More papering; ignore if you don't want really disparate writing on Blake and Milton

What does Blake’s poem have to say about poets and prophecy? Milton’s? How comfortable are the poems with the idea of visions and visionaries?

“So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed. I answered: we impose on one another, & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics” (40)
-Much of Milton’s most involved poetic moments in Paradise Lost come with rhetoric and in rhetorical speeches.
-Milton speaks of prophecy in books 11-12 – both Milton and Blake almost use the same lines to describe man’s limits of perception. Blake: “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man” (32). Milton: “I perceive / Thy mortal sight to fail: objects divine / Must needs impair and weary human sense” (Bk. 12 l. 8-10) and “But to nobler sights / Michael from Adam’s eyes the film removed / Which that false fruit that promised clearer sight / had bred” (Bk. 11 l. 411-414) and later Adam must “close his eyes” (l. 419) in order to take in all he is to see. Blake and Milton both speak to human reason clouding some larger sense of truth (divine Good and Evil in Milton; or poetic genius in Blake). Milton relies on some sort of divine intervention in order to expand human ‘sight’, or reason (but remains limited to expansion in terms of the ability to use the human mind to reason and rationalize) – Blake gives more credit by positing that humans, if they are open to more infinite frames of mind (equally entertaining multiple or oppositionary modes of thought; or giving words multiple definitions/meanings) have the ability for themselves to tap directly into these larger truths.
Interesting that Milton uses the word ‘impair’ to describe the effects of divine ‘sight’ or foresight/prophecy on ‘human sense’, or human’s ability to reason. Impair from Latin, pejorare – “to make worse”. So is foresight or the ability to prophesy a negative thing for humans? In the sense that Michael perhaps believes we shouldn’t shoot too high? It aids in the ‘knowledge isn’t all good’ argument of the poem – ignorance is bliss, sort of. But, in reverse, does that mean that not having an absolute or not being able to predict outcomes is best? That making mistakes and thus gaining wisdom from experience is better than having the knowledge of the mistake ready-made? Certainly more ‘poetic’ interpretation of the merits of human reasoning, in a Romantic sense – not having knowledge of purpose, not knowing what should come next, lends to creating self-purpose, to fashioning a purpose independent of the pursuit of absolutes (absolute truth, absolute good, etc.).

Milton framing speeches with caveats – “so spake the apostate angel”; he “weeped as only an angel could weep”
-arguments which are easily taken apart through reasoning them through – i.e., how the Devil in the Garden with Eve interprets eating from the tree of good and evil, AND eve’s subsequent rationalizing to herself of eating from the tree.

Blake places himself in the poem both as a prophet and as a friend of the prophets. He dines with Ezekiel and Isaiah in the twelfth and thirteenth plates: “I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert, that God spoke to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition” (34). Blake has concerns about the deception that poets or prophets sometimes proffer in their writings. I don’t think he means it as a purposeful deception, but is concerned about the liminality of speech in being able to describe infinite things.
Blake’s concern of the finite used to describe the infinite, or his anxiety about receiving information from the “perceptions” (35) of a secondary source, shows up later in his journey with the angel who shows him his fate. While with the angel, Blake views his fate as epically hellish: “a cloud and fire burst and rolled thro’ the deep…beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest…we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire” (38). But when the angel leaves, Blake sees quite a different scene than the one the angel presented him, and reports to the angel that “All that [Blake and the angel] saw was owing to [the angel’s] metaphysics; for when [the angel] ran away, I found myself on a bank by the moonlight hearing a harper” (39). Blake is incredibly wary of self-proclaimed poets or visionaries who claim to show truths but instead offer limited perceptions or interpretations. Blake believes that false prophecy leads to More here. Indeed Blake interprets himself as a primary source, not as a poet who reinterprets divine (or satanic) prophecy, but as a scribe who writes directly what the divine and what the satanic speak: “As I was walking among the fires of hell…I collected some of their Proverbs” (30).
Blake sometimes directly associates poetic genius with the ability to be a prophet; a true poet, he thinks, spontaneously is gifted or receives direct communication with divine Truths or sayings. Blake has a deep concern about art being or producing something original – his illuminated paintings, each one painted and produced differently than any other copy, may be the best testament to his obsession with originality. Blake’s harshest criticism is of Swedenborg, whom he says writes “a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further” and also that “he has written all the old falshoods” (40). Poetic genius, Blake offers, is established in having a mind infinite enough to be capable of receiving these messages despite conflicting messages being produced by man. He thinks the function of a poet is to reproduce the divine, not interpret it, as he criticizes Swedenborg of doing. He praises poets whom he believes recapitulate messages from the infinite – messages which he believes both take into account the angelic/Good/reason/religious and “converse with Devils who all hate religion” (40) – and cites Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton all as poets who have expansive enough minds to be considered primary authorities of poetic thought.
In this vein, Blake is damning of interpretation and of gilded metaphor or poetic speech. Most generally, his own writing in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is plain and without set verse or rhyme. It lays out claims in a very clear and almost philosophic style; these claims are often numbered, bulleted, or separated by line breaks which aid in visual ease of the work. Often Blake equates eloquent speech as the building blocks to oppression and finite interpretation: “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion” (32). Blake almost argues for a reading against the grain when he says that “opposition is true friendship” (40) or acerbically claims that he “reads the Bible together [with an angel who has become a devil] in its infernal or diabolical sense which the world shall have if they behave well” (41).


Both Milton and Blake I think use images of the devil and of hell as a protagonist (or anti-hero) for the shock value; the fact that the audience finds themselves sometimes rationalizing or approving of, in Milton’s case, arguments or speeches that the devils posit, or, in Blake’s case, Machiavellian-like prophecies that do have some credence. They play with the appeal of the taboo more here how milton’s play deviates from blake’s. While Milton may only argue to think and reason for yourself, or to question authority, Blake takes it one step further and actively argues for reading oppositionally to what is being offered you in the hopes of expanding your capability for understanding the infinite or receiving infinite truths.