William Blake's prophetic books

Information about William Blake's prophetic books

The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake are a series of difficult and obscure poetic works. While Blake worked as a commercial illustrator, these books were ones that he produced, with his own engravings, as an extended and largely private project. The French Revolution from 1791 is not illustrated, and is usually excluded from the list of prophetic books.

In them he elaborated, with some false starts, a personal invented mythology (mythopoeia). The mythopoeia is largely Biblical in inspiration; apart from that, it has been extensively debated for both its political and religious content. David V. Erdman[1] considers that the separation from the corpus of The French Revolution removes a key to the symbolism used by Blake.

The prophetic books have at times in the past been dismissed as lacking in good sense. This position is now rarely to be met with in scholars of English literature, Blake having been one of the major beneficiaries of critical fashion during the twentieth century. Northrop Frye, and following him Harold Bloom, have suggested that the difficulty of reading Blake's prophetic works can be overcome, and that the dismissive 'mystical' applied to them is largely an obfuscation. 'Mystical' as to the poetic language has been indeed the equivalent of 'visionary' applied to the engravings.

Since the prophetic books were not highly regarded, where Blake's very direct lyric poems were considered unproblematic, they had a tortuous publication history.

The Continental prophecies

The cycle of Continental prophecies comprises America a Prophecy (1793), Europe a Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los (1795), which is made up of sections Africa and Asia.

America a Prophecy is divided into a Preludium (which is part of the Orc myth) and A Prophecy, which has obvious political content devolving from the American Revolution. The first line of A Prophecy is repeated as the final line of Africa. On the other hand, Europe a Prophecy has an unnamed introductory section, a Preludium with Orc and Enitharmon, and A Prophecy with connections to the contemporary situation of wartime Europe. The Asia section of The Song of Los links onto the end of Europe a Prophecy (via the word 'howl').

The books

See also

Notes

1. ^ Blake: Prophet Against Empire (third edition 1977), p.165.
Motto
Dieu et mon droit   (French)
"God and my right"
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No official anthem specific to England — the anthem of the United Kingdom is "God Save the Queen".
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William Blake

William Blake in an 1807 portrait by Thomas Phillips.
Born: November 28, 1757
London, England
Died: August 12, 1827
London, England
Occupation: Poet, Painter, Printmaker William Blake
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The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology (mythopoeia), in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age.
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Mythopoeia (Greek for myth-making) is a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional mythology was created by the author or director. The word mythopoeia and description was coined and developed by J.R.R. Tolkien in the 1930's.
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The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe
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twentieth century of the Common Era began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000, according to the Gregorian calendar. Some historians consider the era from about 1914 to 1991 to be the Short Twentieth Century.
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Herman Northrop Frye, CC, MA (Oxon), DD, D.Litt., FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991), a Canadian, was one of the most distinguished literary critics and literary theorists of the twentieth century.
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Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, Literary Critic
Born:
New York City
Occupation: literary and cultural critic
Literary movement: Romanticism, Deconstructionism, Aestheticism
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Mysticism (from the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) "an initiate" (of the Eleusinian Mysteries, μυστήρια (mysteria) meaning "initiation"[1]
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Narrowly, a visionary is one who experiences a supernatural vision or apparition.

By extension, visionary came to mean also a person with a clear, distinctive and specific (in some details) vision of the future, usually connected with advances in technology or political
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Lyric poetry refers to either poetry that has the form and musical quality of a song, or a usually short poem that expresses personal feelings, which may or may not be set to music.
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Orc (a proper name) is one of the characters in the complex mythology of William Blake. Unlike the medieval sea beast, or Tolkien's humanoid monster, his Orc is a positive figure, the embodiment of creative passion and energy, and stands opposed to Urizen, the embodiment of
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Enitharmon is a major female character in William Blake's mythology, playing a main part in some of his Blake's prophetic books.

She is, but at a remove, an aspect of the male Urthona, one of the Four Zoas. She is in fact the 'emanation' of Los, also male.
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Tiriel is the eponymous hero of a poem by William Blake, the first in a series of his so-called 'prophetic books'. Tiriel was a former king of the West, son of Har and Heva, brother of wild Ijim and enslaved Zazel, husband of dying Myratana, and father of 130 sons with the oldest
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The Book of Thel is a poem by William Blake, dated 1789 and probably worked on in the period 1788 to 1790. It is illustrated by his own plates, and is relatively short and easy to understand, compared to his later prophetic books. The metre is a fourteen-syllable line.
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Europe a Prophecy is a 1794 prophetic book by English poet and illustrator William Blake.

It is engraved on 18 plates, and survives in just nine known copies.[1] It followed America a Prophecy of 1793.
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Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a 1793 poem by William Blake, produced as a book with his own illustrations. It is a short and early example of his prophetic books, and a sequel of sorts to The Book of Thel.
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The Book of Urizen is one of the major prophetic books of the English poet William Blake. The First Book of Urizen was published in 1794, illustrated by Blake's own plates. It takes its name from the Urizen character in Blake's mythology.
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The Book of Ahania is one of the English poet William Blake's prophetic books. It was published in 1795, illustrated by Blake's own plates.

The poem of the book consists of six chapters.
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