Blakes Poetry: Spectral Visions [Paperback]

William Blake is acknowledged as a poet of opposition and contradiction: a writer who, from Songs of Innocence and Experience to his last epic Jerusalem, ceaselessly explored the conflicts between limitation and possibility, reason and energy, torment and joy. But the contradictions within Blake's own 'visionary' poetics are less often considered. Throughout his work, Blake powerfully dramatises the energies and agonies of his own poetic labour.List of Abbreviations - List of Plates - Acknowledgements - Introduction - Critical Exclusions: Spectres and Blake Criticism - The 'Cloud and Vision': the Sublime, Vision and Revolution - 'Twixt Earnest & Joke': Poetic Sovereignty - Shadows of Horror: Binding and Unbinding in the Lambeth Prophecies - Excesses of Joy and Grief: the Veil, Sexuality and Apocalypse in The Four Zoas - 'Drawing a Third Part': Destruction and Redemption in Milton - 'Continually Building, Continually Destroying': Language in Jerusalem - References - Index