‘Exuberance is Beauty’, one of the Proverbs of Hell in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), hereafter MHH, is an equation validated by the work itself. In it Blake combines an array of genres and tones; what results is an artistic creation that is vibrant with apocalyptic hope and contrarian life. Mainly composed in sharply witty and provocative prose, MHH consists of ‘An Argument’ (a poem in tautly cadenced free verse), ‘The voice of the Devil’, scintillatingly immoderate proverbs, and several memorable fancies mocking the ‘Memorable Relations’ told by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), a Swedish visionary whom Blake had once admired.1 It concludes with ‘A Song of Liberty’, written in the form of pseudo‐biblical verses. MHH recalls so‐called Lucianic or Menippean satire, typified by an inclusive medley of forms, and redeploys Swiftian techniques in places.2 But, as it leaps with verve from aphorism to fable, jousting with ‘All Bibles or sacred codes’ (4; references are to plate numbers), with Milton, Swedenborg, and the Authorized Version, MHH shapes, through the interplay of word and richly coloured image, a work that is uniquely itself.
Throughout, Blake mingles satirical and revolutionary notes. What gives MHH its electrifying charge of newnesss is a revolutionary readiness to think the unthinkable in moral, religious, political, and artistic terms, to reject and revalue tradition and orthodoxy. Blake is out to shock the meekly compliant believer. The new millennium ‘will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment’ (14), a statement belonging to a group of plates that the Norton editors gloss as commending ‘expanded sense perception’.3 The gloss is true, but Blake’s phrases honour and release a libidinal sexual energy, too, as his designs reveal with their bodies bathed in flames. An example is the sexually explicit frontispiece, featuring a ‘nude couple’ exchanging a ‘frankly erotic embrace’.4 Blake makes clear, with playful zest, that his own methods of printing are central to the dismissal of the notion that ‘man has a body distinct from his soul’. Blake will disprove this falsehood ‘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’ (14). Blakean printing methods, involving the acidic ‘melting’ of ‘surfaces’ and subsequent ‘displaying’ of the ‘infinite’, confer a positive value on ‘Hell’ and locate the ‘infinite’ in the actual seen anew, not in some misty beyond.
In a Memorable Fancy that follows this assertion, Blake finds himself ‘in a Printing house in Hell’ where he ‘saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation’ (15). The narrative that ensues describes five chambers in each of which some stage of the ‘method’ is carried out, culminating in the fifth chamber in which ‘Unnam’d forms’ ‘cast the metals into the expanse’ before they ‘took the forms of books’ (15). Punning on ‘formes’ as meaning both shapes (yet to be given a name) and a printer’s ‘forms’, the bed that holds the type,5 Blake fuses the material conditions of his individual mode of book production and the ways in which ‘the doors of perception’ might be cleansed (14). He produces a Romantic version of Spenser’s Cave of Mammon, revalued so as to suggest an imaginative redemption.6 The Memorable Fancy does not preach a doctrine; instead, ‘Numerous intriguing combinations and permutations demand the reader’s mental energy’.7
The work’s central proposition, ‘Without Contraries is no progression’, leads Blake to redefine Good and Evil as, respectively, ‘the passive that obeys Reason’ and ‘the active springing from Energy’ (3). Living with and accepting ‘Contraries’ is a buoyant but troubled ideal in the work: buoyant because Blake convincingly embodies in his sharp but good‐humoured sallies the notion that creativity thrives on the ‘Opposition’ that is ‘True Friendship’ (20);8 troubled because one side of the paired contraries – namely the ‘active’ or ‘Evil’ – continually enjoys the rhetorical upper hand in the work. Blake has little time for ‘the passive that obeys Reason’. What, then, does Blake understand by the term ‘Contraries’? Martin K. Nurmi distinguishes Blake’s idea of contraries from apparent parallels in Hegelian thought. Whereas Hegel sees thesis and antithesis as a dialectic continually resolved by a progression of syntheses, Blake’s ‘only “progression” … is that of continued creativeness’.9 In its ideal form, a ‘Contrary’ is a positive, complementary coupling ‘between’, as the idea is exemplified by Nurmi, ‘the creative imagination and the ordering reason, or between idea and form’.10
At points in MHH, however, ‘Contraries’ include as one term of a binary pair an attitude that Blake rejects. In the voice of the Devil passage, as Harold Bloom notes, contraries ‘have ceased strictly to be contraries, for Blake declares one set to be error and the other to be true’.11 The Devil’s propositions do not so much exist in creative tension with dualistic orthodoxy as seek to overthrow it. The errors castigated by the Devil are threefold: that human beings consist of ‘a Body & a Soul’, that Good comes from the latter, Evil from the former, and ‘That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies’. ‘But’, asserts Blake, assuming a diabolic voice hard to distinguish from his own, ‘the following Contraries to these are True’, namely that ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul’, that ‘Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’, and that ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’ (4).
A partial solution to the conundrum is that Blake’s credal trinity of ‘Contraries’ contain ‘Contraries’ within themselves, not simply in their relationship to that which they critique. The interplay between energy and reason, for example, will dominate Blake’s poetic practice for many years, undergoing sombre complications in the major prophetic books. The emergence of Urizen, whose name suggests ‘Your reason’ or ‘horizon’, as a major anti‐hero in works such as The Book of Urizen and Milton bears witness to Blake’s wrestle with the problem posed by reason. Reason, at its best, supplies the necessary ‘bound or “outward circumference” of Energy’ (4), and Blake himself uses ‘Reason’ in MHH to anatomize what is wrong with the erroneous reasonings enshrined in ‘sacred codes’. Possibly the closest that the poem comes to adumbrating a genuine ‘Contrary’ is this coupling of Energy and Reason, rephrased in plate 16 as the dynamic tension between ‘the Prolific’ and ‘the Devourer’, the former initially identified with creative ‘Giants’, the latter with cunningly restraining agents. Yet when he gives the ‘two classes of men’ their titles of Prolific and Devourer, Blake gives a role to the latter class that is not merely negative; the active receptivity of the Devourer is vital for the two classes to enjoy the productive enmity which is Blake’s notion of ‘True Friendship’.
From the opening ‘Argument’, Blake’s own combination of energy and reason is exhilaratingly present. The poem tells an elliptical fable in which the ‘just man’ finds himself mimicked by the ‘villain’, who usurps the domain of the just man, until a present state is reached in which anger and rage are the only legitimate forms of expressing authentic selfhood. Yet though Blake finds a typically obscure, self‐mythologized other in the ‘Rintrah’, a figure of the poet‐prophet in the wilderness, who begins and ends the poem as he ‘roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air’ (2), his own tone is coolly playful rather than fiery. It is his ideological enemy and subsequent friend, the Angel, who turns various colours before ‘mastering himself’ as a result of hearing a very Blakean Devil assert that ‘The worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men, … for there is no other God’ (22–3). The way in which this Memorable Fancy concludes characterizes Blake’s creative insouciance in the work; the Angel, after being persuaded by the Devil that ‘Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules’, embraced fire, ‘was consumed and arose as Elijah’. Becoming Blake’s ‘particular friend’, he and the author read ‘the Bible together in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well’. With high good humour, Blake dominates the Angel and patronizes the ‘world’ – then he intensifies his provocation: ‘I have also: The Bible of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no’ (24). In little, the tones here establish MHH as a visionary, revolutionary performance, not, for all its acuteness of thought, a philosophical treatise.
MHH mounts a challenge to religious systems, retelling in trenchant fashion a revolutionary story that Shelley will also narrate in A Defence of Poetry in which he praises poets such as Dante and Milton who ‘have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form’;12 ‘modern mythology’ would appear, in context, to be Christianity. It seeks, as the editors of the Early Illuminated Books point out, a ‘redirection of attention from religion, which is cast as derivative, external, and oppressive, to art, cast as original, internal, and liberating’.13 A series of plates culminating in Blake’s account of his own creative activity (discussed earlier) brings this theme fully to the fore. In plate 11 he mordantly describes the process by which the imaginings of ‘The ancient Poets’ were turned into ‘a system’ presided over by a ‘Priesthood’. Initially poets ‘animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses’. But this originating impulse was subsequently repressed until ‘men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast’. This formulation does not deny deity, but it insists that Gods were created by and reside within human beings. Then in an entertaining yet strangely unsettling Memorable Fancy, Ezekiel presents himself as an early believer in ‘the Poetic Genius (as you now call it)’ (12). The passage is unsettling because Ezekiel, answering Blake’s question about the efficacy of a ‘firm perswasion’ (12), comes perilously close to proving such efficacy through the fact that ‘we so loved our God, that we cursed in his name all the deities of surrounding nations’ (13). Persuasion sounds dangerously close to conquest here. Blake, one senses, claims for Hebrew religion a prophetic, poetic quality, yet Ezekiel’s talk of consequent ‘subjection’ seems momentarily to deconstruct itself. Brio and reckless fun are part of the mixture, and Blake does not mind subjecting his own persuasions to the possibility of critique. It is in the following passage, discussed above, that he makes clear his use of the ‘infernal method’ of printing, as if to state his own role as a poet capable of announcing, even bringing about, the new millennium: ‘The ancient tradition’, Blake writes as though he were coming to fulfil it, ‘that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell’ (14).
At such moments Blake seems to voice the revolutionary energies of his age. He does so in a work that is sui generis, but has a swift, sharply etched sense of purpose. Error after error is exposed; possibilities of redemption assert themselves in the substance and manner of the work’s impudent riposte to orthodoxy. The marriage imagined in the title and suggested by MHH is very much on hell’s terms.14 In one of the period’s major rewritings of Paradise Lost, Blake claims Milton as author, against his conscious will, of a subversive epic that shows the folly of attempts to ‘restrain desire’ (5). Blake mocks Milton’s depiction of God, adding a rider, after which Milton criticism would never be quite the same: ‘Note. 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 Devil’s party without knowing it’ (6). Impishly inflected with condescension, the praise insists that Milton should be read on Blake’s terms. Milton, indeed, is caught up in the irresistible but pointed flow of a work that reaches its triumphant climax in ‘A Song of Liberty’ (and Chorus) with its anti‐imperialist assertion that ‘Empire is no more!’ and its ontological belief that ‘every thing that lives is Holy’ (27).
Blake would rarely sound so rapturously if open‐mindedly sure again. In The Book of Urizen (1794) the outlook is almost unmitigatedly bleak. The poem is a parody of a sacred text in word and design. In the frontispiece, Urizen, white‐bearded, eyes closed, copies with both hands into books on each side; behind him are two tablets of stone. The image mocks the Mosaic law, commandments written on tablets of stone; but it also incriminates the process of writing itself, as if to suggest a connection between Urizen and his creator. Fundamental to this first book of the ‘Bible of Hell’ unnervingly promised in MHH, set out in double columns that mimic the traditional way in which the Bible is printed, is the idea that creation involves a fall. Whereas creation in Genesis is a work of wonder, benignly approved by its all‐powerful author (see Genesis 1:31), creation in The Book of Urizen involves a continual sundering, self‐division, and falling away from an original plenitude. Blake’s techniques for rendering this tearing apart include short, tersely phrased lines gathered together in convoluted syntaxes, mirroring the confusion and chaos at the heart of every attempt to define, to restrain, to bound. Urizen is ‘A self‐contemplating shadow, / In enormous labours occupied’ (3: 21–2), determined to separate himself from the ‘Eternals’, at whose behest Blake claims to write (see 2: 5). What results is a terrifying update of Genesis and Paradise Lost. Urizen sees himself in heroic terms, a cross between Milton’s God and Satan, yet he is at one with what his confused pronouncements suggest that he sees himself as confronting, namely ‘A wide world of solid obstruction’ (4: 23).
Los, whose role as blacksmith‐artist and surrogate of Blake is greatly expanded in later works such as and especially The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, seeks to give boundaries to Urizen’s collapse into formlessness. Yet the imposition of form leads to a description of the making of the human body, and subsequently the division into male and female, that suggests, from the Eternals’ perspective, and indeed Blake’s, catastrophe, anguish, and woe. Los and his partner or Emanation, in Blake’s word, Enitharmon, have a child, Orc, whom they chain ‘to the rock / With the Chain of Jealousy / Beneath Urizen’s deathful shadow’ (20: 23–4). The relentless unfolding of ‘dark visions of torments’ (2: 7) gives the work a nightmarish force, one apparent in some of the full‐length designs, full of foreboding and terror, of cramped, constricted figures, as though the creation were viewed as an aberration, and everything that lived in a Urizenic universe was unholy.
Orc’s chaining marks the inauguration of what Blake critics refer to as the ‘Orc cycle’, the process by which Urizenic repression gives rise to Orc’s rebellion in an endless cycle that bears on the progress of the French Revolution and the repression of radical ideas in Britain during the 1790s.15 The only positive that emerges from The Book of Urizen is the candour, audacity, and artistic brilliance of the work itself. Or, to put it another way, Blake tests and validates the strength of ‘mind‐forg’d manacles’ (‘London’, 8), yet the ferocity of his delineation creates a wish that the poet’s ‘swift winged words’ (2: 6) will propel a breakthrough. Hints of such a breakthrough come at the joyous endings of the major prophetic books, as in the gravely celebratory chant at the close of Jerusalem where the poet writes of ‘All Human Forms identified’ (99). There, the long line flows, not with exhaustion, but with delight in a truly human ‘living going forth & returning’. It makes clear that Blake’s pursuit of what in his most famous lyric he calls ‘Mental Fight’ (Milton 1: 13) aims at a transvaluation of the present.
Yet it remains the case that Blake is often at his poetically finest when confronting all that opposes his will to affirm. Above all, he wishes to break from temporal cycles without rejecting the world in which human beings live. ‘The Mental Traveller’, a lyric from the so‐called Pickering manuscript, presents, in a ballad of twenty‐six quatrains, a seemingly inexorable process of sexual warfare, carried out between the generations: a ‘Woman Old’ (10) binds a young boy; when he grows up she ‘grows young’ (20) and he ‘binds her down for his delight’ (24). As the youth grows old he looks after ‘A little female Babe’ (44), who seems to offer comfort and beauty, yet the ‘fire’ of which she is made is disquietingly ‘solid’ (45), indicating that ‘hers is not the free, exuberant flow of Energy’.16 The grim cycle repeats itself until the Orc‐like young man reappears only for the ‘Woman Old’ (102) once more to nail ‘him down upon the Rock’ (103). ‘And all is done’, the balladeer signs off, with a bitter flourish, ‘as I have told’ (104). Throughout, the poem manages, especially through repeated rhyme sounds (on the word ‘old’) and a controlled, strong rhythmic beat, to convey the sense of a cycle marked by stages and station, but always heading back inexorably to its starting point.
The poem ‘pivots upon two births’ as Morton Paley notes,17 that of the boy at the start and the female babe halfway through, and two cycles result. The theme of the first cycle is the fate of energy at the hands of the world that the boy enters (hence the echoes of Christ’s crucifixion); the theme of the second cycle spins round the entrance of a female counterpart. Fallenness in Blake often shows itself through failures in relationships between men and women; sexual identity is at the very heart, for Blake, of human desire. Over and over in the poem, remorselessly conveyed through the conjunction ‘till,’ possible episodes of happiness turn out to be illusory, leading, at best, into ‘Labyrinths of wayward Love’ (83) and, at worst, into the violent impulse to dominate and repress signalled by the ending’s brutally matter‐of‐fact return to the crucifixion motif. But the poem remains a masterpiece, possibly Blake’s greatest song of experience.
The three poems show how for Blake the poet’s role was, respectively, energizing, conflicted, near‐tragic. In MHH, enacting his belief that ‘All deities reside in the human breast’, he employs a satirical‐cum‐visionary voice to unleash beautifully exuberant heterodoxies; in The Book of Urizen, he shows the poet as one who believes with Thomas Hardy (in ‘In Tenebris II’) that ‘if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst’ (14);18 in ‘The Mental Traveller’, the speaker he visits as from another cosmos, almost nonchalantly outraged by ‘such dreadful things / As cold Earth wanderers never knew’ (3–4), but reminding us always that ‘the Eye altering alters all’ (62). Though it carries a pessimistic freight in the poem, it reminds us, implicitly, as Blake’s work often does, that visionary poetry can alter our outlook; can ‘open the Immortal Eyes / Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity / Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination’, as he put it in Jerusalem (5: 18–20). Fittingly, that last line, in true Blakean fashion, identifies ‘God’ with the ‘Human Imagination’.