William Blake's Milton A Poem 1803-1808

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The article considers Blake's visionary experiences and his Apocalyptic vision in Milton a Poem. This is compared with`perceptions of the infinite' of other`visionaries', particularly Aldous Huxley's experiments with mescalin described in The Doors of Perception(1954)and Heaven and Hell(1956). Scholars approach Blake as a quarry in which to dig out his sources, his religion, his references, his symbolic references, but not his prophetic meaning. He claimed to write only from personal experience; where he quotes other writers it is to challenge them. He repeats he is a channel for revelations of truth, visionary experiences, the perception of infinity, but one that was much more intellectually honed than Huxley's. Plate 11 of Milton: much they questioned the immortal / Loud voicd Bard / Where hadst thou this terrible Song / The Bard replied. I am inspired! I know it is Truth! for I Sing / According to the inspiration of the Poetic Genius / Who is the eternal all-protecting Divine Humanity.

In 1790 Blake identified himself with Satan as the Messiah, confusingly in Milton he identifies himself as a victim of Satan's jealousy. The redemption of Milton the poet becomes part of an allegorical saga of Blake's entities in conflict with Satan in his experiences in Felpham 1800-3. The Elect of Calvanism, identified with Milton, are also representatives of the world of commercialized art. Milton's rescript of the Genesis myth in Paradise Lost, preparing the Calvinist apocalypse, is inverted in Milton a Poem. Blake's image of the physical / spiritual experience - which is life - is a vortex on Plate 10 Europe a Prophecy; one travels cyclically to the centre and out again and returns. Time and Space are illusions.

In his 1790s books Blake's Los / Christ is the Messiah cast into the Abyss but it is Milton's Satan. Milton acknowledges that his religion was that of Urizen, whom Satan had become, responsible for centuries of war, famine and pestilence. In Paradise Lost after the Fall, Lucifer became Satan, the first of six Guardians of creation listed by Blake as six Biblical ages; the last was Jehovah / Urizen, but all the same identity.`The religious' devised mysteries to control their congregations. Blake inverts the Elect and Reprobate, the`saved' and the`damned'. Jesus is Reprobate in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell. The Elect worship Jehovah, the lawgiver, who is Satan. On Plate 39 Milton recognizes Satan as his own Spectre, the Self who should be annihilated, surrogate of Puritan religion, in order to deny Satan, the Elect and all their works.

Then follows Los' Apocalypse, the Great Harvest and Vintage of The Book of Revelation: the birth of Blake's prophetic / poetic soul, a feminine, transformational inspiration in his psyche. Blake's imagery of the Apocalypse in terms of the redeeming Female challenges the misogynist, apocalyptic fantasies of Hebraic-Christian tradition though expressed in the imagery of Ezekiel's four-fold theophany and the rhetoric of The Book of Revelation. Blake is a Platonist, but his perception of`reality' is a highly personal conception of the nature of the Poetic Genius, which is constantly distorted to States, created and thus changeable and annihilable. The goal of the spiritual pilgrim is perception of infinity, Divine Jesus, pure form, the State Self-Annihilation, to be One with that beatific vision. Aldous Huxleys' mundane if rapturous exploration of mind-altering drugs hardly matches Blake's vision at any point. Milton a Poem ends as a beginning, because Los' Apocalypse is a vortex within every human being on earth, a spiritual journey we are on whether we know it or not.

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