In a controversial examination of the conceptual bases of Blake's myth, Leopold Damrosch argues that his poems contain fundamental contradictions, but that this fact docs not imply philosophical or artistic failure. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Over 15 years in the making, an unprecedented one-volume reference work. Many of today's students and teachers of literature, lacking a familiarity with the Bible, are largely ignorant of how Biblical tradition has influenced and infused English literature through the centuries. An invaluable research tool. Contains nearly 800 encyclopedic articles written by a distinguished international roster of 190 contributors. Three detailed annotated bibliographies. Cross-references throughout.

It demonstrates that Blake's protests are directed to laws based on obligation, which assume that all human persons are essentially alike, while Blake's advocacy of forgiveness among human beings assumes an ethics of character based on the cultivation of virtues.

This book provides compelling new readings of William Blake’s poetry and art, including the first sustained account of his visionary paintings of Pitt and Nelson. It focuses on the recurrent motif of apotheosis, both as a figure of political authority to be demystified but also as an image of utopian possibility. It reevaluates Blake’s relationship to Enlightenment thought, myth, religion, and politics, from The French Revolution to Jerusalem and The Laocoön. The book combines careful attention to cultural and historical contexts with close readings of the texts and designs, providing an innovative account of Blake’s creative transformations of Enlightenment, classical, and Christian thought.

William Blake and the Myths of Britain is the first full-length study of Blake's use of British mythology and history. From Atlantis to the Deists of the Napoleonic Wars, this book addresses why the eighteenth century saw a revival of interest in the legends of the British Isles and how Blake applied these in his extraordinary prophetic histories of the giant Albion, revitalising myths of the Druids and Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christ to Albion.

Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.

Explores Blake's esoteric and religious influences

William Blake is acknowledged as a poet of opposition and contradiction: a writer who, from Songs of Innocence and Experience to his last epic Jerusalem, ceaselessly explored the conflicts between limitation and possibility, reason and energy, torment and joy. But the contradictions within Blake's own 'visionary' poetics are less often considered. Throughout his work, Blake powerfully dramatises the energies and agonies of his own poetic labour.

William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. He believed that we live in the midst of Eternity here and now, and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. Following Blake’s life from beginning to end, acclaimed biographer Leo Damrosch draws extensively on Blake’s poems, his paintings, and his etchings and engravings to offer this generously illustrated account of Blake the man and his vision of our world. The author’s goal is to inspire the reader with the passion he has for his subject, achieving the imaginative response that Blake himself sought to excite. The book is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment, an invitation to appreciate Blake’s imaginative world and, in so doing, to open the doors of our perception.