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Table of Contents
Preface
9. Hell
10. Purgatory
11. Heaven
Conclusion
Chapter Notes
References
List of Names and Terms
Preface
Dear Sir
I am still far from recoverd & dare not get out in the
cold air. Yet I lose nothing by it Dante goes on the
better which is all I care aboutWilliam Blake1
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or
the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to
fulfill them.Matthew 5:17
No thing can become manifest to itself without
oppositionJacob Boehme2
part from his theological principle that God and man are not
divided. Whereas Dante accepts the traditional Christian view
that limited human reason is inadequate to understand God,
and that human language lacks the power to describe Heaven,
Blake sees such an admission as an unnecessary falling-short.
The true prophet, for Blake, is a poet who makes God
manifest, either in words or in pictures. Blake rejects Dantes
repeated claims that human art is inadequate to show Gods
full majesty and works to realize in fullness the message that
the Italian poet found impossible to convey.
Earlier interpretations of Blakes Dante pictures, following
Roes analysis, saw the entire series as an attempt to show
that the Comedy is false and that Dantes theology was
inherently flawed. My book, on the other hand, will show that
there are major points of agreement between the two poets. It
is primarily in Dantes final inability to manifest God that
Blake sees a failure. Blakes illustrations, then, were not made
to abolish the Comedy, but to fulfill it.
I am of course aided in my task by the 60 years of
advancement in the field of Blake studies since Roes book
appeared. Even a much abbreviated list of those who have
published since 1953 would have to include Kathleen Raine,
George Mills Harper, and Desiree Hirst, who have revealed to
us the esoteric and Neoplatonic background of Blakes
thought. The British antinomian roots of his methods have
been unveiled by E.P. Thompson. W.J.T. Mitchell showed us
the inseparable nature of Blakes visual and verbal art, while
David Erdman revealed its politics. Kathleen Lundeen
brought Blake criticism up to date in regard to the world of
semiotics and language theory. A fascinating triad of books
has helped me understand the interplay of philosophy and
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good
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that while Blake had a copy of the Inferno in one hand and a
critical pencil in the other, he reserved nearly all of his rage
for the translator and not the author of the poem. And the note
quoted above does seem to indicate that Blake considered the
Italian poet to be among the ranks of the Men of Genius.
In addition to the marginal note from the Inferno, we have
two direct criticisms of Dante penciled onto the preparatory
sketches for Blakes illustrations. Since he began these works
with rough pencil lines, gradually bringing them to clarity and
obscuring most of the sketched lines when adding color, we
may assume that these notes were never intended to be part of
the final work. In those watercolors that appear to be finished,
no such words remain, nor is there any writing (beyond a
single title) in the seven engravings. The penciled criticisms
are significant, however. In the first, Blake declares that
Dante was inspired by nature, and not by imagination or the
Holy Spirit (E 689). The other note opposes the traditional
Christian idea that God could condemn anyone to Hell for an
eternity (E 690). Blakes God is a God of forgiveness.
For additional statements Blake made on the subject of Dante,
we rely on the testimony of Henry Crabb Robinson, a friend
of Blake, who recorded some of the artists opinions in a
diary. These journal entries were made from memory after the
fact, not during the conversation,3 though they ring true to
what we know of Blakes manner of thinking. Crabb
Robinson himself found Blakes speech obscure at times.
Still, the remarks he recorded in his journal, when considered
in the light of other findings, will help us to uncover Blakes
intentions. One of the most revealing diary entries on the
subject of Dante records Blakes opinion that Dante
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Classical Paganism
The early Age of Reason saw the birth of theories that
attempted to unify and explain vast sweeps of human
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Moral Self-Righteousness
The Old Testament, from Exodus to the second book of
Kings, contains at least as much violence as the Iliad or the
Aeneid. Indeed, the body count in scripture is probably higher
than in Greek epic. So it may come as some surprise that
Blake seems to associate bloodshed exclusively with classical
works and not with the Bible. Solving this puzzle will provide
us with a clearer view of the reasoning he uses to condemn
both Moses morality and Miltons.
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Rational Materialism
Near the end of Milton, the title character declares:
I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of
Inspiration
To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the
Saviour
To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration
To cast off Bacon. Locke & Newton from Albions
covering
To take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with
Imagination
To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration
[E 142]
The returned, corrected Milton has rejected the kind of
reasoned argument that Blake associates with his trio of
Enlightenment devils: Bacon, Locke, and Newton. A rational
explanation of the ways of God to man, Milton has
discovered, is a paradox, since God himself operates through
inspiration and not reason, Johannine revelation and not
Lockean memory. Rational Demonstration, of the type used
by scientists and plodding scholars, is here juxtaposed with
faith in Christ; memory is contrasted with inspiration. Blake
has no patience for those thinkers who rely only on
sense-experience for data, and construct reasonable systems
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The second error that Blake perceived derives from the first.
Dante makes extensive use of the inexpressibility topos, the
literary convention of describing something by saying that it
is indescribable. Over and over, especially in the Paradiso,
Dante can only write of the wonders of Heaven that they
cannot be written about, that they are far beyond the powers
of humans to understand or even, after his trip through
Heaven, to remember properly. The use of this topos was, for
Blake, in need of correction, if the Comedy was to become a
truly prophetic work. As I will describe in the third part of
this book, Blake believed that it is not only possible for us to
view God, but that art is precisely for that purpose. A true
poet, he writes, is one who makes God manifest for others.
Where Dante falls short, through his more traditional view of
God as above and beyond human perception, Blake will
kindly supply the missing vision, making the Comedy into the
living prophecy he knows it should be. Through his
collaboration, or dialectic, with Dante, the immanent nature
of God with us is shown to the viewer, who thereby
reenacts the trip of the pilgrim Dante, and achieves the goal
that readers have been falling short of since the fourteenth
century. As the final work of a dying visionary, one could
imagine nothing more triumphant.
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were left in an incomplete state. The artist gave far more time
and attention to the watercolor illustrations, which were not
mentioned in the contract with Linnell. Did Blake intend to
translate all of these paintings into prints? Its not possible to
say. Some of the more finished paintings are colored far
beyond what would be required for a preparatory sketch or
study. In comparison, the watercolor and ink sketches that he
had made some years earlier, as preparation to an engraved
set of illustrations for Robert Blairs The Grave, are pale, and
would have lost much less by being translated into black and
white. The Grave pictures were commissioned by a far more
businesslike publisher, however, and it appears that Blake
was enjoying the more relaxed relationship he had with
Linnell to create unique and beautiful paintings that were not
exactly a part of his contractual obligation.
Whether he chose to concentrate on watercolors as fully
colored studies, or whether he was painting because the
carving of copper plates was too strenuous for his weakened
physical state, his choice allowed him to produce a few works
that are as vibrant as anything he ever painted. Anthony Blunt
compares the rare technique of the more finished watercolors,
which builds up touches of unmixed color, to Czannes late
watercolor paintings.34 Paley notes that even in his final
months, Blake was still extending his extraordinary technical
mastery.35
One member of the Antients, Samuel Palmer, records finding
him working in bed, and provides us with a moving portrait of
the artist:
On Saturday, 9th October 1824, Mr. Linnell called
and went with me to Mr. Blake. We found him lame
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he is not a Republican
Following the dedication to his patron and a list of the
subscribers who helped pay for the book, Boyd opens his
preface to the Comedy by reproducing a chapter called A
Summary View of the Hell of Dante, from Thomas Wartons
History of English Poetry (published in three volumes from
1774 to 1781). Warton is apologetic for Dantes many
extravagancies and indelicate descriptions, forgiving
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Dantes Politics
Dante discussed the political situation in Italy throughout the
Comedy. For the most part, these passages do not inform us of
his theoretical views on the roles of church and state but serve
only to lament the current condition of his home country.
Corruption is rampant; people are too greedy. There is no
reason to think that Blake would have objected to such an
evaluation. He believed that England, too, was corrupt and
greedy. We can identify at least two sections, however, in
which Dante represented his opinions on government in more
philosophical terms, and in both cases his views are not
something with which Blake could agree.
The first part of the Comedy we should examine is the deepest
level of Hell: the frozen lake of Cocytus in which traitors are
trapped sempiternally. In his usual careful manner, Dante
broke down this type of sin into subgroups, ranged in order of
seriousness. The least bad traitors are those who have turned
against their own families, and the worstin fact, the worst
people in all of Hellare those who have betrayed their lords
or benefactors. From what we have seen before of Blakes
antinomian beliefs, it will be clear that to him, we do not have
different levels of responsibility to different sorts of people,
especially to those who outrank us. Dante, of course, is not
asserting that we may never turn against a leader. He shows
us enough popes and monarchs in Hell to make it clear that
bad elites are not exempt from judgment. The sinners he
shows in the lowest level are those who have betrayed good
men and bitten the hands that wisely fed them. It follows,
then, that the worst traitor is the one who betrayed the best
benefactor: Judas.
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Although Blakes Christ is not quite the same as the one that
Dante imagines, both poets would agree that the murder of
Jesus was the worst of sins. The real irritation for Blake, and
the reason the issue becomes one of government, arises from
the identities of the two sinners who are punished to the left
and right of Judas. In Satans three mouths, Judas is in the
center, and on each side are Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed
Julius Caesar. To rate these two as next-worst, almost as bad
as Judas, does seem to make Dante into an Emperors <a
Caesars> Man. Why is the assassination of the Roman
emperor nearly as bad as the betrayal of Christ? To
understand this, we can turn to the second, and clearest, of
Dantes statements on the role of government.
On his way up the mountain of Purgatory, the pilgrim Dante
has stopped to talk with Marco Lombardo, a fellow Italian.34
Dante has asked him about the influence of the stars on
peoples personalities, and whether we are justified in
blaming astrological factors for our sins. The answer is that of
course we are born with various tendencies due to stellar
influences, but that human beings do have freedom of choice
in deciding whether they succumb, or not, to inborn traits.
However much the stars have shaped our natural desires, our
intellects are unaffected and may overrule our urges. At this
point, perhaps surprisingly to those who consider Dante a
strict moralist, Marco describes an individuals moral
responsibility in a very merciful way. He says that each soul
appears in the world innocent and playful:
the soul
Comes like a babe, that wantons sportively,
Weeping and laughing in its wayward moods;
[Purgatory, 16; Cary, 215].
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our earthly world and the higher world are not the same.
Good behavior in this world is necessary to get to the next,
but there is a fundamental ontological jump between the
higher and the lower. God and Heaven are transcendent, over
and above us, and cannot even be adequately imagined by us
as long as we remain in the material world.
Blakes theology is so radically different from Dantes view
that it required a full set of illustrations for him to set the
Comedy straight. Opposed to views of a transcendent God,
the theological concept of absolute immanence is
fundamental to Blakes beliefs. In such a view, God and our
earthly world are in no way separate; God is present not only
here and now, but in every grain of sand and every wild
flower, in his entirety. For Blake, this permeating presence of
God means that our perceived separation from Him is not to
be overcome through even the most well-meaning of
government laws or church rituals. Since there is no real
separation, but only a perceived one, the answer is to improve
perception. And neither church nor state have this goal. As
long as we perceive worldly issues and religious issues to be
different, and provinces of different institutions, we will never
open our eyes enough to see the truth. The authoritative
guidelines that Dante wants government to establish in fact
allow believers to keep their eyes closed, by urging us to trust
in our superiors to keep us on a moral path that leads
nowhere.
I will devote much of what follows to working out this
difference between Dantes transcendentalism and Blakes
theology of immanence. In my opinion, it lies at the root of
each significant difference between the two poets. Their
views of nature, of the possibilities of language, and of the
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role morality plays in our lives, all spring from this basic
disagreement. Before I turn to the history of absolute
immanence, however, there is one more aspect of Dantes
Caesarism that we must address.
Classicism in Dante
The nine Muses of classical poetry are the daughters of Zeus
and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Dante, following
ancient tradition, asks them for assistance throughout the
Comedy. Near the openings of the Hell and the Paradise he
calls upon them collectively; in the first canto of the
Purgatory he specifically invokes Calliope, the muse of epic
poetry. There are at least ten other mentions of Muses in the
poem, as well.
Blake would not have been the only reader to find it odd that
the greatest poet of the Christian Heaven and Hell should ask
for help from pagan deities. (In a later section of this book,
we will see why the Muses, in particular, are offensive to
Blake, as symbols of memory and not inspiration.)
Throughout the Comedy, classical sources, examples, and
characters are on nearly equal footing with those of the Bible.
For example, at each level of Purgatory, Dante cites moral
tales to show cases in which people have either succumbed to
the sin purged on that level, or risen above it. The cases he
chooses are carefully balanced between hagiographic or
biblical, and classical examples. At each level, one good
example is from the life of the Virgin Mary, at least one is
from the classical world of myth or history, and one more is
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separates dead whiteness from the living lily, the Holy Spirit
inspires us to see the thing in its entirety, including its
qualities and beyond these to its infinite connectedness in
God. The nine Greek Muses, who were literally born of
Memory, Blake associates with Reynolds deductive methods
and with their classical origins. Twice in Milton he contrasts
the daughters of memory with the daughters of inspiration,
and leaves no doubt about which he prefers (E 95, 108).
We already saw that after the French Revolution, poets cited
the Bible as the model to follow when they turned from
political revolution to spiritual change. Blake is following the
same path when he declares it is the Holy Spirit who inspires
art. The prophets and the Pentecost are examples of true
inspiration, and not the classical poets. Blake made the Bible,
in this as in everything, the Great Code of Art (E 274). In
the Old Testament, Job is not satisfied with deduction or
analysis but demands a direct vision of the divine. (In fact, his
friends analyses all turn out to be wrong.) Ezekiel and Daniel
dont receive abstracted general principles, but monstrous
apparitions. Again, we should see the Bible as true vision of
the truth because it is less logical and more inspired, because
Christ addresses himself to the Man not to his Reason.
What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic
Philosophy which blinds the Eye of Imagination The Real
Man (E 664). The visions of the prophets, the parables of
Christ, and the revelations of John are direct imagination,
while their exegesis is mere talk. The Hebrew Bible & the
Gospel of Jesus are not Allegory but Eternal Vision or
Imagination of All that Exists (E 544). While the Cambridge
Platonists, Spinoza, and others carefully made the final book
of the Bible the final acceptable use of prophetic imagination,
Blake insists that true poets carry on the tradition. Blake
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himself had done so, and there was no reason why Dante
couldnt.
How far away is Blakes theory of imagination from Dantes?
Is the Comedy built of memory or of vision? This turns out to
be a more difficult question than we might imagine. Pietro
Alighieri, the poets son and earliest commentator, declared
that his fathers Comedy was fiction, and this was enough for
most subsequent critics to label the poem as no more than
allegory.67 Its customary to see Dante as a systematizer,
using his powerful intellect to assemble the data gleaned from
his wide reading into a great logical collage. Yet some recent
scholars have suggested that he was more of a visionary than
we have been led to believe. In 1941, Italian scholar Bruno
Nardi published a paper called Dante profeta68 to posit that
when Dante declared hed seen Heaven and Hell, this was not
fiction writing. Since Nardis article appeared, the
truth-claims of the Comedy have been analyzed against the
rich and various medieval traditions of visionary writing,
from bella menzognabeautiful lies to teach moral
truthsto genuine claims of prophecy of the Johannine
type.69 Its possible that even if Dante did believe hed visited
the realms of the dead, in flesh or in spirit, he would not have
said so. Noncanonical claims of prophecy would have caused
the Church to suppress Dantes work and place the Comedy
on its list of banned books, as it did his Monarchia, and so for
practical reasons he may have used one literary form to mask
another, in the interest of reaching the widest possible
audience. The debate about Dantes intentions continues in
our own time, and we can look forward to more research into
how people of earlier ages defined truth in regard to
statements on religion. For our present purpose we will leave
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And all
Are blessed, even as their sight descends
Deeper into the Truth, wherein rest is
For every mind. Thus happiness hath root
In seeing, not in loving, which of sight
Is aftergrowth.
The degree of each individuals grace and blessing comes
from the degree to which that soul can see.
And of the seeing such
The meed, as unto each, in due degree,
Grace and good-will their measure have assignd
[Paradise, 28; Cary, 420].
And at the end of the canto, for good measure, we are shown
a good example and a bad example: one who got his
knowledge from direct vision, and was correct, and one who
only calculated, and erred. Dante reminds us that both
Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite and Gregory the Great had
written about the nine levels of angels in Heaven, but their
accounts did not agree. Eventually, when Gregory reached
Heaven, he saw that he had been mistaken.
But soon as in this Heaven his doubting eyes
Were opend, Gregory at his error smiled.
Dante says its no surprise that Dionysius should get it right,
because instead of relying on calculation, he had eyewitness
testimony: the account of the Apostle Paul, who had travelled,
Comedy-like, to Heaven to see for himself.
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The quotes from Hegel in the paragraphs above are all from
his explication of Boehmes work, but in his own philosophy
there are sentences that could have been written by either
man. From Hegels Encyclopedia Logic, we can see the
similarity of their views on the immanence of God: We
usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond; but it
is precisely what is wholly present, what we, as thinkers,
always carry with us and employ[.]94
There are many more concepts that have close parallels in the
two mens work. Boehmes separation of God into contraries,
which battle and create, reminds us of Hegels dialectic of
history, and Gods realization as it takes place in the minds of
people is recalled in the development of Geist. For our
purposes, interested as we are in the immanence or
transcendence of God, we may make use of Hegels notions,
also owing much to Boehme and Cusanus, of good infinity
and bad infinity.
Hegels Schlechte Unendlichkeit was until recently translated
as bad infinity, though Wayne M. Martin suggests that use
of the word bad here is misleading. To call this infinity
bad implies that it is a variety of infinity, an infinity that is
bad.95 Martin suggests instead the word spurious as a
translation of Schlechte, to make clear that Hegel intended
Schlechte Unendlichkeit as something that is not actually
infinity at all. Punter uses false to contrast this notion with
real infinity: The false infinite, which is infinity conceived
only in the crypto-quantitative terms of the understanding;
and the real infinite, which resides not beyond but within
finite objects.96
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Shortly after lifting off for Heaven, Dante wonders about the
composition of the planetary spheres and their difference
from the material world below. Beatrice explains:
I see, thou sayst, the air, the fire I see,
The earth and water, and all things of them
Compounded, to corruption turn, and soon
Dissolve
[Paradise, 7; Cary, 323].
As we know too well, anything made of the four elements
will decay and crumble, and material bodies die. Yet, Dante
reasons, if all things derive from God, why arent the objects
of the world eternal? How can God make something that falls
apart? His guide tells him that although God made the
original four elements, the mixtures of the elements that form
objects are not the direct work of God. The material world
feels the influence of God mediated by the planetary spheres,
the stars.
the elements,
Which thou hast named, and what of them is made,
Are by created virtue informd: create,
Their substance; and create, the informing virtue
In these bright stars, that round them circling move
[Paradise, 7; Cary, 323].
The substances of the material world, and the stars that
influence the world, were created by God. The objects in our
world made of the elements, on the other hand, are
contingent. Their makeup depends on Gods influence only as
it is distributed and dispersed by the aetherial spheres. Even
the soul, placed in the embryo by God, feels the influences of
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Unswervingly
[Paradise, 7; Cary, 329].
Dante thought that the father of the child supplied the form
and the mother the material, like a seed and a flower pot.
Lacking a knowledge of combined parental DNA, Dante
thought that without the influence of the stars, each child
would be exactly like its father. Inheritance without astrology
would be unswerving, but the stars overrule direct
descent and give each child abilities different from the
fathers.
Though every occurrence in the sublunar world is contingent
on the stars, if we trace stellar influence up through the
spheres and back to its source, we see that everything
originates with God. When Dante reaches the sphere of the
sun, Thomas Aquinas himself explains that both mortal and
immortal things emanate from God:
That which dies not,
And that which can die, are but each the beam
Of that idea, which our Sovereign Sire
Engendereth loving; for that lively light,
Which passeth from His splendour, not disjoind
From Him, nor from His love triune with them,
Doth, through His bounty, congregate itself,
Mirrord, as twere, in new existences;
Itself unalterable, and ever one
[Paradise, 13; Cary, 351].
New existences in the sublunar world are reflections
mirrord in the elements. The beam of existence that shines
out of Heaven travels unbroken, from the highest level to the
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?
but focusing on the higher laws makes us
unable to see the original particulars.
As Blake puts it in Jerusalem:
The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man; &
when separated
from Imagination, and closing itself as in steel, in a
Ratio
Of the Things of Memory, It then frames Laws &
Moralities
To destroy Imagination [E 229]
The Laws & Moralities hes writing of include everything
the English word laws may refer to: the laws of nature, such
as gravity; the laws of man, such as government censorship
regulations; and the laws of God, such as the 613 mitzvahs of
the Old Testament. In a world where imagination was in
control and the Spectre was in its place, none of those laws
would apply. Or perhaps certain laws would apply in
individual cases, but would expand and contract with human
perception, as do the laws of space and time in Eternity.
Whats certain is that a uniform application of Spectral law is
the work of priests and not poets, those who enslave and not
those who imagine. Urizen makes this mistake when he
decrees:
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Contraries
Cusanus defined the infinite as the place where all opposite
qualities coincide. His most effective illustration of this was
the thought experiment of the infinite circle and the infinite
straight line. We know that by definition, a straight line (not a
segment) goes on in infinity in both directions, and never
curves back on itself. We might say that its contrary is a
circle, which has no straight segments at all. From the human
perspective, nothing in the world can be both a straight line
and a circle. We do understand, though, that the larger the
circle is, the more a segment of it will appear straight to our
eyes. We know that the horizon appears straight at eye level,
even though the earth is round, because the earth is quite big.
If we imagine an even larger circle, say, the circumference of
our galaxy, we can see that quite a large segment of that circle
would appear straight from a human perspective although, in
fact, it is curved. The larger the circle is, the more its
segments approach straightness. What is more difficult to
imagine is a circle of infinite size. An infinite circle is not
merely bigger than a big circle. Its segments do not merely
approach straightness, they are, paradoxically, straight and
curved at the same time. You and I cannot perceive such a
circle, but God can; God sees infinitely. From Gods
perspective, straightness and roundness coincide, and so do
all other so-called contraries. From Gods perspective, it is
wrong to say that an egg is bad and only bad; it is good and
bad, simultaneously, and more besides.
Sad to say, we do not have Gods perspective. We tend to see
one or the other of an objects qualities, rate that quality good
or bad, and leave it at that. Blake tells us this is a mistake. In
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and drink, that are necessary for earthly life but not of the
highest degree. As long as we are focused on the highest goal,
which is the source of all goodness, and moderate our love of
the healthful but lower things of this world, we will be all
right.
But let it warp to evil,
Or with more ardour than behoves, or less,
Pursue the good; the thing created then
Works gainst its Maker.
In Durling:
but when it turns aside to evil, or when with
more eagerness or less than is right it runs after
some good, it employs his creature against the
Creator.
When we begin to love something else, not the source of
good, then we are in trouble. That is what causes evil. And if
we love even good things with too much eagerness or too
little, then we begin to work against God.
While not exactly contradicting the New Testament, the
system Virgil describes here is clearly derived from the
Nicomachean Ethics. In that work, Aristotle explains that
virtue is a matter of balance. Loving the proper aim, in the
proper degree, makes a person virtuous:
Now virtue is concerned with feelings and actions,
in which excess and deficiency are in error and incur
blame, while the intermediate condition is correct
and wins praise, which are both proper features of
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Blakes States
The word states had a special meaning for Blake. He uses it
frequently in and after the composition of The Four Zoas,
though we can see it also plays an important role in his
earliest well-known work, Songs of Innocence and
Experience, which is subtitled Shewing the Two Contrary
States of the Human Soul (E 7). In that collection of poems,
a person may be in a state of innocence or a state of
experience, but he is still the same individual. What changes
of course is the way the person perceives. The state of
innocence eternally remains, and babies pass into it as they
are born. A transition to the state of experience is inevitable
and not to be regretted.
The state you are in depends on your manner of perception.
While in a particular state, a person perceives the world
according to that states particular narrowness or limitations.
We have seen that for Blake, though, perception is an active
creation of the world, so a persons state of perception will,
for that individual, determine what his world is. From outside,
from the perspective of a person in a different state, anothers
state may seem crazy or immoral. But from inside, they seem
to be in the only world possible. To philosophy students, the
prisoners in Platos cave seem like unreal puppets who exist
only for discussion purposes. But to someone tied in the cave,
his life seems to be the only possibility there is. States are
Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, meer
possibilities:
But to those who enter into them they seem the only
substances
For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor
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tear,
One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away
[E 158]
In the Songs, Blake demonstrates this by writing poems in the
voices of the innocent in the first half of the book and in the
voices of the experienced in the second half, performing for
us a dramatization of how the world appears to people in
those states. Only one of the poems in that collection includes
the voices of both states. The Clod & the Pebble, from
1794, begins in the voice of innocence:
Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.
So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattles feet:
Blake makes it clear that this is not his own opinion by
inventing a character and attributing the speech. He then
introduces a different character, in a different state, and
invites us to compare the two viewpoints.
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.
Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight:
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite [E 19].
The innocent clod of clay is permeable and easily broken by
the uncaring forces of lifein this case a passing cow. The
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Individuals Evermore
Amen [E 170]
But there are always people in lower perceptive states whose
narrowness causes them to blame the individual:
Thus wept they in Beulah over the Four Regions of
Albion
But many doubted & despaird & imputed Sin &
Righteousness
To Individuals & not to States, and these Slept in
Ulro [E 171].
Blake demonstrates in Jerusalem that as individuals are
eternal and may change from state to state, which for them is
the same as a change from world to world, it would not be fair
to blame any individual in eternity for what he perceived in
only one state. He describes the sons of Albion as they fall,
and how they produce moral codes of reward and punishment.
They are beginning to form Heavens & Hells in
immense
Circles: the Hells for food to the Heavens: food of
torment,
Food of despair: they drink the condemnd Soul &
rejoice
In cruel holiness, in their Heavens of Chastity &
Uncircumcision
The fallen moralists, thinking they are enforcing Gods law,
form Heaven and Hell, and undertake what they think is
holiness, though in fact it is cruelty. Blake particularly felt
that enforcement of chastity was a cruel restriction. The
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phenomena are all that we know, the fall into the phenomenal
world is essential for any knowledge to be had.
Traditional Neoplatonic philosophy had imagined spirit
dividing from the One and descending to enter a body. It is a
spatial fall as well as a change in state, from high to low.
Boehme sees both spirit and body as a portion of the
Ungrund: body is merely the division that perception forms in
order to perceive. Thus for him the Fall is not a literal descent
from a high place. It is a change in perception of the Ungrund
only. But for Boehme as for Plotinus, it is the identification of
spirit with body that brings strife into the world. Now that
portions of the Ungrund have been embodied, and knowledge
made possible, tension and dialectic are also possible. The
spirit perceives itself as suffering, and learns to yearn for a
third state: a state of consciousness without the pain that
physical limitation brings.
Plotinus had taught that the soul, after falling into division,
desires reunion with the One. The early Neoplatonic reunion,
though, is also the end of the individual soul. In this version
the soul will be fully reabsorbed into the One, losing all
individuality, as with Buddhisms Nirvana. Boehme rejects
this annihilating view as fully as Dante did. For Boehme, the
resurrection out of the physical body into the third phase of
existence is not dissolution but liberation. The self-awareness
discovered through the fall into division is retained, but the
painful limitations of life in the material world are cast
aside.136
With Boehmes reading, the apparently simple fable of Adam
and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge has been transformed
into something very close to Kantian epistemology. The
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This, and the previous plate in which Job shows his paintings
of his visions to his daughters, show us that Job has taken on
the artistic imaginative relation to the world which, for Blake,
is the only true Christianity.
The Songs of Innocence and Experience had shown us only
the preFall state and the condition of fallen man. Blakes
Book of Job ends, however, with a third condition, which
Paley calls higher innocence.143 It is the synthesis at the
end of the innocence-experience dialectic. It is the fuller
understanding that we must leave our innocent state to reach,
though the path there is tortuous.
We will see that Blakes version of the Comedy follows the
same path, though of course there are many differences in the
story. The illustrations begin, as the Comedy does, with the
state of innocence already lost and the fall underway. And
just as Dante explains in detail the conditions and horrors of
the underworld, Blake also lingers in the lower realm. The
difference is, of course, that for Blake the lower realm is our
current realm.
When comparing Blakes theology of fall and redemption to
Dantes, there is another significant difference that we must
keep in mind. I find no statement in Dante in favor of the felix
culpa. For him, the Fall is only to be regretted. Though the
pilgrim Dante must go down before he can go up, this is
required by his own fault in losing the right path. At no point
does the pilgrim announce that he is glad to have lost the
path, and glad to have been required to make the journey. At
various points in the Comedy, he announces that it would
have been better if he had had the opportunity to remain in an
unfallen state. Nor does he see Adam and Eves Fall as the
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fault that allowed the greater reward. Both his own and
mankinds fall from grace are only everywhere denounced.
We see an example in Purgatory 29, as the pilgrim is walking
through the woods of the Earthly Paradise, which is the
original home of Adam and Eve. The great beauty of Eden
makes him think only of what humankind has missed by not
being allowed to stay.
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Figure 10. The Worm upon its dewy bed, from The Book of
Thel, 1789; relief etching with hand coloring, object size:
approx. 15.0 11.0 cm, leaf size: 37.1 26.9 cm (Lessing
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The terrific porter lifts the bar on the eternal gates, Thel
enterd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown. She has
descended to the world of the dead, A land of sorrows & of
tears where never smile was seen. She wanders in this
underworld, listening to the horrible lamentations, until she
finds her own grave, where she hears a voice:
Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own
destruction?
Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!
Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn,
Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?
Or an Eye of gifts & graces, showring fruits &
coined gold!
Why a Tongue impressd with honey from every
wind?
Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?
Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror trembling &
affright.
Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy!
Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?
[E 6]
This is the voice of Thel herself, if she were dead in that
grave. The voice is lamenting the loss of innocence, regretting
that we must have knowledge of evil and of loss.
Characteristically, Blake has framed the questions in terms of
the senses. If Thel had remained in innocence, ignorant of
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death, her state would be one in which the ear and eye and
nostril are closed to their own destruction. We see that in
innocence the senses are unaware of suffering, and in
experience they lament.
The lower world is too dark, and the questions too horrifying,
and Thel flees shrieking back to Vales of Har. She wanted to
see for herself, had a brief vision of the world below, was
terrified by what she saw and rejected it. This is why I think
we can refer to Thels story as a failed katabasis. Unlike the
epic versions of descent stories, in which Odysseus or Aeneas
learn what is required for rebirth in an advanced state, Thel
rejects the knowledge she could have found there and returns
to her previous condition.
No doubt it is unnecessary for me to remind anyone that Thel
is a fictional character and a poetical construct. In the work of
an author like Blake, in particular, such characters are capable
of being in a number of states all at the same time, as
multivalent symbols and personalities. Given this freedom, I
will borrow portions of Kathleen Raines reading of The Book
of Thel, without necessarily following all of her conclusions.
Raine has read Thels story as an allegory of the soul in the
terms of Neoplatonic tradition. Plotinus and Porphyry had
held that the human soul begins as a portion of the One in the
intelligible world, and may fall into the sensible. For them,
matter is evil and the souls descent into body a death from
eternity incurred by sin or by folly.153 As described above,
the Neoplatonists saw the unity of the One as goodness, and
division from that unity as the source of evil. Unity in the
ideal world above is good; the fragmentation of the Ones
emanation into the material world is evil. Raine calls Thel a
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Raines attempt to force the work too closely into the role of
literal illustration. She believes that Blake has combined
elements of two related literary works: a scene from book 5 of
the Odyssey, and Porphyrys Cave of the Nymphs, a
Neoplatonic interpretation of a location mentioned in book 13
of the Odyssey. Because this combination is not entirely
persuasive, and because Blakes landscape scene doesnt
conform precisely to Homers description of the cave,
Heppner and others dismiss much of Raines interpretation.
My own reading of the Arlington Court picture might be
called a simplified version of Raines. If we keep in mind that
Blake never felt the need to illustrate written texts slavishly
but did feel free to employ Neoplatonic imagery in his own
way (as we have seen in our interpretation of The Book of
Thel), the pictures connection to Porphyrys work seems
beyond doubt. Allowing a few differences from Raine in how
we see the characters actions in the painting also means we
need not look to book 5 of the Odyssey at all, therefore
simplifying the source material.
One of Heppners main objections to Raines interpretation is
that she insists, against all evidence, that Blake was a
Platonist.165 This view, I believe, requires more nuance. It
would be wrong to call Blake a Platonist, but it would be
equally wrong to say that he rejected the tradition that grew
out of that philosophers writings. It is entirely possible to
reject Platos banishment of the poets, say, or his dualistic
view of the soul, while still using Neoplatonic sources.
As I described in an earlier chapter, Blake thought that the
wisdom of the Hebrews had been stolen by the Greeks and
Romans, who degraded and spoiled it by making it
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Some of the symbols are more obvious than others (fig. 11).
The olive tree at the crown, for example, is easily taken to
represent wisdom, since we know the olive is the sacred tree
of Minerva/Athena, and it is she who has guided Odysseus on
this last leg of his trip home. The cave is pleasant to Naiades,
Porphyry tells us, because they are water nymphs, not wood
nymphs, and thus prefer humid caves. Attracted to humidity,
then, the Naiades are symbols of souls descending to
generation, because, as we have seen, philosophers since
Heraclitus have said that descending souls move toward
water. The bowls and urns are also associated with liquid,
both the water that attracts souls and the wine that stands for
pleasure. Homer tells us that the nymphs are weaving
amazing webs, not on wooden looms but on shining native
marble. Porphyry explains: And to souls that descend into
generation and are occupied in corporeal energies, what
symbol can be more appropriate than those instruments
pertaining to weaving? For the formation of the flesh is on
and about the bones, which in the bodies of animals resemble
stones.
The bees that fill the urns, Porphyry cites various authorities
to show, are symbols of noble souls, buzzing busily in
anticipation of return to the world. Honey is another sign of
sensual pleasure, which had been known to serve as bait for
the gods.
By now we recognize the symbols of northern and southern
gates. Homer says the north is for mankind and the south for
immortals, but Porphyry assures us that immortal here
refers to the immortal souls of people, ascending to the ideal
world, while the south is for souls descending to generation.
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Color Illustrations
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Figure 92. Saint Peter and Saint James with Dante and
Beatrice and with Saint John Also, graphite, pen and ink,
and watercolor ( The Trustees of the British Museum/
Art Resource, New York).
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its
infinite
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show Dante the world below and the path toward Heaven, and
to give the pilgrim over into the hands of another who will
take him to the highest point.
I thy guide
Will lead thee hence through an eternal space,
Where thou shalt hear despairing shrieks, and see
Spirits of old tormented, who invoke
A second death; and those next view, who dwell
Content in fire, for that they hope to come,
Wheneer the time may be, among the blest,
Into whose regions if thou then desire
T ascend, a spirit worthier then I
Must lead thee, in whose charge, when I depart,
Thou shalt be left
Blakes watercolor for this canto is among the most finished
in the series. He has condensed the events of the story into
one scene, and the main elements are immediately visible:
Dante, forest, beasts, and guide. A glance at the picture shows
that the required figures are present, and their actions are in
accord with the text. Beyond the presence of these basic
elements, however, the illustration hardly resembles Dantes
text at all (see fig. 13 in color insert).
The difference in mood between Carys gloomy text and
Blakes colorful watercolor is immediately apparent. Though
there are large thorns on the ground, the forest does not
appear particularly dark or frightening. Indeed, the setting
more closely resembles Englands green and pleasant land
than it does a life-threatening savage wild. The pilgrim and
the animals are in a glade that opens directly onto an ocean
view, from which the rising sun ascends. Unlike the scene in
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split into subject and object. Once the split has occurred, the
dominoes tumble, and the world changes.
We have seen similar falls again and again in Blakes work.
Urizens fear of disorienting passion causes him to create a
moral order that becomes tyranny. In The Four Zoas,
especially, the projection of interior existence onto exteriority
causes imbalance and horror.8 The illustrations for Dante,
though, are unique in one way: they do not require the pilgrim
to undergo the Fall. They save him from suffering by showing
him, and of course showing us as well, the consequences of
such a fall. In more traditional interpretations of the Comedy
the pilgrim is in danger of falling to damnation but is saved
through Beatrices kind intercession. Before he makes the
fatal fall, mercy allows him to take a guided tour of what
awaits in the afterlife. The same is true in Blakes version.
Just as the pilgrim is fleeing his exteriorized passions,
heading toward the sea of time and space that constitutes the
world below, he is caught by a kind spirit, who saves him.
Virgil as Poetic Genius
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Roe says that the four figures were suggested by the ladies
mentioned by Dante but that Blake has converted them into
the Daughters of Beulah, characters from his private
symbolism.18 I feel it would be Urizenic of us to insist that
the ladies are either one or the other. This is an instancenot
the last we shall meetin which Blake has combined or
conflated symbols freely, and used them not as one-to-one
signifiers but as suggestive and multiple. The viewers job is
to see the signs not with the corporeal eye but with
imagination, keeping in mind the knowledge that everything
is immanent in everything else. Such a viewpoint would allow
the women here to be at the same time those whom Dante
names, as well as the Daughters of Beulah and several others
that Blake has mentioned in his earlier work.
The fact that Mary is sitting at a loom reminds us that
weaving is a symbolic act that occurs with frequency in
Blakes work. Variants of the word weave occur
twenty-nine times in The Four Zoas, twenty-five times in
Milton, and fifty-eight times in Jerusalem. Whereas Los is
shown doing the sweaty work of hammering out perceptions
from the noumena of the world, weaving is more often
encountered in feminine or pastoral contexts. In The Four
Zoas, for example, Luvah describes an interlude with Vala:
I hid her in soft gardens & in secret bowers of
Summer
Weaving mazes of delight along the sunny Paradise
Inextricable labyrinths, She bore me sons &
daughters [E 317]
But the products of the weaving may be a mixed blessing.
When souls fall, the contracted world they create with their
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Blake has taken the names of these giants from the Old
Testament, the book of Numbers 13:33 and 21:33, where Og
and Anak are called enemies of the Israelites. In the following
lines from Milton we can see that Blake has employed them
in the role of enemies to man, who oppose opening the doors
of perception. Their job is to prevent us from seeing a world
in a grain of sand, or to perceive that the sweet smell of a
flower emanates from eternity.
Thou percievest the Flowers put forth their precious
Odours!
And none can tell how from so small a center comes
such sweets
Forgetting that within that Center Eternity expands
Its ever during doors, that Og & Anak fiercely guard
[E 131].
In Jerusalem, Og and Anak operate Looms & Mills &
Prisons & Work-houses (E 157), and when Los creates the
material world within the mind of man, we read that the
starry characters of Og & Anak are Perusing Albions
Tomb To Create the lion & wolf the bear: the tyger &
scaly serpent. They are present when summer and winter are
divided, and all the things of Vegetative Nature are created
by hard restricting condensations (E 228). Damon writes
that the giants in Milton and Jerusalem function to oppose
Mans progress towards Eternity and that Og and Sihon
[another giant] together constitute the Mundane Shell, all of
which I believe applies to the Comedy watercolor as well.25
The giants presence in different scenes of the Fall, their
association with frightening beasts, and their position at a gate
make the connection clear. Here they are guarding the
entrance to Hell, rather than the exit toward Eternity, but we
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Figure 22. The Inscription Over the Gate, chalk, pencil, pen
and watercolor (Tate, London/Art Resource, New York).
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Limbo
Charon refuses to take Dante across the Acheron in his
barque, because the pilgrim is neither dead nor damned. At
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the veil of nature. But he also allows that their works contain
allusions to deeper visionary truths, as we saw in his
illustration to Porphyrys explication of a scene from the
Odyssey. The inscription on this Comedy illustration, though,
shows Blake in his most anti-classical mood, blaming the epic
poet for the theft and perversion of biblical ideas. He puts
Homer at the center of the crime, writing, Homer is the
Center of All, and making the central location literal in the
watercolor. Because the figure of Homer is the most nearly
finished element in the illustration, Blake gives him more
prominence than Dante does in the Comedy. Dante does state
that Homer is of all bards supreme (Cary, 15) but does not
indicate that he is geographically or hierarchically at the
center of Limbo, which contains all manner of philosophers
and heroes as well.
In my opinion, Blake has structured this watercolor to
associate Homer, a low point of visionary literature, with
Satan, the limit of Opakeness (E 189). The Comedy puts
Homer in a respected but marginal position in Limbo, and
locates Satan at the center of everything. Blake conflates
these by putting Homer in the center of the page and then
drawing behind him a map of Hell, with Satan just over
Homers shoulder. In this way he can make his illustrations
follow Dantes narrative order while showing that Homer and
Satan are nearly equally guilty in their shutting-down of
vision. Once more we see that in a nonPtolemaic universe
that has no permanent center, but a center that is everywhere,
as Cusanus described it, the association of spatial points
depends on perspective. Blake is telling us that from his point
of view, Satan is the low point, but so is Homer, though they
are in different places.
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the lower left corner; four of these wear laurel crowns and one
carries a sword, indicating that we are again seeing Homer
and his companion poets, though Blake has drawn one more
than the four whom Dante describes here. (Roes description
of these as personifications of the five senses seems arbitrary
to me.)43 At right there is a man blowing a pipe, leaning with
his female companion against a tree. The pastoral effect of
this pair makes it easy to imagine they are virtuous pagans,
sighing in the region outside the walls of Limbos castle. The
souls flying in pairs through the air in the left center of the
picture are a glimpse of the next level of Hell, where the
lustful are caught in the storms of passion.
Figure 27. Homer and the Ancient Poets, pencil, pen and
watercolor (Tate, London/Art Resource, New York).
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Minos
After crossing the Acheron, souls destined for eternal
punishment descend to the second circle of Hell.
There Minos stands,
Grinning with ghastly feature: he, of all
Who enter, strict examining the crimes,
Gives sentence, and dismisses them beneath,
According as he foldeth him around:
For when before him comes the ill-fated soul,
It all confesses; and that judge severe
Of sins, considering what place in Hell
Suits the transgression, with his tail so oft
Himself encircles, as degrees beneath
He dooms it to descend
[Hell, 5; Cary, 1819].
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Figure 28. Minos, pen and ink and watercolor over pencil
and black chalk (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
Felton Bequest, 1920 [9903]).
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scales erect
And weigh the massy Cubes, then fix them in their
awful stations
.....
The enormous warp & woof rage direful in the
affrighted deep
[E 31819]
We have seen that in an unfallen condition, the imagination
creates what it perceives and is unfettered by divisions of time
and space. Because each thing is in infinity, and infinity
excludes nothing, it is an error to ascribe a limited set of
attributes permanently to anything or anyone. Part of the
narrowing of perception that occurs when we fall is the onset
of the illusion that things or people have fixed attributes. As
Stempel puts it: The fall of man is the division of the subject
among its attributes and the usurpation of being by those
attributes.44
When a person falls, in other words, he becomes merely his
attributes. He is no longer an infinite eternal soul, but a soul
who is good or bad or greedy or generous. This is the role that
Minos plays in Blakes re-imagining of the Comedy: he is the
one who names the dominant and determining attribute of
each soul. Dante says that Minos discerns the souls condition
and assigns it an appropriate location based on its personality;
Blake sees such an assignation as the truly evil act. Minos
acts precisely as the sons of Urizen did in the lines from The
Four Zoas quoted above, measuring out the souls, dividing
them from infinity, and fixing them in their awful stations.
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Cerberus
Blakes illustration for the third circle of Hell, where the
gluttons are punished, is only roughly sketched, but wide blue
and grey washes give it an appropriately gloomy feel. The
pool in the foreground has penciled indications of the souls
submerged there, and a few other figures are sketched here
and there, but the work is not finished enough to discern
where Blake intended to show Dante and Virgil. The only
clear figure finished enough to be sure of is the three-headed
dog Cerberus, shown in a cave at left. There is a puzzling
group of upside-down figures at top right, apparently falling
or swirling in the sky. The placement seems inappropriate for
storm-tossed figures from the previous circle, and they do not
seem to be in pairs. Beyond them, however, visible in a gap
between the mountains, we can see a flat plain or river and
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only imagine this was an error on Roes part that was taken
up by the others on his authority. All three subjects are named
in canto 7, but the Comedy makes the order clear: Plutus
appears in the fourth circle of Hell, and Virgil explains the
motions of Fortune while the pilgrim is in that circle. The
River Styx isnt seen until Dante and Virgil have descended
to the fifth circle near the end of the canto.
Plutus was the personification of riches in classical
mythology (Cary, footnote, 27). The resemblance of his
name to Pluto, god of the underworld, is probably only
coincidence, though Cicero and Isidore of Seville worked out
a connection between them based on gold and silver coming
from underground and on the importance of greed as a source
for ills.50 Canto 7 of the Hell begins with Plutuss shout of
Pape Satn, pape Satn aleppe! Modern translators agree
that these are nonsense words, but Cary has bravely
interpreted them to mean Ah me! O Satan! Satan! (Yet
Carys version is surely a safer bet than Boyds: Prince of
the Fiends, arise; Behold thy realms exposd to mortal
eyes!)51 Blake has depicted Plutus in the act of shouting
these words, one hand in the air and the other on a bag of
coins. He is shown as one of Blakes patriarchal types, this
time nude and with a pointed white beard and hair that goes
up into two points like flame. He is seated at the bottom of the
picture while Dante and Virgil walk down a slope toward him
(fig. 31).
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The Styx
In the fourth circle of Hell the pilgrim sees a well (or spring,
depending on the translation) from which flows murky
waters. The dismal stream flows into a lake called the Styx.
From the shore, the pilgrim sees the wrathful souls.
Intent I stood
To gaze, and in the marish sunk descried
A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks
Betokening rage. They with their hands alone
Struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet,
Cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs.
Virgil explains that the angry souls visible at the surface are
not alone in this swamp.
underneath
The water dwells a multitude, whose sighs
Into these bubbles make the surface heave,
As thine eye tells thee wheresoeer it turn.
The submerged souls are the sullen. If those on the surface are
out of control from anger, those on the lake bed are those who
turned their anger inward and lie paralyzed from sadness.
Fixd in the slime, they say: Sad once were we,
In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun,
Carrying a foul and lazy mist within:
Now in these murky settlings are we sad.
Such dolorous strain they gurgle in their throats,
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flames. The wall and its gate appear at lower right, the two
human characters indicated with only the briefest of lines. A
white space above the wall and a few pencil marks indicate
where the Furies would have appeared. The angel, nude, is
entering from the left, crouched like a runner in a sprint and
with wings spread wide. The dominant element in the
painting are the huge black swirls at the center, ensuing from
the angel and curling up over the wall. Here Blake has
indulged his tendency to illustrate elements in the authors
description that are not meant as literally present, but as
verbal descriptions of the scene. Dante writes that the sound
the angel makes at his arrival is as if a wind / Impetuous
proudly sweeps / His whirlwind rage. The poet indicates
that the sound of the angel is like a whirlwind, and the
illustrator has echoed the metaphor by including a visible
whirlwind in the painting. The metaphorical storm makes
beasts and shepherds fly, and though there are no shepherds
here in Hell, Blake has shown the whirlwind lifting souls out
of the waters of the Styx and dumping them, like some
mythical rain of frogs, onto the shore in front of the city wall.
In this case, I see no reason to conclude that Blake is at odds
with the text he is illustrating. Here he is employing images
from the poetry of the Comedy to convey more powerfully the
feeling that the poet intended. Blakes willingness to translate
verbal metaphor into visual symbols, we will see, accounts
for several more difficult images later on.
The large whirlwind swirls of this illustration, in addition to
showing forcefully the power of the angel, repeat visual
motifs of the earlier illustration of Paolo and Francesca.
Though the picture is rough and lacking detail, it has a bold
impact that makes it among the most successful in the series.
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Figure 35. The Angel Crossing the Styx, pen and ink and
watercolor over pencil (National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [9943]).
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Figure 36. The Angel at the Gate of Dis, pen and ink and
watercolor over pencil and black chalk (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [9953]).
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have been
Whatever Book is for Vengeance for Sin &
whatever Book is
Against the Forgiveness of Sins is not of the Father
but of Satan
the Accuser & Father of Hell [E 690]
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Why Blake chose to write these words here and not, for
instance, on the portrait of Satan, becomes clear when we
examine the idiosyncratic way he has drawn the map.
There are two obvious differences in Blakes map from every
other: first, it is upside-down, and second, the circles of Hell
arent level. We will find that there are good reasons for both
of these unique choices.
First, why did Blake draw Hell upside down? He has written
the obvious answer on the extreme right edge of the sheet.
This line reads sideways along the edge, from top to bottom:
This is Upside Down When viewd from Hells Gate
The next lines reverse direction, and continue from bottom to
top:
But right When Viewd from Purgatory after
they have passed the Center
In Equivocal Worlds Up & Down are Equivocal
This is true of course; when the pilgrim is at the gate of Hell,
he is in the northern hemisphere, Hell is below him, and Satan
would be head-up if he were visible. Purgatory is in the
southern hemisphere, though, and the pilgrim has passed
through the center of the earth, so if he looked down from this
position Hell would be upside-down, with Satan feet-up at the
top. All readers of the Comedy know this, but Blake is the
first to take advantage of the equivocal viewpoint to draw
Hell from this angle. It sometimes surprises students who
assume that everyone in the Middle Ages thought the world
was flat to discover that Dante not only knew the earth to be a
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The Violent
The circle of Hell inhabited by the souls of the violent is
divided into three sections. The first holds those who were
violent against other people, the second is for those who did
violence to themselves, and the third is for the souls who were
violent towards God or his will.
Blakes illustrations for the first two sections are in keeping
with our analysis so far and require no further comment. The
Minotaur and the centaurs who guard the first circle can be
seen as emblems of peoples violent passions, externalized as
were the three beasts in the opening canto of Hell (fig. 41).
The same is true of the harpies in the forest of the suicides
(fig. 42). Moreover, the fact that the suicidal souls are
changed into trees is another instance of the association of
materiality with wood.
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him, looking from his safe pathway into the rain of fire. The
fact that Blake has shown a woman as one of the runners is
perhaps an indication that he is not interpreting this group in
the traditional way. Of course women may participate in
sodomy, but sodomites are traditionally described as
homosexual men, and all of the figures the poet mentions in
this circle are male. The Bible never condemns female
homosexuality per se. I will return to this subject in my
discussion of the fourth picture made for this circle.
Canto 14 names as an example of blasphemy a character from
the Roman poet Statiuss epic work the Thebaid. This is
Capaneus, a proud warrior, who refuses to pray to any of the
gods of the Roman pantheon. Durling and Martinez tell us
that in the tenth book of the Thebaid, he is the first to
surmount the walls of Thebes, he disdains its earthly
littleness, challenges Bacchus and Hercules (its patrons) to
defend it, and then, disdaining lesser gods, challenges Jupiter
himself; Jupiter strikes him with a thunderboltanother
instance of fire from Heaven.
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394
Geryon
The drop between the circle of the violent and the next level
of Hell is too steep and high for the pilgrim to travel on his
own. To make this descent, he must ride on the fantastic
creature Geryon, a sort of chimera assembled from a mans
face, animal claws, the body of a serpent, and the sting of a
scorpion. His sympathetic facial expression is belied by the
monstrous rear parts, a combination that shows him to be
representative of fraud or malice, the sins that are punished in
the lower part of Hell. Whereas the sinners in the upper half
were damned for their inability to control basic desires, those
below consciously used their reason to deceive or seduce.
Blakes Geryon is depicted in a way that accurately follows
the poets description (fig. 47). His face is exaggeratedly
sincere-looking, his body properly convoluted, and the sting
in the tail appropriately dangerous. The pilgrim is seated on
his shoulders with Virgil behind, just as the narrative
describes. Though he is shown as he descends through the air,
there is no sense of motion in the picture. The sky is blue, but
flames rise from below.
Is this chimera a partial reintegration? Have the beasts of
passion, separated from the observer because of their
frightening nature, begun the process of rejoining with the
body? If so, it is too soon in the Comedy for the process to be
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The souls are not walking at the bottom of the ditch but along
its edges, and some seem to be escaping, climbing up the
ridge and away. They move only right to left, not in two
directions as the text states. And despite the fact that both of
the souls named by Dante are male, most if not all of the
figures in the illustration seem to be female, which of course
is not the way we normally imagine a group of pimps. There
are two bridges over the water. The demons punishing the
souls are shown flying, which is not indicated in the text.
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& one another> lead us not to read the Bible <but let
our Bible be Virgil & Shakspeare> & deliver us
from Poverty in Jesus <that Evil one> For thine is
the Kingship <or Allegoric Godship> & the Power
or War & the Glory or Law Ages after Ages in thy
Descendents <for God is only an Allegory of Kings
& nothing Else> Amen [E 669]
This parody does not specifically accuse the church of
simony, which involves the purchase of church offices, but
does flip head-to-toe everything Blake believed about true
religion.
The watercolor of the simonist pope shows, at top, Virgil
carrying the pilgrim (see fig. 49 in the color insert). This is
because the pair have left the ridge overlooking the ditch and
descended to its lowest point in order to observe the souls in it
more closely. Virgil offers to carry the pilgrim on the more
dangerous path. The damned soul is shown here, as in Dantes
text, with his feet protruding from a fiery well, a sort of
Hellish baptismal font. Blake has made this well partially
transparent, so that we can see the full figure of the pope
inside it, although the painting doesnt show the numerous
other souls who Dante says are crushed underneath the
topmost figure.
A similar reversal is shown in the next watercolor, which
shows the souls who practiced divination or necromancy and
are punished in the fourth bolgia (fig. 50). Because these
souls attempted to see ahead, into the future, in an illegitimate
way, their punishment is to have their heads turned
backwards. As they walk forward, they face only where they
have come from. As with the simonists, Blake never singles
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Figure 51. The Devils Under the Bridge, pen and ink and
watercolor over black chalk and pencil (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10003]).
408
top edge to the right. What makes the stone remarkable is that
Blake has shown it as composed of human parts, oversized
and ordered randomly. There is a foot at the base of the
column, but directly above that is a face, above that an
abdomen, an ear, and another foot. Perched above the ear is
another figure lightly sketched who is the same size as the
soul in the pitch. This rocky composite of body parts
corresponds to nothing in the text, though a similar rocky
column appears in one of the later illustrations.
Blake began his pictures with very rough pencil lines, loosely
sketched. One wonders if in this stone column he is
opportunistically emphasizing accidents of drawing, finding
pictures of body parts in his almost-random first draft as one
sees shapes in clouds, or as Leonardo recommended artists
throw a paint-soaked rag at a wall to imagine landscapes. The
presence of body parts can also be accounted for, as Roe
does, by recalling that The Four Zoas speaks of the scatterd
portions of fallen Albions immortal body (E 385), or how
the Book of Los describes
The Immortal stood frozen amidst
The vast rock of eternity; times
And times; a night of vast durance:
Impatient, stifled, stiffend, hardned [E 92].
Blake chose to engrave two of the watercolor designs for this
bolgia. One shows the soul Ciampolo, who has been lifted out
of the tar (fig. 52). In a particularly painful-looking scene, we
see the devil Libicocco hook Ciampolo:
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that we are doing what God wishes. If the devils are indeed
meant to be externalized portions from our own souls, these
unbearable portions may include smugness and
self-righteousness.
The second engraving from this episode shows the two devils
fighting each otherboth Alichino (Harlequin) and
Calcabrina (Trample Frost) are about to fall into the pitch.
This engraving is less finished than the previous one. The
devils upraised arms and the figures in the upper left quarter
are all left as rough outlines (fig. 54).
We catch a final glimpse of the comedic devils at the top of
the next illustration, as the pilgrim eludes them and they fly
back to their own bolgia. Now Dante has reached the circle of
the hypocrites, who walk under the weight of gilded lead
robes. Each time they complete the circumference of the
bolgia, they trample the soul of Caiaphas, who is crucified flat
on the ground. Caiaphas, the Jewish leader who (Dante
thought) had hypocritically voted to condemn Christ in order
to silence criticism of his own misdeeds, is a figure of Blakes
patriarchal type. Here again, this type is used to portray an
example of the worldly, false representatives of God, whose
outward appearance may fool the unwary.
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by God: upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat
all the days of thy life (Genesis 3:14).
By the time Blake was working, several writers had
demonstrated that the dust to which the snakes had been
cursed was the hyle of the material world. Thomas Vaughan,
an alchemist and philosopher in the Neoplatonic tradition,
describes matter as a serpent in his 1651 book Lumen de
Lumine, or New Magical Light. He illustrates this definition
with a mythical animal that is part rooster, part snake. And a
source even closer to Blake, Jacob Bryants New System: Or,
an Analysis of Antient Mythology, records that in the ritual of
Zoroaster, the great expanse of the heavens, and even nature
itself, was described under the symbol of a serpent.70 So the
association of snakes with evil, and of evil with the material
world, was established in numerous sources Blake knew.
Blakes own work makes frequent use of serpents, in a way
which we can apply directly to his Comedy illustrations. In
his Everlasting Gospel, he alludes to Genesis when he
writes:
Dust & Clay is the Serpents meat
Which never was made for Man to Eat [E 523]
And in the same poem he gives the snake a Neoplatonic
meaning by referring to The Serpent Bulk of Natures dross
(E 524). In Milton, the serpent or reptile appears as a symbol
of the souls narrowing down to the limited perceptions that
follow the Fall.
Ah shut in narrow doleful form
Creeping in reptile flesh upon the bosom of the
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ground
The Eye of Man a little narrow orb closd up & dark
[E 99]
In Jerusalem, when inspiration becomes impossible due to the
Fall, and reason takes over mans thoughts, the reasoning is
serpent-like.
For Bacon & Newton sheathd in dismal steel, their
terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like
vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute
articulations [E 159]
Nature can be depicted as a serpent:
Luvah & Vala
Went down the Human Heart where Paradise & its
joys abounded
In jealous fears in fury & rage, & like flames rolld
round their fervid feet
And the vast form of Nature like a Serpent playd
before them
[E 328]
as can the Selfhood, as when Albion beholds
the Visions of my deadly Sleep of Six Thousand
Years
Dazling around thy skirts like a Serpent of precious
stones & gold
I know it is my Self [E 255].
418
There are eleven illustrations for the level of the thieves, more
than for any other part of Hell. Two of these are very roughly
sketched views of the pilgrim and Virgil approaching or
leaving this ditch in Malebolge. These pictures correspond to
the first part of canto 24, before the snakes appear, in which
Virgil urges the pilgrim not to tire on his difficult journey.
Two more watercolors labeled HELL Canto 24 follow
Dantes descriptions closely. When the pilgrim can first look
down into the bolgia where the thieves are, he sees that
Amid this dread exuberance of woe
Ran naked spirits wingd with horrid fear,
......
With serpents were their hands behind them bound,
Which through their reins infixd the tail and head,
Twisted in folds before
[Hell, 24; Cary, 102].
Four of the five people in the foreground of Blakes
watercolor are tied up in this way, though only one is running.
And if we compare the illustration to the text, we see that one
part of Dantes description hasnt been shown, probably due
to Carys rather vague wording. The hands of the souls are
described as being tied behind their backs, but the snakes
heads and tails are then twisted between the persons legs to
make a knot in front. The Italian reads:
con serpi le man dietro avean legate;
quelle ficcavan per le ren la coda
el capo, ed eran dinanzi aggroppate [9496].
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422
Figure 55. The Thieves and Serpents, pen and ink and
watercolor over pencil and black chalk (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10043]).
423
who was unable to rise from the burning sand. The snakes
still prevent Fuccis rise, but the pilgrim is nearing the
deepest portion of Hell (or highest portion, according to
Blakes map) and will soon find the means of egress.
At this moment the travelers are approached by Cacus, a
centaur whose mane consists of snakes and on whose
shoulders a winged dragon rides. The other centaurs of myth
were employed above, in the circle of upper Hell reserved for
the violent, but Cacus is placed here because he is famous for
having stolen cattle from Herculess herd. Blakes picture of
him is like a majestic equestrian monument; the centaur kicks
his forelegs in the air, with his arms and the wings of his
dragon outspread. His face is bearded and patriarchal, but his
expression is not evil or frightening. He is carrying a sort of
staff with a round head, not mentioned by the narrator. The
picture is only done in pencil, with a bit of ink on the outlines
and gray wash. A few souls or snakes are faintly visible under
Cacuss feet.
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Now three souls draw near to the pilgrim, who overhears their
Italian, and pauses to watch them undergo two of the most
remarkable transformations in the Comedy. A six-legged
snake throws itself at one of the three souls, named Agnello
Brunelleschi. The snake grips his arms, waist, and legs in its
claws, wraps its tail through his legs, and bites his face. The
two beings then melt together, the line between them blurring,
and become a kind of horrible human/snake composite. Then
another of the souls, Buoso de Donati, is bitten by a small
snake, and with smoke issuing from both the serpents mouth
and the mans wound, the two change their statesthe snake
turns into a human, Guercio de Cavalcanti, and Buoso
becomes a snake. Dante describes in detail the physical
changes involved in this metamorphosis.
The serpent split his train
Divided to a fork, and the pierced spirit
Drew close his steps together, legs and thighs
Compacted, that no sign of juncture soon
Was visible: the tail, disparted, took
The figure which the spirit lost; its skin
Softening, his indurated to a rind.
The shoulders next I markd, that entering joind
The monsters arm-pits, whose two shorter feet
So lengthend, as the others dwindling shrunk.
The feet behind then twisting up became
That part that man conceals, which in the wretch
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436
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440
At right are two men who scratch endlessly at their red skin.
Though Blake has made them appear suitably uncomfortable,
he has chosen not to show the unpleasant detail of the scabs
and sores that Dante describes in his text. These two are
seated on top of another group of people, who are compressed
into an unmoving lump of flesh. Only one face from this
group is clearly shown: a simply drawn but accurate face of
an ill person lacking hope and the strength to move. The
pilgrim and Virgil observe the condemned souls from a step
on a stone arch, holding their noses against the smell.
The second watercolor for this bolgia, illustrating canto 30,
shows at top two souls with rabies, who pursue and bite a
third sinner (fig. 63). Dante describes these two, in Carys
translation, as running like the swine / Excluded from his
stye (Hell, 30; Cary, 127). Blake has made the simile more
literal, giving the two running figures the snouts of pigs.
Blake has divided the top and bottom of the illustration by a
sort of stone wall or arch, which isnt described in Dantes
text. The soul who has been attacked by the rabid pig is about
to fall off this wall into the pit below, as another soul, at left,
is doing already. The wall crowds the souls beneath it into a
mass that is barely visible beyond the figures of the pilgrim
and Virgil. The character with whom the pilgrim converses
longest in this canto, Maestro Adamo of Brescia, is not
identifiable herethe narrator makes it clear that Adamos
body looks like a lute, with a swollen belly, but no one in the
picture matches that description.
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Giants
Four illustrations depict the events of canto 31, in which the
pilgrim sees a ring of giants on the inward edge of Malebolge.
Viewed in order, these pictures follow closely the narrative of
the Comedy.
The pilgrim first sees the giants in the distance and mistakes
them for the towers of a city. Virgil corrects the
misunderstanding:
Yet know, said he, ere farther we advance,
That it less strange may seem, these are not towers,
But giants. In the pit they stand immersed,
Each from his navel downward, round the back
[Hell, 31; Cary, 131].
Drawing nearer, the travelers can see that the giants are
Uprearing, horrible, whom Jove from Heaven / Yet
threatens, when his muttering thunder rolls. The watercolor
for this scene shows the pilgrim and Virgil in the foreground,
tiny in comparison with the landscape and still-distant giants
(fig. 64). Dantes mistaking the giants for towers is made
understandable here, since the giants are drawn from the
back, their human features as yet hardly discernible. Blake
has not failed to note that the giants are still threatened by
Jupiter: jagged lightning shoots down from the clouds above
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447
Figure 65. Ephialtes and Two Other Titans, pen and ink
and watercolor over black chalk and pencil (National
Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920
[10113]).
448
characters that are not entirely evil, not doomed to this place
forever. Blakes Hell is like our worldin fact, it is our
worldin that some inhabitants are in better states than
others, and some will give up and flee in fear to a childish
world of innocence. Others will burn with a desire for uplift,
only to fail and fall back. Others, while currently blind, will
rise again.
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452
From canto 33 we learn that the soul behind, doing the biting,
is Count Ugolino, and his victim is an archbishop. The
archbishops robe and discarded hat are now visible, and his
crozier is lain horizontally along the bottom of the page.
Ugolino has left off biting the archbishops neck long enough
to tell his story and has extended his hands in a
self-exculpatory gesture. This picture from the next to the last
canto of Hell brings Blakes relation to Dantes work full
circle, in a way. It was the story that Ugolino tells here that
first caught the attention of the British reading public and
appeared in works by Fuseli, Reynolds, and Blake himself,
even before the Comedy as a whole was being read (see Part
I). The familiarity of Ugolinos story may explain why
Blakes illustration for it is sketched only in pencil, as if from
memory in a single sitting. The composition is symmetrical
and virtually identical to a tempera painting now in the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Because the pencil sketch
is very light, and the Fitzwilliam painting is finished, I have
chosen to reproduce the latter here (see fig. 69 in the color
insert).
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If the Sea of Time and Space is a metaphor for our world, the
material world of roiling change, Blakes Cocytus is that sea
in its worst possible condition. The constant change of an
unfrozen ocean at least allows for chaotic motion, which may
give hope for progression. But in contrast to the giants in the
previous cantos, who were powerful forces, the souls frozen
in Cocytus are as far from movement as they can be.
The final scene in Blakes Hell is a full-length portrait of
Satan (fig. 70). As Dante describes, he is frozen to the waist
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Figure 70. Lucifer, pen and ink and watercolor over pencil
and black chalk (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,
Felton Bequest, 1920 [10133]).Hell: Conclusion
No one gets out of Dantes Hell. It is sempiternal punishment,
and any motion that goes on there occurs without the hope of
progression. The type of sinner varies from place to place,
circle to circle, but in the end their fate is the same: more of
what they have now, forever. When William Blake, on the
other hand, writes of eternal death, he means that the state
of death may last forever but the person who is there will
eventually move on. When he shows us Hell, the people we
see there are not only suffering in different ways but have
different strategies, different points of view, and different
prospects for getting out. The frightened souls in the first of
the eight bolgia are running up the wall, heading back to their
preFall state, avoiding pain but giving up on progression to a
higher condition. Ulysses and the snake people have devised
plans of escape but, being stuck in a state of Urizenic reason,
dont see why they are doomed to fail. The spirit of revolution
lives on here. It may burn in a futile way, as with Capaneus,
seeing no way out, or it may make futile gestures, like Vanni
Fucci, but it still burns. The giants that we see near the end of
Hell are in a better condition than the ones at the entrance.
The demands they make may sound like nonsense, or their
chains may take another millennium to break, but they have
made enough progress to rouse the God of Hell to anger. His
angry lightning strikes at them, which is a good sign.
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10. Purgatory
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470
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473
Blake used the sun as a symbol in two ways that dont occur
explicitly in Dantes work. First, as we saw in our discussion
of the Arlington Court painting in Part III of this book, the
sun is the gate through which souls return to the ideal world
from the material. This use derives from Porphyry and other
Neoplatonists after him. Second, as Paley reminds us, Blake
followed in the tradition of Paracelsus and Agrippa by
identifying the sun with the human imagination.87 The name
of Blakes character Los, the personification of imagination,
may well be Sol in reverse.88 Both of these meanings
present themselves as likely readings of the prominent
presence of the sun in the illustrations to the Purgatory.
Having left the lower, material world, the souls who climb the
mountain are aiming to pass through the gate of the sun back
into the ideal. The suns rise in cantos 1 and 9, and its
appearances through the rest of the canticle in various degrees
of occlusion, are therefore signs that the goal is in sight.
Perhaps more importantly, and certainly more uniquely
Blakean, is the use of the sun in the Purgatory to refer to
human imagination. As we have seen, imagination for Blake
is the fundamental human faculty through which we relate to
the world. In our fallen condition it loses its power, and we
forget that we create everything we see through this faculty.
In Eden, however, the power of the imagination is restored,
and once again imagining is identical to creation, and the
world contracts or expands just as we wish to see it. The
horrors of Hell exist only because the souls there (i.e., here)
have lost the ability to perceive the world freely; this means
that the light of the imagination has gone dark, and,
symbolically, the sun (Los/Sol) has gone out. Little by little as
souls climb the mountain of Purgatory, the sun rises and
peeks from behind the clouds. When the pilgrim reaches
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477
Figure 76. The Lawn with the Kings and Angels, pen and
ink and watercolor over pencil (National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10163]).
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481
The rays
[Purgatory, 9; Cary, 185]
Blake shows the three steps colored as Dante describes, and
very large in relation to the figures of the travelers (see fig. 78
in the color insert). The angel sits above the steps, his wings
folded behind him. The gate is a Gothic pointed arch.
The most dramatic feature of this painting is not mentioned in
the text: Blake has shown, at the top left of the picture in the
distance beyond the mountain, huge red clouds obscuring the
bright sun. These are angry clouds, full of energy, not the
white or pink ones we have seen so far in this canticle. They
remind us of the very first time that Orc appears in Blakes
work, in the early book America:
Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels
of blood
And in the red clouds rose a Wonder oer the
Atlantic sea;
Intense! Naked! A Human fire fierce glowing, as the
wedge
Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were
fire [E 53].
Though Orcs human form doesnt appear in this illustration
to the Purgatory, the terrible red clouds are there, over the
Atlantic. This is the beginning of the restoration of the intense
energy necessary for souls to ascend. In contrast to the rather
tired-looking angel, the fiery red clouds with the light of the
sun behind them indicate that beyond the gate the ascending
soul finds the energy that was lost in the fall into division.
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488
The Rock Sculptured with the Recovery of the Ark and the
Annunciation, graphite, ink and watercolor (Tate,
London/Art Resource, New York).
The bad examples of pride, carved in relief into the floor of
this terrace, include Lucifer, Nimrod, and several others from
the Bible and from the classical world. Blake has shown this
terrace from a high viewpoint, making the horizontal marble
surface seem almost parallel to the picture plane (fig. 81). He
has not drawn the scenes and characters in the reliefs as
framed separate pictures, as the good examples were, but
jumbled one on the other, to make a single wild combination.
The pilgrim and Virgil stand at the bottom of the page, so that
we see their bodies against the background of the relief
images. Indeed, except for the touches of color on their
clothes, their figures nearly merge with the images of the
prideful. This, I think, is intentional and important.
Again and again we have seen that the Fall means the division
of the soul, and ascent requires reunification. In this
illustration, the merging of the travelers with the artistic relief
and its characters indicates that reintegration is under way.
The biblical and mythical characters are not put discretely
into separate frames, and the observers of these figures are
held at no distance whatsoever. They have all become one. If
we ask why the bad examples, the devils and monsters, are
shown merging with the pilgrim while the good examples
werent, we can see that it was these immoral cases that
caused the division to occur in the first place. It was our fear
of the three beasts in the dark forest that forced us into the
illusion that they exist outside of us. Likewise, it isnt the
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494
497
looks into the sky, relaxed and content. On both sides of the
staircase there are abundant small laurel trees.
The restfulness of the scene, the presence of the moon, and
the location of the steps, above the errors of the material
world but below Eden, all tell us that Blake has set this
illustration in the land that he calls Beulah. It is a brief but
important stop. In The Four Zoas, Blake describes Beulah this
way:
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504
505
506
507
508
509
510
512
513
Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity
Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride &
wife
That we his Children evermore may live in
Jerusalem
Which now descendeth out of heaven a City yet a
Woman
Mother of myriads redeemd & born in her spiritual
palaces
By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death [E
391]
Boehme had seen wisdom as female, and declared that she
was Christs wife.99 Jerusalem appears as a city and a
woman, descending from Heaven for a new spiritual rebirth.
In addition, if we follow Roe in seeing the watercolor of the
merkabah as the moment of the Fall, we are left with the
problem of the final canticle following on from this point. If
the Fall is just beginning, why do we now proceed to Heaven?
Roes interpretation of the Heaven illustrations are a mixture
of positive and negativesome of the souls in the upper
world demonstrate Blakes Eternity, and some show the fallen
world. The painting of the pilgrim with St. John, for example,
shows the final stage in the gradually expanding degrees of
perception,100 but the final drawing, of the Rose of Heaven,
depicts only the evil dominion of the Female Will.101
Despite the unusual presence of Beatrice as a representative
of salvation, I think we may see Blake as following in the
direction Dante meant to take us. From the Garden of Eden,
the pilgrim launches to Heaven, which Blake calls Eternity.
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515
igure 86. The Harlot and the Giant, pen and ink and
watercolor over pencil and black chalk (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10193]).
516
11. Heaven
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520
521
522
523
And as the imagination is the man, and all men are in Christ,
Christ himself is imagination: All things are comprehended
in their Eternal Forms in the Divine body of the Saviour the
True Vine of Eternity The Human Imagination (E 545).
The imagination, as we saw in Part III, is the faculty of mind
that makes a world from the noumena, and thus, it is the
creator of the human world. The imagination, then, is the
creator of all, who is God, who is Christ. Worship of Christ is
not like the monarchs of the earth worshipping the Angry God
of this World, because we know that imagination exists only
in people, and therefore worshipping Christ is worshipping
the creative source in ourselves and everyone else. God is not
distant but immanent in all of us, and the creative principle, or
Logos, is us: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only
begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
In canto 19, the pilgrim has ascended to the sphere of Jupiter,
the sphere of the just and temperate rulers. At this level he
sees the souls of several great kings, including David, Trajan,
and Constantine, and he sees a vision of a great eagle. Blake
shows none of this. Instead, he has invented a sort of
recording angel of a type that appears nowhere in the
Comedy. The watercolor is labeled PAR. Canto 19, but
without that hint we would be hard pressed to know where to
place it. This angel is similar to the one at the gate of
Purgatory: a seated patriarchal type with long, up-pointed
wings (fig. 88).
He is also similar in appearance to God as Blake shows him
in the Job series. Perhaps most importantly, he is much like
the evil God of this World that we met as the pilgrim
524
What then,
And who art thou, that on the stool wouldst sit
To judge at distance of a thousand miles
With the short-sighted vision of a span?
[Paradise, 19; Cary, 379]
We are told to have faith and not try to understand.
525
his own purposes. This and the next three pictures should be
read as a series; they form a sort of independent work within
the set of Dante illustrations, explicating the theme of unity in
multiplicity and of the blissful debate among spirits in
Eternity (fig. 89).
527
528
In the sphere of the fixed stars the pilgrim sees myriad souls,
who appear as flying lights. They combine to form larger
shapes.
Beatrice spake;
And the rejoicing spirits, like to spheres
On firm-set poles revolving, traild a blaze
Of comet splendour: and as wheels, that wind
Their circles in the horologe so work
The stated rounds, that to the observant eye
The first seems still, and as it flew, the last;
Een thus their carols weaving variously,
They, by the measure paced, or swift, or slow,
Made me to rate the riches of their joy
[Paradise, 24; Cary, 399400].
529
530
532
Figure 90. St. Peter Appears to Beatrice and Dante, pen and
ink and watercolor over black chalk and pencil (National
Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920
[10213]).
533
Figure 91. St. Peter and St. James with Dante and Beatrice,
pen and ink and watercolor over pencil (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10223]).
534
met the just rulers, we see two bearded patriarchal types, and
at Saturn, associated with religious contemplatives, figures
who look fittingly thoughtful. Above, in the Primum Mobile,
are six angels who look like those in the lower ranks. At top,
in Heaven itself, there is a sketch of a bearded patriarchal
type, with one hand on the top of the sphere and the other
waving in greeting. The effect of this figure is, frankly, a little
goofy. In fact the whole orderly drawing seems out of place in
the pilgrims ecstatic rise to Eternity.
538
Figure 93. The Vision of the Deity from Whom Proceed the
Nine Spheres, watercolor and some pen and black ink over
539
moment ago looked like sparks and jewels by the river are
now seen to be the angels and souls of Heavennow, for the
first time, visible to the pilgrim in human form.
bending me,
To make the better mirrors of mine eyes
In the refining wave: and as the eaves
Of mine eye-lids did drink of it, forthwith
Seemd it unto me turnd from length to round.
Then as a troop of maskers, when they put
Their vizors off, look other than before;
The counterfeited semblance thrown aside:
So into greater jubilee were changed
Those flowers and sparkles; and distinct I saw,
Before me, either court of Heaven displayd
[Paradise, 30; Cary, 429].
This is the moment of change in the Comedy that is most
suited to Blakes theology. The revelation here is not a
physical rise from level to level but a transformation of
perception. The doors are opened, and everything appears as
it really is, infinite. The change doesnt come about through
training or through logical explanation but through symbolic
means, a drink of light in a garden of sensual enjoyment.
The top third of Blakes illustration shows the source of the
river, a blazing circle too bright for us to see, and shown to be
so by the thinnest application of red, yellow, and blue
watercolor, leaving the white of the paper to imitate
effectively the light itself (see fig. 94 in the color insert). The
river flows vertically straight down the middle of the page. In
the lower part of the picture we see the foliage on the banks
of the river, the pilgrim bending to drink on the left side, and
542
544
Between the rose and God a host of angels flies back and
forth, delivering peace and ardour from God to the souls in
the rose. There is no obstruction between the light and the
soulsno more interference by the aetherial spheres or the
four elements.
Already, we can see that there are elements in Dantes
Heaven with which Blake could not agree. The foremost is
the separation that still exists between the souls and God.
Though his light shines directly on them, the souls are still
below God, and still require the intervention of angels to
receive their peace and ardour. Moreover, God is still
frustratingly abstract: an unspecified source of light, nothing
like a person. Dante describes him here as not only pure light,
but as eternally inscrutable to people:
O eternal Light!
Sole in Thyself that dwellst; and of Thyself
Sole understood, past, present, or to come
[Paradise, 30; Cary, 442].
For Dante, who believed in the transcendence of God, the
separation of God and man is unavoidable. However much
Gods emanation forms the ground of existence in all levels
of the universe, God is always greater than that which he
creates. Blake, as we have seen, held that God was absolutely
immanent. When perfect perception has been achieved, there
will be no more separation between man and God.
As Blake wrote in his Auguries of Innocence:
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
545
546
Her sway
[Paradise, 30; Cary, 430].
The direct relevance of this statement to Blakes thought is
even clearer in other translations. The Italian sounds more
Urizenic than Carys choice of the word sway.
ch dove Dio sanza mezzo governa,
la legge natural nulla rileva
[Paradiso, Canto 30, 122123].
Legge means law. In Singletons direct translation:
where God governs without intermediary,
the law of nature in no way prevails.108
The idea of God governing, as if he were an earthly king, is
unacceptable as long as God is transcendent, over and above,
but if we could finally realize that God is Man, the message
would accord with what Blake tells us. Laws of nature, of the
type that Newton and Bacon provided, hold sway only in a
world where imagination has lost its power. In Eternity,
human imagination is not bound by laws. In Jerusalem, we
see the souls in Eternity
creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the
wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination [E 258]
As we come to the end of the Comedy, then, reading with
Blakes viewpoint in mind, we see that Dante comes
frustratingly near to a true vision of God, only to fall short at
547
the last moment. It is only that gap between the souls in the
rose and the source of the light that needs to be closeda
final overcoming of that transcendence. The falling-short is
emphasized by Dantes repeated use of the inexpressibility
topos in these last cantos. Again and again we read that what
he experienced in Heaven exceeds his powers of expression,
vigour faild the towering fantasy, and not language nor art
can show what lies beyond the transcendental leap. Blake has
tried to complete, in a picture, what Dante failed to tell.
Blakes final illustration in the series makes the rose of
Heaven a real rose; he has drawn not only the petal-like
shapes that Dante describes but also the green sepals below
(fig. 95). The scale is much reduced from the description in
the text; if the people within are the size of earthly people, the
flower is far smaller than the diameter of the sun. Each petal
contains a soul, and other people are perched above, in poses
like those seen in Michelangelos Last Judgment. At the top
we see Mary, labeled by Blake in pencil. She is holding a
scepter and a looking glass, also labeled. Below her and
looking up at her are three female figures, and at each side of
this group is an open book, one labeled Homer and the
other Aristotle. At the far left and right of the flower are
two figures too sketchy to be identified as male or female,
labeled Thrones and Dominionstwo types of angel.
Each of these sits behind a closed book. The book on the left
is labeled corded round and the right Bible Chained
round. Above the rose we see an arch of small angels,
probably flying, as Dante describes them, to the light above
and then down again.
548
Figure 95. The Queen of Heaven in Glory, pen and ink and
watercolor over pencil and black chalk (National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [10233]).
549
551
both of body
& mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination
[E 231].
Dante tells us that neither God nor the angels need books. In
fact, they dont need memory, because all truth is eternally
visible to them. Human souls who have reached Eternity,
therefore, having fulfilled the message of the Gospel, would
no longer need to consult the book; they would be living it by
exercising the divine arts of imagination in their most
powerful forms.
The First Book of Urizen contains an image we may use as a
contrasting example to the closed books in the rose of Heaven
(fig. 96). In that early illuminated book, Urizen is shown
holding his Book of the Law wide open in front of him,
presenting us with the laws of nature and of the false God that
we are to obey in our fallen condition. The writing on the
pages of the book is not legible; it is painted as a mish-mash
of spots and blurs. We do not achieve the freedom of Heaven
until this book is shut and chained.
553
556
557
558
Conclusion
559
561
Chapter Notes
Preface
1. William Blake: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1988), 777.
All quotes from Blakes work are from this edition. Further
references will be given as E followed by the page number.
Blakes original spelling and punctuation are maintained
throughout. <Angle brackets> indicate Blakes changes to the
text.
2. Jacob Boehme, Von gttlicher Beschaulichkeit, chap. i,
quoted in G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of
Philosophy; Part Three: Modern Philosophy, Section 1.B,
Jacob Boehme, trans. E.S. Haldane, http://www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpboehme.htm.
3. Albert S. Roe, Blakes Illustrations to the Divine Comedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).
4. For example, Milton Klonsky, Blakes Dante (New York:
Harmony, 1980).
5. Rodney M. Baine, Blakes Dante in a Different Light,
Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society
105 (1987): 11336; David Fuller, Blake and Dante, Art
History 11 (1988): 34973.
562
Part I
1. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 17721804
(New York: Pantheon, 1999).
2. Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante in English Poetry
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 12572.
3. Albert S. Roe, Blakes Illustrations to the Divine Comedy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 32.
4. Quoted in Arthur Symons, William Blake (New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1907), 258.
5. Roe, Blakes Illustrations, 16471.
6. Morton Paley, The Traveller in the Evening (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 115.
7. William Butler Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New
York: Collier, 1961), 128.
8. For example: the key-bones & the chest dividing in pain /
Disclose a hideous orifice; thence issuing the Giant-brood /
Arise as the smoke of the furnace, shaking the rocks from sea
to sea. / And there they combine into Three Forms, named
Bacon & Newton & Locke (E 224).
9. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and
Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Thomas Sadler (London:
Macmillan, 1869), 309.
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
Part III
1. Henry Boyd, A Translation of the Hell of Dante Alighieri,
in English Verse, with Historical Notes, and the Life of Dante
(Dublin: P. Byrne, 1785), v; italics in original.
2. S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Boulder:
Shambhala, 1965), 176.
3. For example: Thou lovedst me well, / And hadst good
cause; for had my sojourning / Been longer on the earth, the
love I bare thee / Had put forth more than blossoms,
Paradise, 8; Cary, 32526; spoken by Charles Martel.
4. Boyd, A Translation of the Hell of Dante Alighieri, 163.
5. Ibid., 23.
6. Dante Alighieri, The Vision of Dante Alighieri, translated
by H.F. Cary (London: J.M. Dent, n.d.), 277; all other
references to this book will be given in the text.
7. Boyd, A Translation of the Hell of Dante Alighieri, 118.
8. Ibid., 132.
9. Ibid., 136.
10. Ibid., 141.
11. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1971), 57.
570
571
572
574
576
577
578
579
580
Reminiscences,
and
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
69.
Plato,
Timaeus,
trans.
Benjamin
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html.
Jowett,
594
595
596
597
References
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
Bacon, Francis
Baine, Rodney M.
Basire, James
Beatrice
Bertrand de Born
Bindman, David
Blair, Robert
Bloom, Harold
Boehme, Jacob
Bocca degli Abbati
Book of Job
The Book of Los
The Book of Thel
The Book of Urizen
Botterill, Steven
Botticelli
Boyd, Henry
609
Boydell, John
Bromion
Bruno, Giordano
Bryant, Jacob
Bunyan, John
Buoso Donati
Butlin, Martin
Butts, Thomas
Byron, George Gordon
Caiaphas
Capaneus
Cary, Henry Francis
Cassirer, Ernst
Cato of Utica
Cavalcante Cavalcanti
Cerberus
610
Charon
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Ciampolo the Barrator
Ciardi, John
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Coppe, Abiezer
Cowper, William
Cromwell, Oliver
Damon, S. Foster
Dante Alighieri:
Darwin, Erasmus
David (king)
Davies, Edward
Descriptive Catalogue
Dor, Gustave
Drer, Albrecht
611
Durling, Robert M.
Ephialtes
Erdman, David
Erigena, Johannes Scottus
Essick, Robert
Europe
The Everlasting Gospel
612
Galileo Galilei
Geryon
The Ghost of a Flea
Gianni Schicchi
Gibbon, Edward
Giovanni di Paolo
Godwin, William
Goya, Francisco
613
The Grave
Gwin, King of Norway
614
James, William
Jerusalem
Johnson, Joseph
Jung, Carl
Kant, Immanuel
Keats, John
Kepler, Johann
The Keys of Calais
Kircher, Athanasius
Klonsky, Milton
615
616
Michelangelo
Milton
Milton, John
Minos
Minotaur
Mitchell, W.J.T.
Moevs, Christian
Montesquieu, Baron Charles-Louis de Secondat de
Morning
Muggletonianism
Nardi, Bruno
Newton
Newton, Isaac
Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus)
Nimrod
Numenius
617
Orc
Origen
Ovid (character in The Divine Comedy)
Ovid (Roman poet)
Paine, Thomas
Paley, Morton
Paolo and Francesca
Paracelsus
Paradise Lost
Phlegyas
Pico della Mirandola
Pinsky, Nicole
Pinsky, Robert
Plato
Plotinus
618
Plutus
Porphyry
Portrait of Dante Alighieri
Priestley, Joseph
Proclus
Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite
Punter, David
Raine, Kathleen
Raphael
Reynolds, Joshua
Richardson, Jonathan
Robinson, Henry Crabb
Roe, Albert S.
Rogers, Charles
Russell, Archibald G.B.
Rusticucci, Jacopo
619
St. Ambrose
St. Augustine
St. Gregory the Great
St. John
St. Lucia
St. Peter
St. Thomas Aquinas
Satan
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich
Shakespeare, William
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Singleton, Charles
Smith, John
Smollet, Tobias
Southey, Robert
Spenser, Edmund
620
Statius
Stempel, Daniel
Stoudt, John Joseph
Stukeley, William
Swedenborg, Emmanuel
Taylor, Thomas
Tharmas
Thel
There Is No Natural Religion
Thompson, E.P.
Thorton, Robert John
Tiresias
Toynbee, Paget
Ugolino
Ulysses
621
Urizen
Vala
Vanni Fucci
Vaughan, Thomas
Virgil (character in The Divine Comedy)
Virgil (Roman poet)
the Virgin Mary
Viscomi, Joseph
Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Walpole, Edward
Walpole, Horace
Warton, Thomas
Watanabe, Morimichi
Werner, Bette Charlene
Wicksteed, Joseph
622
Wilford, Francis
Winckelmann, Johann
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Wordsworth, Dorothy
Wordsworth, William
623