Plate from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, depicting Nebuchadnezzar. The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. The book is written in prose, except for the opening " Argument" and the "Song of Liberty". Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral strictures and his Manichaean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order hence, a marriage of heaven and hell. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake in several places in the Marriage.
The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell, published in Latin 33 years earlier. The work was composed between 17, in the period of radical ferment and political conflict during the French Revolution. He also claims that Milton's Satan was truly his Messiah. William Blake claims that John Milton was a true poet and his epic poem Paradise Lost was "of the Devil's party without knowing it". It opens with an introduction of a short poem entitled "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air". The plates were then coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets from etched plates containing prose, poetry, and illustrations. It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake.
The title page of the book, copy D, held by the Library of Congress
0 kommentar(er)
