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s”. Poems such as The French Revolution (1791), America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and Europe, a Prophecy (1794) all express his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny, and his contempt for literary convention and restraint. The “Preludium” to The (First) Book of Urizen invokes the visionary imagination: “Eternals! I hear your calls gladly / Dictate swift winged words & fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment”. Much of the prophetic poetry dramatizes the conflicts between Urizen, the symbol of repressive morality, and Orc, the Promethean arch-rebel. The Book of Urizen (1794) is specifically concerned with theological tyranny, and the dreadful cycle set in motion by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in “The Mental Traveller” (c. 1803). It was in 1803, also, that Blake was arrested and charged at Chichester with high treason, for having “uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as ‘D—n the King, d—n all his subjects’”. Blake maintained that “the whole accusation is a wilful Perjury”, and he was acquitted. This incident perhaps serves as a reminder that freethinking was not readily tolerated in Blake’s time, and the espousal of radical views necessarily set him apart from the rest of his generation. He often expresses this feeling of social isolation: “O why was I born with a different face? / Why was I not born like the rest of my race?” he rhymed in a letter to Thomas Butts in 1803. Among the Prophetic Books is a prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), which owes much to the ideas of Swedenborg and develops Blake’s idea that “without Contraries is no progression”. It includes the “Proverbs of Hell”, such as “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.

The great visionary epics came late in Blake’s career. Milton (1804-1808), Vala, or The Four Zoas (that is, aspects of the human soul, 1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-1820) have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor metre; the rhetorical free-verse lines demand new modes of reading. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason, as a quotation from Jerusalem illustrates: “Awake, Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion, / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time; / For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day / Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come away!”

Blake died largely unknown, and for many years he was considered, by William Wordsworth among others, to have been insane and merely an interesting oddity. It was only later in the 19th century that his work was rediscovered by Algernon Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti: the latter brought out an edition in 1874 that added previously unknown poems to the canon and excited a new interest. W. B. Yeats produced a three-volume edition in 1893. Blake, although rightly acknowledged today as a great poet and artist, perhaps remains the poet’s poet. His work has influenced poets as diverse as the Beat Generation of the 1950s, W. H. Auden, and Emily Dickinson.