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  • Essay / Prophetic voice in the poetry of William Blake

    In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1793), Blake writes with a strong prophetic voice, giving rise to a new set of proverbs, a new poetic, twisting and overturning traditional wisdom. Blake challenges the status quo, challenging stagnant and conventional thinking. As if standing before a gathered crowd, he exclaims: “All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors…” (MHH 4). It is a poetic, powerful and searing production, a collection of proverbs which hovers very easily over those who are still chained in these abandoned “spirit-forged handcuffs” (London 27). Blake's words, like those of a prophet, at first throw us into confusion. He wants to lead the reader off the beaten path, through the dark forest, making him feel as if we are lost, with the hope of seeing us enter a new clearing; a new understanding of our being, opening wide the “doors of perception” (MHH 39). (We can only imagine how confused the disciples were when Christ said, “But I tell you that whoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” taking the commandment against lust , marginalized in the series of ten, and by placing it at the center of his teaching, completely reorganizing the social landscape around the question of desire.) Blake wishes to reverse the relationship between Energy and Reason, between Imagination/Vision and Materialism, differently. known as the “Plant Ratio” (Mil 5.35). Such a radical paradigm shift calls for a dramatic approach, which Blake finds in the hyperbolic poetics of the prophets. But why is hyperbole necessary? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essayBlake condemns the "relation of the five senses" (MHH 35), this abyss, considered the foundation not only of Lockean thought , but also the age of reason, leading man astray; the prophet must remind him. In the section “A Memorable Fantasy,” Blake puts words into the mouths of Isaiah and Ezekiel to fit his new vision. He has Isaiah profess: "I have neither seen nor heard any God, in finite organic perception", and Ezekiel affirms: "we, Israel, taught that Poetic Genius... was the first principle and all others derivatives” (35). . The Poetic Genius, the prophet, goes beyond the theory of correspondences of truth, of rectitudo, of adaequatio, of assimilatio, of convenience, to enter into the poetics of prophecy, a hyperbolic theory of the truth. We do not grasp or evaluate their revelations, but they grasp us. Blake's writing style is not a testament to what we can measure before us, what we can oppose, and what we can object to. This goes beyond what we can perceive with our physical organs; “Human perceptions are not limited by organs of perception. He perceives more than the senses (even if acute) can discover” (NNR 2). Blake's writing style is a testament to what we can "perceive" with our vision and imagination, as he so poetically puts it: Now I see a fourfold vision And a fourfold vision is given to me It is quadruple in my supreme pleasure And triple in the sweet night of Beulah And double Always. May God save us from Newton's unique vision and sleep (TB, 722.83-8). Blake personifies the banality of the single vision, the limits of reason, the "plant ratio", manifested by the limited creation of closed and global systems and by generalization. concepts, » 1802.” 720-22.