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

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

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--Zürich. / "List of books used": p. 57-58.