1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1819), ch. 31.
2. Jerusalem 3, E145.
3. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 381; Blake Records, 68.
4. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, ed. Hugh J. Luke (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 276.
5. Blake to the Rev. Dr. Trusler, Aug. 23, 1799, E702; Vision of the Last Judgment, E560.
6. Eternity, E470.
7. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Bentley, Stranger from Paradise. Ackroyd is excellent on London life in Blake’s time and on his career as an artist; he is not very deeply grounded in Blake scholarship and has been rightly criticized for a number of errors. Bentley is the doyen of Blake scholarship and incomparably learned on every detail of Blake’s life and works, but Ackroyd’s biography may be more appealing to the general reader.
8. Marriage 14, E39; Plotinus’ “last words to us” are quoted by William R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), 10.
9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Visible Language: Blake’s Wond’rous Art of Writing,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. Morris Eaves and Michael Fischer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 83.
10. Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). On pages 375–81, Viscomi presents his chronology of all known copies, established from watermarks in the paper and other clues.
11. Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the Songs from Manuscript to Illuminated Printing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 31.
12. Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 19.
13. David Fuller, William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Pearson Longman, 2008), 21.
14. Jerusalem 13.21, E157; G. E. Bentley Jr., ed., William Blake’s Writings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). An example of “and” instead of an ampersand is at Urizen 10.16, E75.
15. References are to the revised edition: David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, with commentary by Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
16. Alicia Ostriker, ed., William Blake: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2004); W. H. Stevenson, ed., Blake: The Complete Poems (London: Pearson Longman, 2007). Once standard, but now superseded, is Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Complete Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
1. Details about the Blake family and their shop are drawn from G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), ch. 1.
2. John Blake is mentioned as “the evil one” in an 1802 poem (E721). It is not certain that he died abroad, but because he was not buried with the rest of the family, that seems most likely.
3. Gilchrist, 97; Blake Records, 663–64.
4. Notebook verses, E510; Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study in the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 206.
5. Blake to John Flaxman, Sept. 12, 1800, E707.
6. The evidence for the Moravian connection—suggestive but not conclusive—is summarized by John Beer, William Blake: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5–6.
7. Blake Records, 10–11, 699. Aileen Ward suggests that a degree of skepticism is appropriate for tales about Blake’s childhood: “William Blake and the Hagiographers,” in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl (New York: AMS, 1994), 13–14.
8. Bentley, Stranger from Paradise, 22; where not otherwise noted, biographical details are from this source. On Pars’s school, see also Martin Myrone, The Blake Book (London: Tate, 2007), 15.
9. Blake Records, 16.
10. Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 20.
11. Public Address, E582; Blake to William Hayley, Mar. 12, 1804, E743. On Blake’s eyeglasses, see Joyce H. Townsend, ed., William Blake: The Painter at Work (London: Tate, 2003), 24.
12. Blake to George Cumberland, Dec. 6, 1795, E699; Blake to the Rev. John Trusler, Aug. 23, 1799, E703.
13. See D. W. Dörrbecker, “Innovative Reproduction: Painters and Engravers at the Royal Academy of Arts,” in Historicizing Blake, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (London: St. Martin’s, 1994), 125–46 (the quoted passage is at 130–31).
14. Blake to John Flaxman, Sept. 12, 1800, E707; Mrs. A. E. Bray, Life of Thomas Stothard, in Blake Records, 19–20; Bentley, Stranger from Paradise, 60.
15. Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 28.
16. Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, 3 vols. in 5 (London, 1789–98), 1:159–60.
17. A melodramatic piece called The Fall of Rosamond, for instance, is executed in a delicate stipple technique that was fashionable among society ladies, and colored in pastel shades; see Myrone, Blake Book, 30–31.
18. Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition,” in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson et al. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 877.
19. Blake Records, 71.
20. This suggestion is made by Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), 96.
21. Allan Cunningham, Blake Records, 638. John Mee comments on the differences between the watercolor and the engraving: “‘As Portentous as the Written Wall’: Blake’s Illustrations to Night Thoughts,” in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. Alexander S. Gourlay (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 2002), 178.
22. Blake Records, 632; Gilchrist, 117. Blake Records, 632. Henry Fuseli, a close friend of Blake’s, said that Catherine had been a maidservant: Blake Records, 71.
23. Blake Records, 672; Shakespeare, Othello 1.3.171–72; Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 306–7.
24. Gilchrist, 334–35.
25. Robert N. Essick, “A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Winter 2005–6), 126–39; Bentley, Stranger from Paradise, pl. 88 caption.
26. Blake Records, 392, 684.
27. Gilchrist, 333. See Anne K. Mellor, “Physiognomy, Phrenology, and Blake’s Visionary Heads,” in Blake in His Time, ed. Robert N. Essick and Donald Pearce (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 63–67.
28. See William M. Ivins Jr., How Prints Look: Photographs with Commentary, ed. Marjorie B. Cohn, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1987), 46.
29. Public Address, E574; Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 32.
30. Blake Records, 690.
31. Marriage 14, 27, E39, 45.
32. See Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 92; Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy,” Print Quarterly 21 (2004), 18–38; and Phillips’s edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 28–30.
33. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1995), 165.
34. America 3.15, E52.
35. See Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 93, and Michael Phillips, “No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,” British Art Journal 5 (2004), 13–21.
36. On the printing process, see Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 25.
37. Blake Records, 690; Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 129. On Blake’s inks, see Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, 98; and on the watercolor paints that were used at the time, see Townsend, Blake: The Painter at Work, 42.
38. Phillips, “Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy.”
39. Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832), 48, quoted by Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 146.
40. Ivins, How Prints Look, 158.
41. On total sales, see G. E. Bentley Jr., “What Is the Price of Experience? William Blake and the Economics of Illuminated Printing,” University of Toronto Quarterly 68 (1999), 617–41.
42. Descriptive Catalogue, E546–47; Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 29.
43. On romantic classicism, see Anne K. Mellor, Blake’s Human Form Divine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), ch. 4, “Romantic Classicism and Blake’s Art.” On Flaxman and Blake, see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 183, 172.
44. Descriptive Catalogue, E550; on outline as moral, see Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art, 5. Cumberland is quoted by David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 103.
45. Ralph Wornum, Lectures on Painting (1848), quoted by Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 254; Descriptive Catalogue, E548; annotations to Reynolds, E655; Gombrich, Story of Art, 303.
46. Descriptive Catalogue, E538.
47. Jerusalem 38.23, E185 (the phrase “minute particulars” is repeated in eight other places in Jerusalem); Vision of the Last Judgment, E560. See Jenijoy La Belle, “Blake’s Visions and Revisions of Michelangelo,” in Essick and Pearce, Blake in His Time, 13–22, and Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1.
48. Notebook puns, E510; Public Address, E580; annotations to Reynolds, E636, 641. See Eaves, Counter-Arts Conspiracy, 159–68.
49. Annotations to Reynolds, E641.
50. Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse 3,” in Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 44–45.
51. Annotations to Reynolds, E648, 656.
52. Annotations to Reynolds, E639. I discuss the problems in Reynolds’s position in “Generality and Particularity,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 381–93.
53. Descriptive Catalogue, E541; Gilchrist, 94; annotations to Reynolds, E655; John Flaxman to William Hayley, Blake Records, 208.
54. Gilchrist, 247; Kingsley Amis, The Alteration (New York: Viking, 1976), 1–2.
55. Examiner, Sept. 17, 1809; Blake Records, 282–83.
56. David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 19–20.
1. Descriptive Catalogue, E541; Vision of the Last Judgment, E565–66. In a translation of Plato that Blake knew, “It is more proper to consider the eyes and ears as things through which, rather than as things by which, we perceive”: Theaetetus 184c, in the 1804 translation of Thomas Taylor; see Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 2:120.
2. Blake to John Trusler, Aug. 23, 1799, E702; Trusler is quoted in a letter from Blake to George Cumberland, Aug. 26, 1799, E704. See also G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 181–82.
3. William Butler Yeats, “William Blake and His Illustrations to The Divine Comedy,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 119.
4. Thomas Gray, Ode on . . . Eton College, lines 21–30.
5. Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Gray,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 434–35; William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, lines 200–203.
6. Macbeth 1.8; Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), 29.
7. Christopher Heppner suggests possible alternative titles: “Reading Blake’s Designs: Pity and Hecate,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 84 (1981), 339. See also David L. Clark, “How to Do Things with Shakespeare: Illustrative Theory and Practice in Blake’s Pity,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 106–33.
8. Gilchrist, “Supplement,” 407.
9. Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114. Heppner’s extended commentary on this picture is especially valuable.
10. John Milton, L’Allegro, lines 73–74, 91–98; Blake’s descriptions of his illustrations to L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, E683.
11. See Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs, 268.
12. See John E. Grant, “Blake’s Designs for L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” in The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics, ed. Robert N. Essick (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1973), 430.
13. Four Zoas 70.12–17, E346; the “man of sorrows” in Isaiah 53:3 was taken to be an anticipation of Christ.
14. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 29.
15. Marriage 11, E38.
1. Inscription in the Four Zoas manuscript, E697.
2. Cunningham, Blake Records, 637; John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 133.
3. Peter Berger, “The Comic as a Signal of Transcendence,” Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 213. On the tree of knowledge, see Andrew Lincoln in Blake Trust, 2:143.
4. Isaac Watts is quoted by John Holloway, Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 48–49, and John Wesley by E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), 375.
5. These and others are cited by Zachary Leader in a survey of progressive educational theory in Blake’s time: Reading Blake’s Songs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 149 and fig. 7.
6. Annotations to Reynolds, E650. The final word was accidentally cut away by a bookbinder, but “body” is the best guess (probably not “form,” since that would repeat “formed”).
7. Introduction, E7; Marriage, E36.
8. John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828); Alan Cunningham, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830); both in Blake Records, 606, 633.
9. E16.
10. Quoted by Constantine Fitzgibbon, The Life of Dylan Thomas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 323–24.
11. William Cowper, The Poplar Field, in Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 362; The Ecchoing Green, lines 11–20, E8.
12. See Walter S. Minot, “Blake’s ‘Infant Joy’: An Explanation of Age,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 25, no. 2 (Fall 1991), 78, and Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25–26, 131–32.
13. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, The Loves of the Plants (1789), 2, 26. On the anemone as the flower of Adonis, see Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 1:108.
14. Visions 6.4–5, E49; see Mary Lynn Johnson, “Feminist Approaches to Teaching Songs,” in Approaches to Teaching Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, ed. Robert F. Gleckner and Mark L. Greenberg (New York: MLA, 1989), 61; Helen P. Bruder, “Blake and Gender Studies,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicolas M. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 137–38; and Robert N. Essick’s commentary to his edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2008), 34–35.
15. Illuminated Blake, 69.
16. Illuminated Blake, 52; Dylan Thomas, The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.
17. The Blossom, E10; Marriage, E36.
18. The “clockwise” interpretation is David Wagenknecht’s: Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 58–59; Illuminated Blake, 52. The halo-sun can be seen in copy Y in the Blake Archive, and in the Kings College, Cambridge, copy reproduced in Blake Trust 2:pl. 11.
19. G. E. Bentley Jr., “Blake’s Pronunciation,” Studies in Philology 107 (2010), 114–29.
20. E8–9.
21. Four Zoas 18.1–3, E310.
22. E17.
23. Holy Thursday, E13 (and see The Little Black Boy, E9); Revelation 19:6; Hebrews 13:2.
24. Stephen C. Behrendt, Reading William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1992), 54.
25. E10.
26. See Martin K. Nurmi, “Fact and Symbol in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Blake’s Songs of Innocence,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 15–22.
27. See David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 132.
28. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, 96–101, 363.
29. Zachary Leader, Reading Blake’s Songs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 47.
30. Edward Larrissy invokes ideology in this nonjudgmental sense: William Blake (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 19–20, 29.
31. Raine, Blake and Tradition, 1:25–26, quoting Emanuel Swedenborg, Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System (1758).
32. Auguries of Innocence, E490.
33. Noted by Alexander Gourlay, “‘More on Blake’s Auguries,’” Notes and Queries (December 2011), 523.
1. Europe 5.7, E62; see Andrew Lincoln’s commentary on the Experience frontispiece, Blake Trust, 2:172.
2. Marriage 14, E39.
3. E28. See Angela Esterhammer, Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 144.
4. E29–30; Romans 7:7.
5. E26.
6. Ah! Sun-Flower, E25.
7. Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), 135; The Sick Rose, E23; Stephen Cox, Love and Logic: The Evolution of Blake’s Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 109.
8. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 892 (letter 261).
9. Matthew Prior, A True Maid, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), 1:455.
10. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Scribner, 1953), 260.
11. Marriage 14, E39.
12. The Clod and the Pebble, E19.
13. Marriage 7, E36; The Everlasting Gospel, E518. Paul is cited by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant in their edition of Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 31; on self-abnegation I follow the suggestion of David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 11.
14. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 133.
15. E24–25.
16. Alexander Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 8–9; Paradise Lost 1.25–26. B. H. Fairchild comments on Blake’s trochees: Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1980), 36–37.
17. Public Address, E576. The crossed-out lines were recovered by David V. Erdman and Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 109. The 1771 Britannica article is quoted by John E. Grant in a masterly article to which my comments are much indebted: “This Is Not Blake’s ‘The Tyger,’” Iowa Review 19 (1989), 112–15.
18. Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument, 82.
19. Paradise Lost 2.634–35. On the spears as beams of light, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 175–77.
20. Marriage 6, E35.
21. Illuminated Blake, 84; I am indebted also to Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Something in My Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 88.
22. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 137; Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 86. Tigers are pictured in Erdman and Moore, Notebook of William Blake, Notebook p. 2.
23. Night, lines 33–40, E14.
24. E22–23.
25. E12–13, 27; Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, ch. 19. The mention of chimney sweeps forbidden to enter churches is from Jonas Hanway, A Sentimental History of Chimney Sweepers in London and Westminster (1785), quoted by Martin K. Nurmi, “Fact and Symbol in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of Blake’s Songs of Innocence,” in Blake: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Northrop Frye (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 18.
26. E26–27.
27. James Joyce, lecture on Blake (translated from an Italian original), in James Joyce: The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959), 215. Joyce did not realize that Blake was referring to Saint James’s Palace; Buckingham Palace was not yet the royal residence.
28. Ezekiel 9:4–6; there is a similar passage at Revelation 13:16.
29. George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 71; Michael Ferber, “‘London’ and Its Politics,” ELH 48 (1981), 310.
30. Jerusalem 84.11–12, 15–16, E243.
31. Preface to The Revolt of Islam (1818) in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), 33; P. B. Shelley, Julian and Mad-dalo: A Conversation, 182; Four Zoas 71.11, E348; Steve Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
32. Jerusalem 69.34–35, 57.8–10, E223, 207; T. S. Eliot, “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 47.
33. John Holloway, Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 30; Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse, 142. On venereal disease and tears, see G. C. Roti and D. L. Kent, “The Last Stanza of Blake’s ‘London,’” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 11 (1977), 19–21.
34. Marriage 8, E36.
35. Auguries of Innocence, E492; David Punter, “Blake and the Shapes of London,” Criticism 23 (1981), 7. Gavin Edwards notes the range of Blake’s indictments: “Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A Contribution to the Discussion of Blake’s ‘London,’” Literature and History 5 (1979), 88.
36. Annotations to Reynolds, E636.
37. Blake Records, 396.
38. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 286; John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828), Blake Records, 619.
39. Blake Records, 438, 312–13, 337.
40. Charles Burney in the Monthly Review (June 1799), 202, quoted by Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2. On the ranking of poets in Blake’s time, see the comments by Nicolas M. Williams and Edward Larrissy in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1, 256.
41. Four Zoas 35:11–15, E325.
1. Acts 17:6; Revelation 14:6.
2. E. P. Thompson wrote the classic Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963); his Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) was published shortly after his death. Jon Mee gives a valuable review of what we know and don’t know about Blake and the radical underground: Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
3. Annotations to Bishop Watson, E617; Vision of the Last Judgment, E560, quoting Numbers 11:19. Richard Brothers’s bizarre career is described by Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 260–93.
4. Robert N. Essick gives an authoritative account of the several states of this print: William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 70–74.
5. Gilchrist, 33; Albion Rose inscription, E671; There Is No Natural Religion [b], E2.
6. Milton, Samson Agonistes, line 41; Areopagitica in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 557–58.
7. On “invenit” and “sculpsit,” see Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 70, and Morris Eaves, The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 110.
8. The historical context is reviewed by David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 7–11; Burke is quoted from the 1796 Letter to a Noble Lord.
9. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 153; the second comment is in Mitchell’s Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 55. Tatham, Blake Records, 673.
10. See Essick, Blake, Printmaker, 182–83, and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 56–60.
11. See Joseph Viscomi, “The Lessons of Swedenborg; or, The Origin of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 182–84.
12. Marriage 3, E34.
13. Gilchrist, 90.
14. Michael Phillips reproduces an enlargement of these two figures in his edition of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), 88.
15. My comments are indebted to Blake Trust, 3:131.
16. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1969), 194–95; Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Nelson F. Adkins (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 77, 80; Marriage 7, E35.
17. Jerusalem 45:9–12, E194.
18. Marriage 7–10, E35–38. The difference between Blake’s proverbs and traditional ones is explored by John Villalobos, “William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell and the Tradition of Wisdom Literature,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990), 246–59, and by Mike Goode, “Blakespotting,” PMLA 121 (2006), 769–86.
19. See Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s America a Prophecy,” Print Quarterly 21 (2004), 29.
20. For helpful interpretations, see Illuminated Blake, 139; Blake Trust, 4:50–52; and Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake’s Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 135. I explore affinities between Prometheus and the crucified Christ in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 107–11.
21. Europe 5.6, E62; Jerusalem 30.57, E177; Tiriel 8.11, E285.
22. America 2.1–7, E52; Song of Solomon 3:4.
23. America 8.13–14, E54; on sales of America, see Andrew Lincoln, “From America to The Four Zoas,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210, and David Worrall, “Blake and 1790s Plebeian Radical Culture,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 195.
24. America 14.10–19; see Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 57n. An important theme in Saree Makdisi’s William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) is Blake’s emphasis on revolutionary goals far more radical than the American leaders envisioned.
25. Marriage 10, E37; Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 45.
26. America 6.1–15; Matthew 24:41, 27:66; John 20:17; Ezekiel 37:7–10.
27. Makdisi, Blake and the Impossible History, 182–83, makes the point about activity and stasis. Some possible references for the small creatures are given in Illuminated Blake, 144, and in Blake Trust, 4:58.
28. W. M. Rossetti, appendix to Gilchrist, 423; The French Revolution 10.189, E294; Song of Los 6.6, E68; King Lear 3.2.4; Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art, 59.
29. America 8.1–6, E54.
30. Essick makes this point: Blake, Printmaker, 144.
31. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 207–35; Milton O. Percival, William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 31. Frye’s “Orc cycle” is trenchantly critiqued by Christopher Z. Hobson, The Chained Boy: Orc and Blake’s Idea of Revolution (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 48 ff.
32. I originally proposed this distinction between iconic and dynamic symbols in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth, 79 ff.
33. Illuminated Blake, 157; Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 79.
34. Europe 10.16–23, E63.
35. The Herculaneum image is mentioned by Milton Klonsky, William Blake: The Seer and His Visions (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), 51.
36. America 7.3–5, E53, and 6.15, E53.
37. James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), xvi.
38. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956), 29; Europe 9.8, E63. W. J. T. Mitchell suggests the visual pun on “blasts”: “Style as Epistemology: Blake and the Movement toward Abstraction in Romantic Art,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 154.
39. America 2.18–21, E52; the “vales of Kent” refers to the Old Kent Road in London, not to the county of that name. When Blake printed America again in 1807 he masked these lines so they did not appear, but they show up once more in the final copy of 1821. A Welsh bard refusing to play his harp for the conqueror is the subject of a then-famous poem by Thomas Gray, The Bard, which Blake would later illustrate.
40. Royal proclamation and Stationers’ Company resolution quoted by Michael Phillips, “Blake and the Terror, 1792–93,” Library, 6th ser., no. 16 (December 1994), 266, 272; see also Stephen C. Behrendt, “History When Time Stops: Blake’s America, Europe, and The Song of Los,” Papers on Language and Literature 28 (1992), 379–97.
41. Notebook entry, E694; annotations to Watson, E611.
42. Public Address, E580.
43. Jacob Bronowski, William Blake and the Age of Revolution (New York: Harper, 1965), 3.
44. Marriage 3, E34.
1. E477–78.
2. Blake Records, 703.
3. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (London: Routledge, 1950), 236–37.
4. Annotations to Lavater, E595.
5. Alexander Pope, Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey; William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), 3.61–63.
6. Isaac Newton, Opticks (New York: Dover, 1952), 400; the quotation about “sands on the shore” comes from Charles C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 132.
7. Auguries of Innocence, E490; Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum; or, An Exposition of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, in the 1654 translation of John Sparrow, vol. 1 (London, 1965), 4; Blake Records, 404, 343; Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking, line 9.
8. Annotations to Lavater, E592; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 147; Marriage 7, E36; Milton 24.72–73, E121.
9. On a source in Michelangelo, see Jenijoy La Belle, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Frescoes and Blake’s 1795 Color-Printed Drawings,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Summer 1980), 81.
10. Blake Records, 500.
11. Blake Records (Frederick Tatham), 48; on Blake’s printing technique, see Martin Myrone, The Blake Book (London: Tate, 2007), 81.
12. Mark Crosby, “‘The Sculptor Silent Stands before His Forming Image’: Blake and Contemporary Sculpture,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127.
1. Blake to George Cumberland, Sept. 1, 1800, Blake Records, 97; printed with a facsimile by Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, “‘Dear Generous Cumberland’: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Summer 1998), 4–13.
2. Blake to William Hayley, Dec. 18, 1804, E759; see Robert W. Rix, “Healing the Spirit: William Blake and Magnetic Religion,” Romanticism on the Net 25 (February 2002), http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/006011ar.
3. Blake to Thomas Butts, Sept. 23, 1800, E711; Butts to Blake, undated, Blake Records, 101.
4. Blake to Butts, Oct. 2, 1800, E712–13; W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960), 61. See also Arnold M. Ludwig, “Altered States of Consciousness,” General Psychiatry 15 (1966), 25–34.
5. Vision of the Last Judgment, E565–66; Isaiah 6:3; Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy, 2.1.
6. Gilchrist, 159, 196.
7. E504, 506; Henry IV, Part I 3.2.25.
8. Milton 41.8, E142; Paul Youngquist, Madness and Blake’s Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 19.
9. Blake to Cumberland, July 2, 1800, E706–7.
10. Milton 4.26, E98.
11. Blake to Butts, Aug. 16, 1803, E733; Matthew 25:29–30.
12. To H——, E506; Fair Elenor, line 68, in Poetical Sketches, E412. I have argued for the schizoid interpretation in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 311–13; Robert N. Essick likewise suggests “a mild form of schizophrenia” in “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 257.
13. Hayley to Lady Hesketh, Aug. 3, 1805, Blake Records, 205–6.
14. Annotations to Spurzheim, E663; R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Vintage, 1976), 67.
15. Blake to Butts, Jan. 10, 1803, E724.
16. Blake to Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804, E756; see Morton D. Paley, “The Truchsessian Gallery Revisited,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977), 265–77.
17. Michelangelo quoted by James Hall, Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 108.
1. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” and “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 7:109, 17:143; Jerusalem 39.41–42, E187.
2. Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 196; William Hayley, An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), 3.114, 5.268–70, quoted by Joseph A. Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 235–36.
3. Jerusalem 10.20–21, 11.5, E153–54. Nelson Hilton makes the point about “striving with” in “Blakean Zen,” Studies in Romanticism 24 (1985), 183.
4. Jerusalem 5.16–22, E147.
5. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E722; Milton 30.1–3, 8–14, E129.
6. Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1. Morris Eaves has said, “It takes the massive intellectual pressure of a Northrop Frye to bind Blake’s formidable difficulties into an illusion of total coherence, which inevitably falls into contradictions, fragments, and dead ends as soon as the pressure lets up”: “On Blakes We Want and Blakes We Don’t,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995), 415–17.
7. Jerusalem 77, E231; Morris Eaves, quoted by Kari Kraus, “‘Once Only Imagined’: An Interview with Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi,” Studies in Romanticism 41 (2002), 161; Andrew Lincoln, “From America to The Four Zoas,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210.
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge to H. F. Cary, Feb. 6, 1818, and to Charles Augustus Tulk; both in Blake Records, 336. Some commentators assume that “anacalyptic” is simply a synonym for “apocalyptic,” but that seems wrong. I proposed my interpretation of this word in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 74, and Nicholas M. Williams has recently concurred in the introduction to his collection Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1.
9. Vincent A. De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 61; B. H. Fairchild, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1980), 85–86; Nelson Hilton, “Literal / Tiriel / Material,” in Critical Paths: Blake and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 99.
10. Alcuin, Commentariorum in Apocalypsim, quoted by Barbara Nolan, The Gothic Visionary Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 7.
11. Jerusalem 3, E145–46; Four Zoas 34.77, E324; Arthur Golding, Metamorphoses 15.984–95; Four Zoas 3.1–3, E300.
12. Four Zoas 61.24–31, E341–42; David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 92. (I have altered his patterning slightly.)
13. Milton 1, E95–96; Numbers 11:29.
14. Isaiah 52:7.
15. 2 Kings 2:11; Vision of the Last Judgment, E560. On active response, see Stephen C. Behrendt, “‘Something in My Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 85. My comments are indebted as well to Nancy M. Goslee, “‘In Englands Green & Pleasant Land’: The Building of Vision in Blake’s Stanzas from ‘Milton,’” Studies in Romanticism 13 (1974), 105–25.
16. Song of the New Model Army, quoted by A. L. Morton, The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1958), 59; Jerusalem 34.14–15, E180.
17. Jerusalem 65.12–24, E216; the French visitor to the Carron ironworks in Scotland in 1784 is quoted by Michael Ferber, The Social Vision of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 136–37.
18. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 226.
19. See Michael Ferber, “Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as a Hymn,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 34, no. 3 (Winter 2000–2001), 82–94. Ferber offers a detailed analysis of how Parry’s score brings out the force of Blake’s words. David Cameron is quoted by Susan Matthews, “‘And Did Those Feet’? Blake and the Role of the Artist in Post-War Britain,” in Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connally, and Jason Whittaker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 161.
20. Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009), 78.
21. Blake Records, 310; Four Zoas 122.16–20, E391.
22. Jerusalem 27.1–36, E171–72; Gilchrist, 7; details from David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 288–90, 472–75, and Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 75. Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 32–33, traces a typical route that Blake might have followed.
23. Details from S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (reprint ed., Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979; orig. publ. Brown University Press, 1965), 246, and Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 165. On executions, see Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
24. Milton 25.48–55, E122.
25. Michael Phillips, “No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,” British Art Journal 5 (2004), 13–21.
26. Four Zoas 95.26–28, E360–61; details from David V. Erdman, “Lambeth and Bethlehem in Blake’s Jerusalem,” Modern Philology 48 (1951), 184–92.
27. Jerusalem 24.25, 29–35, E169; Zechariah 11:13; Jerusalem 52, E201; Four Zoas 109.5–6, E378.
1. Revelation 4:6.
2. Four Zoas 4.6, E301.
3. I adapt this formulation from Diana Hume George, Blake and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 79. Freud’s analogy of the unruly mob is quoted from his “My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus” by Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (New York: Anchor, 1961), 63.
4. Ezekiel 1:1, 4–6, 10–11, 16–18.
5. See David Bindman, “Blake as a Painter,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98; the Raphael painting is in the Palatine Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.
6. G. E. Bentley Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pl. 77 caption.
7. Jerusalem 15.18–20, E159.
8. Four Zoas 3.4–6, E300–301; John 17:21, 1:14.
9. Milton 21.8–10, E115.
10. Four Zoas 44.5–45.3, E329–30; Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 93.
11. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 4:312. The fourteen versions of the fall are summarized by Brian Wilkie and Mary Lynn Johnson, Blake’s Four Zoas: The Design of a Dream (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 255–60.
12. Milton 24.71, E121.
1. Milton 2.25, E96 (“Mark well my words” is repeated at 3.5 and 4.20); Jerusalem 5.16–23, E147.
2. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:177–78.
3. Stephen C. Behrendt makes this suggestion: Reading William Blake (London: Macmillan, 1992), 156.
4. Milton 2.16–22, E96; Paradise Lost 7.173.
5. Harold Bloom first advanced his theory in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). A case for a more positive focus in Blake’s response to Milton is argued by Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).
6. Paradise Lost 1.26.
7. Milton 40.35–41.4, E142.
8. Milton 16.47–50, E110, and 1, E95.
9. Laura Quinney suggests this interpretation in William Blake on Self and Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 134.
10. See, e.g., Peter Ackroyd, Blake (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 311, and Illuminated Blake, 248.
11. On astral bodies, see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 203.
12. Blake to William Hayley, May 6, 1800, E705.
13. Genesis 1:3; Jerusalem 16.12–15, E160.
14. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry (1821); Marriage 14, E39.
15. Ben Jonson, To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare, lines 58–62; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), 275–76. The Joseph Wright painting described here was executed in 1771 and is in the Derby Museum.
16. Jerusalem 98.24, E257.
17. Book of Los 4.27–36, E92.
18. Urizen 10.15–18, E75; Milton 24.72–73, E121.
19. Book of Los 4.19–26, E92; 5.33–34, 41–47, E94.
20. The similarity of vocabulary is noted by Paul Miner, “‘The Tyger’: Genesis and Evolution in the Poetry of William Blake,” Criticism 3 (1961), 67–68. More largely, see my chapter “Los, Mulciber, and the Tyger” in Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 373–81.
21. Urizen 10.35–39, E75, and 13.20–21, E77; Illuminated Blake, 193; David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 92.
22. Urizen 18.1–5, E78. On the medical theory, see Hilton, Literal Imagination, 83. My comments are indebted as well to W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 156.
23. Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 129; Book of Los 5.47, E94. Copy E is in the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.
24. Jerusalem 45.3, E194; James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 37. Mitchell suggests the printer’s smock: Blake’s Composite Art, 51.
25. Jerusalem 1.9, E144.
26. Isaiah 21.11–12; John 10:9, as suggested by Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse, 244. Erdman mentions also the wicket gate through which Bunyan’s Christian begins his journey to salvation in Pilgrim’s Progress: Illuminated Blake, 281.
27. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E721 (he says the poem was written “above a twelve-month ago”).
28. Milton 22.4–14, E116–17. Udan-Adan is a formless chaos outside the humanized world.
29. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Style and Iconography in the Illustrations of Blake’s Milton,” Blake Studies 6 (1973): 67; Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 220–21; Christopher Z. Hobson, Blake and Homosexuality (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 135.
30. Julia Ward Howe, The Battle Hymn of the Republic; Vision of the Last Judgment, E562.
1. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 359, 351; Jerusalem 75.10–17, E230–31, and 72.17–20, E226.
2. Jerusalem 6.2–7.8, E148–49.
3. Jerusalem 52, E200; on the figure of the double, see Edward J. Rose, “Blake and the Double: The Spectre as Doppelgänger,” Colby Library Quarterly 2 (1977), 127–39.
4. Jerusalem 10.51–55, E153–54.
5. Jerusalem 8.21–22, 39–40, E151, and 10.17–24, E153.
6. My Spectre around me night and day, E475.
7. Four Zoas 117.7–13, E386.
8. Four Zoas 119.4–13, 21–23, E388, and 136.21–22, E404.
9. Milton 42.36–43.1, E144; Robert N. Essick, “Jerusalem and Blake’s Final Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 251.
10. Ronald Britton, “The Preacher, the Poet, and the Psychoanalyst,” in Acquainted with the Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Imagination, ed. Hamish Canham and Carole Satyamurti (London: Karnac, 2003), 125–26.
11. Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 27; Britton, “Preacher,” 130. Peter Otto assembles a remarkable mini-anthology of quotations from a long series of critics who echo Frye: Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 9–11.
12. Jerusalem 53.15–19, E203, and 72, E227.
13. Jerusalem 98.28–29, E257, and 36.58–60, E183.
14. John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977): 138. Harvey refers to this image as “Stonehenge,” which it is not.
15. Descriptive Catalogue, E542; Jerusalem 27, E171, and 47.7–11, E196. See Peter F. Fisher, “Blake and the Druids,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (1959): 569–612.
16. Jerusalem 66.2–9, E218; see Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 71–72.
17. My comments are indebted to Illuminated Blake, 379, and to Morton Paley, Blake Trust, 1:297.
18. William Stukeley, Abury: A Temple of the British Druids, with Some Others, Described (1743), 54; Europe 10.23, E63.
19. W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 181.
20. Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction, 217.
1. Four Zoas 90.36, E370; Blake Records, 137, 140.
2. Blake Records, xxvi–xxvii; Aileen Ward, “William Blake and the Hagiographers,” in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl (New York: AMS, 1994), 16–17. “Intense! naked!” is quoted from America 4.8, E53.
3. Gilchrist, 60.
4. Notebook, E473–75.
5. E469, E516; Blake Records, 290.
6. Visions 8.13, E51.
7. E470.
8. Visions iii, E45. Recent feminist critics have suspected more explicit allusions to the clitoris, to multiple orgasm, and to lesbian sex: Anne K. Mellor, “Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995): 366; Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997): 75; Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly, eds., Queer Blake (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Introduction, 12.
9. Visions 1.1–13, E45–46; see David Worrall, “William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1975), 402.
10. Visions 1.16–25, E46; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1975), 167.
11. Visions 5.3–6, 3.16–19, 7.16, E45–50.
12. Visions 7.23–29, E50; Jerusalem 69.15–17, E223; Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, 82.
13. Visions 2.11–20, E46.
14. Christopher Frayling, “Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous,” in Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Martin Myrone (London: Tate, 2006), 13.
15. Darwin is quoted by Nelson Hilton, “An Original Story,” in Unnam’d Forms: Blake and Textuality, ed. Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 74. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion, 70, quotes Fuseli’s aphorism.
16. Visions 2.35–36, E47; Europe 10.28–29, E64.
17. Gilchrist, 334; Blake Records, 447.
18. Four Zoas 34.63–65, E324.
19. Paradise Lost 4.698–711.
20. Paradise Lost 4.505–11; Rossetti, supplement to Gilchrist, 426.
21. My comments are indebted to David Wagenknecht, Blake’s Night: William Blake and the Idea of Pastoral (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 310; Pamela Dunbar, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Poetry of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 56–60; and Bette Charlene Werner, Blake’s Vision of the Poetry of Milton (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1986), 71–72. I also repeat some thoughts from my Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 223–25.
22. Urizen 20.2–25, E80; François, duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, no. 324, trans. Leonard Tan-cock (London: Penguin, 1959), 79.
23. Four Zoas 60.6–12, 19–22, E340–41; Paradise Lost 6.328–30.
24. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, trans. Helen Zimmern (New York: Modern Library, 1954), aphorism 168, p. 470; Europe iii.1, 5–6, E60; Proverbs 9:17. There are fourteen surviving copies of Europe; no one knows why the Prologue was omitted from twelve of them.
25. E467; Jerusalem 96.5–6, E361.
26. See Jacques Lacarrière, Les Gnostiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 99–100.
27. Jerusalem 44.33–37, E193–94.
28. Jerusalem 69.43–44, E223. Here is one attempt to explain the “cominglings”: “The senses as we conceive them drop out to be replaced by faculties, which, as separate entities, themselves drop out to be replaced by a fourfold organ of imagination, the body of Albion.” Thomas Frosch, The Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 29.
29. Sigmund Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in the Erotic Life,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 68.
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, book 12, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel Raymond et al., vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959), 644; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.4.6.
2. See Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), ch. 4, “The Emblem.”
3. For the Sexes, E268; Tiriel 8.11, E285; also Europe 5.6, E62; Jerusalem 30.57, E177. The complete series of emblems is reproduced in E259–67.
4. E268.
5. Jerusalem 93.8, E253; Genesis 30:14–16; John Donne, “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” line 2.
6. E269.
7. To Tirzah, E30; Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, line 207; John 2:4. David Erdman thinks To Tirzah was added to the Songs in 1803 (E800), and Andrew Lincoln agrees, Blake Trust, 2:18n. Joseph Viscomi argues that it may have been as early as 1795: Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 238–39.
8. Jerusalem 96.23–28, E256.
9. Jerusalem 30.23–26, E176; Helen P. Bruder, William Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Macmillan, 1997), 182, 36, 3. Elsewhere Bruder surveys recent studies and shows that the ambiguity of Blake’s imagery has permitted critics to detect every possible attitude, pro and con, toward sex and gender: “Blake and Gender Studies,” in Palgrave Advances in William Blake Studies, ed. Nicolas M. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 132–66.
10. Alicia Ostriker, “Desire Gratified and Ungratified: William Blake and Sexuality,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Winter 1982–83), 156–65; annotations to Lavater, E596; Milton 36.31, E137. See Susan Fox, “The Female as Metaphor in William Blake’s Poetry,” in Essential Articles for the Study of William Blake, 1970–1984, ed. Nelson Hilton (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986), 15–32, and Leo Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 75–90.
11. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 73; Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), x.
12. Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:157.
13. Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), xii.
14. My Spectre around me night and day, E475–77. The sequence of stanzas in this poem is far from certain; I follow Erdman’s version.
15. Four Zoas 35.11–12, E325.
16. Jerusalem 64.12–17, E215; I follow W. H. Stevenson’s explanation of Arthur: Blake: The Complete Poems (London: Pearson Longman, 2007), 804. Enion’s song of experience is quoted at the end of chapter 4, page 95, above.
17. Jerusalem 68.10–15, 63–68, E221–22; David Fuller, Blake’s Heroic Argument (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 205.
18. Four Zoas 26.5–13, E317; Brenda Webster, Blake’s Prophetic Psychology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 213–14.
19. Gilchrist, 348; Blake Records, 57.
20. E689. The tradition of detecting negative implications in Blake’s Dante illustrations was inaugurated by Albert Roe in Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953).
21. Dante, Purgatorio, 29:91–96, 100–102, 106–14, 121–26 in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Courtney Langdon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 345–47.
22. Dante, Purgatorio, 30:31–33, in Langdon, Divine Comedy, 353. Nelson Hilton gives an illuminating interpretation of various meanings of the vortex: Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), ch. 10.
23. Four Zoas 122.15–20, E391; Jerusalem 99.1–5, E258–59.
24. Robert N. Essick, “Blake and the Production of Meaning,” in Blake in the Nineties, ed. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 13. On Blake’s use of gold and silver, see Blake Trust, 1:15–16.
25. I follow Illuminated Blake, 282–83, and Blake Trust, 1:131–32.
26. Jerusalem 86.1–10, E244.
27. Illuminated Blake, 325; Connolly, William Blake and the Body, 43. My comments are indebted also to Illuminated Blake, 325, and Blake Trust, 1:181.
28. Tintern Abbey, lines 123–24; annotations to Wordsworth, E665–67; Blake Records, 430. M. H. Abrams’s study is Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971).
29. Four Zoas 136.35–36, E404–5.
30. Milton 32.50–63, E131.
31. Milton 31.28–38, E130–31. On “nature” as a construct, see Kevin Hutchins, Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
32. Shakespeare, sonnet 29; Wordsworth, The Prelude 10.725–27 (1805 version).
33. Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, in Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1955), 194.
1. All Religions Are One, E1–2.
2. Marriage 11, E38; Everlasting Gospel, E520; Four Zoas 100.10, E372.
3. Laocoön, E274; David V. Erdman, “‘Terrible Blake in His Pride’: An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 336; Everlasting Gospel, E524.
4. Marriage, E37; annotations to Watson, E614.
5. Daniel 7:9; J. T. Smith, Blake Records, 620.
6. Proverbs 8:27; Paradise Lost 7.224–31.
7. Urizen 20.33–41, E80–81.
8. E516.
9. Voltaire, Candide ch. 25.
10. Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 242.
11. Isaiah 33:6.
12. “Let the brothels of Paris be opened,” E499; Morris Eaves, “The Title-Page of The Book of Urizen,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 225–30. Erdman makes the suggestion about the book of nature: Illuminated Blake, 183.
13. Genesis 1:10–31; Urizen 4.10–11, 23, E71–72.
14. Gilchrist, 130–31; G. E. Bentley, Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of William Blake’s Writings in Illuminated Printing, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 176. The “eternal Now” is in the Lavater annotations, E592.
15. Urizen 4.24–40, E72; Ephesians 4:4–6; Galatians 3:13; Isaac Watts, The Faithfulness of God in the Promises, quoted by John Beer, William Blake: A Literary Life (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9.
16. Urizen 23.23–27, E81; Jean H. Hagstrum, William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 106. The tears are not visible in all copies of the poem.
17. The Human Abstract, E27; Four Zoas 80.9–13, 27, E355–56. Urizen’s first line is repeated in Jerusalem 44.30, E193; see David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 368–69. On the larger relevance of this passage, see Nicholas Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20–21.
18. Blake’s debt to Alexander Geddes, who was reporting the work of the Lutheran theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, is traced by Jerome J. McGann, “The Idea of an Indeterminate Text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr. Alexander Geddes,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986), 303–24. The “indeterminate” in McGann’s title refers to a suggestion that Blake may have reshuffled the sequence of plates in The Book of Urizen so as to imitate what happens when disparate elements get recombined.
19. Blake Records, 701.
20. Zechariah 4:10; Four Zoas 115.50, E381. For details on the Seven Eyes, see S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 388–89, and individual entries in Damon’s Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (reprint ed., Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979; orig. publ. Brown University Press, 1965). Northrop Frye also gives a helpful account: Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 128–34.
21. Hagstrum, Blake: Poet and Painter, 127.
22. Christopher Heppner, Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 49–53. On the Boreas picture, see C. H. Collins Baker, “The Sources of Blake’s Pictorial Expression,” in The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics, ed. Robert N. Essick (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1973), 124–26.
23. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1995), 312.
24. Milton 29.64–65, E128; Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).
25. Blake Records, 52n; Jerusalem 48.9–11, E196; Job 1:1, 11–12, 42:12.
26. Blake Records, 439; John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 144. Full details of the exacting process of engraving and printing are given by Michael Phillips, “The Printing of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job,” Print Quarterly 22 (2005), 138–59.
27. On the Hebrew, see Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43.
28. Blake Records, 652.
29. Job 19:23–27.
30. Ben F. Nelms has studied in detail “Text and Design in Illustrations of the Book of Job,” in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 336–58.
31. Revelation 15:4; Marriage 27, E45; Visions 8.10, E51; America 8.13, E54; Four Zoas 34.80, E324; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 28; Four Zoas 3, E300, quoting Ephesians 6:12.
32. E269; Isaiah 14:12.
33. Marriage 4, E34; see Morton D. Paley, “The Figure of the Garment in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on The Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, ed. Stuart Curran and Joseph Anthony Wittreich Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 119–39.
34. For the Sexes, E269; Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–45), final line of book 8; Blake Records, 427.
35. My comments are indebted to Nelson Hilton, Literal Imagination: Blake’s Vision of Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 166, and to Morton D. Paley, The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17–18.
36. Blake to Thomas Butts, Nov. 22, 1802, E720.
37. Blake Records, 421.
38. Blake Records, 453; Jerusalem 35.25–26, E181; For the Sexes, E259.
39. Four Zoas 106.6, E379; “giving himself for the nations” is at E671. My comments are indebted to Illuminated Blake, 355; W. J. T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 210; John E. Grant, “Jesus and the Powers That Be in Blake’s Designs for Young’s Night Thoughts,” in Blake and His Bibles, ed. David V. Erdman (West Cornwall, CT: Locustv Hill, 1990), 105–7; and Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 113–18.
40. Blake to Butts, Apr. 25, 1803, E728; Jerusalem 97.5–6, E256.
41. John Harvey, “Blake’s Art,” Cambridge Quarterly 7 (1977), 136; Morton Paley, Blake Trust, 1:296, 15.
42. Tom Hayes, “William Blake’s Androgynous Ego-Ideal,” ELH 71 (2004), 156; Susanne Sklar, Blake’s Jerusalem as Visionary Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 248, quoting Jerusalem 69.24, 79.44, E223, 235.
43. Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 81; Blake Records, 392; Luke 15:20–24.
1. “Blake’s London,” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/william-blake/william-blakes-london.
2. Blake to William Hayley, Dec. 4, 1804, E758; notebook memoranda, E694.
3. Jerusalem 17.59–63, E162.
4. Blake Records, 320.
5. Jerusalem 3, E145; Paley, Blake Trust, 1:12. On this remarkable plate, see Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 339; Jerome J. McGann, Towards a Literature of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 11–12, 37; and Tristanne J. Connolly, William Blake and the Body (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–12.
6. Blake Records, 753; on the neighborhood, see Angus Whitehead, “‘Humble but Respectable’: Recovering the Neighbourhood Surrounding William and Catherine Blake’s Last Residence, No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, c. 1820–27,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80 (2011), 858–79.
7. Blake Records, 387.
8. Blake Records, 402.
9. Gilchrist, 319, 322; Blake Records, 405, 680.
10. Blake Records, 438; Blake to John Linnell, Aug. 1, 1826, E780. On the illnesses, see Aileen Ward, “William Blake and the Hagiographers,” in Biography and Source Studies, ed. Frederick R. Karl, vol. 1 (New York: AMS, 1994), 1–24; and Lane Robson and Joseph Viscomi, “Blake’s Death,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Summer 1996), 36–49.
11. Blake Records, 453; Blake to George Cumberland, Apr. 12, 1827, E783; William Upcott’s album, E698.
12. E269.
13. Blake Records, 269.
14. “And his legs carried it like a long fork,” E504.
15. Blake Records, 682, 459, 464. On the unlikelihood that Blake sang on his deathbed, see the articles cited in n. 10, above.
16. Blake Records, 493.
17. Blake Records, 559, 731–32; Marriage 13, E39.
18. Gilchrist, 384–85.
19. Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 81; Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 38; T. S. Eliot, “Blake,” in The Sacred Wood, 6th ed. (London: Methuen, 1948), 151, 156–58.
20. Michael Welland, Sand: The Never-Ending Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), xiii.
21. Descriptive Catalogue, E550; Vision of the Last Judgment, E566; Marriage 6–7, E35.