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The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the philosophy of William Blake as it is expressedin his poetry and other works. The study shows Blake as a lucid and consistent thinker whose philosophy is a subjective idealism, not unlike Berkeley's, directed against British empiricism. The study is divided into an examination of his theory of gods, his theory of knowledge, his theory of what there is, his theory of man, and his ethics.Blake's theory of God is not unlike Spinoza's in that it is a pantheism which appears as atheism to those not thoroughly familiar with Blake's thought. God, according to Blake, is an all-penetrating life force evidenced by the universality of drives, instinctual behavior, and the collective unconscious on the level of dream and imagination.Imagination is also central to Blake's epistemology. This theory of knowledge is shown to relyon voluntarily changeable a priori structures of the mind. Blake calls these the imagination and explains them in terms of the fourfold vision. Dependent on poetic metaphor, man's imagination or the poetic genius in every man is able to create a world of appearance, a world which is, as any world, man's mental image.Based on this epistemology, Blake's cosmology indicates a noumenal world, which is pantheisticto the degree to which a theory of an all-penetrating life force can be considered a pantheistic one. The noumenal world is interpreted in accordance with the a priori structures of the mind, and the noumenon can appear, as a result of such interpretation, as phenomenon. While the phenomenon is held in being by the perceiver, the noumenon is metaphysical, static unity independent of perception.On that noumenal level, also time is static and structured. Man's perception causes it to appear as progressing, but the fact that certain elements of apparent reality are recurrent gives evidence of the static essence of time. The poetic genius supplies structure also to the human experience of time.The theory of man is dependent upon the same distinction between phenomenal and noumenal world. In reference to man, Blake distinguishes between phenomenal men (principio individuationis) and the noumenal Man (humanity as one Being). In respect to man in society, Blake has a very pessimistic view. Existential man is engaged in battle and mutual exploitation which he insufficiently seeks to control through the institution of religion and moralities. Such institutions (Urizen) have a repressive effect and serve to pervert the instinctual human self (Orc).Blake's ethics, then, seek to liberate the instinctual self and to defeat reason, the originator of morality and religion. The ultimate end of such a liberation is to overcome phenomenal objectness or fragmentation for the sake of a symbiotic unity of man with man and man with the world. An imaginative identification of man with man and a dropping of all ego-boundaries is essential to the symbiotic unity and the achievement of a universal self of mankind.Throughout the study, I attempted to cite parallel examples from other philosophers and philosophies, which examples were to help place Blake into perspective in terms of the development of occidental philosophy as well as to elucidate some of the key ideas in Blake's thought. Ultimately, what the study shows is that Blake is a philosopher who, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, chose poetic language as the most meaningful and most effective vehicle for his philosophy.

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In the prophecies of William Blake, the chief agent in bringing about the Apocalyptic restoration of fallen man is the poet-prophet Los. In The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the poet-prophet appears as the Bard who calls the lapsed soul to return to Innocence, the state of integrated vision. In the minor prophecies, as Blake moves into the fragmented mind of the individual in the state of Experience to show us the movement back to the integrated vision of Innocence, the poet-prophet emerges as Los. He is uncertain of his role, since Blake has not yet granted him the guiding influence of the inspiration of Jesus. With The Four Zoas comes the first complete statement of the myth of the fall and resurrection of man, represented by Albion, and with this myth comes the definition of the role of Los as the part of Albion who retains more of the Divine Vision than any of the other Zoas. At the crucial point in the myth of the fall, Jesus inspires Los, who then begins to build redemptive works of art amid the chaos, although, finally, restoration of Albion is not achieved in this poem. In Milton, the final movement toward Apocalypse begins. Although much of the poem deals with the appearance of the historical poet-prophet, Milton, within the mythic world of Los, the redemptive work proceeds as Los, with his family, builds Golgonooza, the city of art, as well as redemptive forms for the Spectres of the Dead, those formless abstractions which exist in a disordered mind. Jerusalem is a presentation of the Apocalyptic reunion of Albion and completes the movement begun in Milton. In this final prophecy, Los never doubts the Divine Vision of Jesus, and having subdued his Spectre, he works toward the resurrection with all his arts. Through Los, inspired as he is by Jesus, Albion achieves renewed vision and all the Zoas return to their rightful positions within him. His work done, Los returns to the Mental Warfare of Eternity in the form of Urthona, his equivalent within the resurrected Albion. Man, fallen from Innocence, is restored to Innocence through the work of one of the parts of his mind. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

William Blake was an artist and a craftsman as well as a poet, and he literally made as well as wrote his books of poetry. It is easy to see that, as an artist, Blake was fundamentally concerned with the physical production of his books of poetry, since for him, the physical form of his works was as much a part of their meaning as the content of the verse. But this primarily artistic interest in the production of his illuminated books also finds expression in the literary aspect of his work. There it takes the form of a carefully veiled, yet surprisingly consistent and detailed metaphoric discussion of the actual stages of production by which he created his famous illuminated books. By looking first at the metaphors in their most mature, most fully-developed expression, this thesis attempts to accomplish two things. The first goal is to clearly identify the vocabulary, imagery, and rhetorical patterns which characterize Blake's handling of the metaphors. Once this is accomplished, the aim of the thesis is to look back into Blake's early poetry in an attempt to plot the early emergence and development of these metaphors, and then to look forward to his later work to trace the metaphors as they evolve in conjunction with his myth and with his technical experimentation. In the early work "The Tyger," Blake is clearly infusing his developing myth with the elements of his process of production, but at this early stage, Blake is not yet tapping the metaphoric potential available to him. It is in the course of writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Blake begins to make full use of the metaphors, and in the subsequent work of America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los the metaphors of illuminated printing steadily increase in coherence, detail, and frequency. But before Blake ended his poetic career, the metaphors per se seemed to lose part of their interest for him and in the later poem Milton, the relative frequency with which they occur drops markedly. Nevertheless, the general patterns of Blake's process of book reproduction remain as important structural elements of the poem —a testament of the fact that Blake's physical techniques of production exerted a fundamental influence on his poetic vision. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Reading and personal experiences have often drawn my attention to the exceptionally high incidence of despair, "nervous disorder", alcoholism, nihilism and even suicide, among modern artists. I would like in this work to look at the visionary, Blake, against the problem of 'breaking the sound-barrier' and against the background of disastrous attempts at this by modern artists.

Thesis (M.A. (Masters by dissertation))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012. / This study is concerned with the relationship between images and poetry in the early illuminated books of William Blake. It seeks to explore the generative production of meaning which arises from the interaction of these different aesthetic modalities. Such meanings are investigated through the notion of a “Third Text”, which has been adapted from the thought of Stephen Behrendt (“‘Something in my Eye’: Irritants in Blake’s Illuminated Texts”). The Third Text arises from the interaction of images and texts, but is identical to neither alone, nor is it constituted by the sum of the contributing parts. The interactions of image and text are further elucidated through the application of selected poststructuralist theories, drawn from the writing of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Notions of the Text, différance, the supplement and spectrality are central to the argument. An interaction is established between Blake’s illuminated books and the chosen poststructuralist constructs in order to recognise the singularity of the verbal and visual material considered. An interrelated component of this study is a reflection on the ways in which Blake breaks the conceptual frames of image and text in his illuminated books, thus challenging a range of established models. Particular attention is paid to the early illuminated books, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and America a Prophecy. Key concerns of this study include the ways in which Songs challenges the boundaries between innocence and experience and the exploration of prophetic vision in America. The dissertation concludes by emphasising the importance of preserving an infinite relation of image to text, both in Blake studies and more broadly in the analysis of image-text