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Dialectic in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell assaults what Blake termed a “cloven fiction” between empirical and a priori procedure in argument. In content, the Marriage compounds ethical and theological “contraries”; in form it mocks the categorical techniques that seek to make the contraries appear as “negations.” The unity of the Marriage is in itself dialectical, and cannot be grasped except by the mind in motion, moving between the Blakean contraries of discursive irony and mythical visualization.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 73 , Issue 5-part1 , December 1958 , pp. 501 - 504
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958

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References

Apocalypse is dialectical in the Marriage, as much so as in Shelley's Prometheus or the poems by Yeats written out of A Vision, or in Blake's own “Night the Ninth” of The Four Zoas. The great difficulty of dialectical apocalypse is that it has got to present itself as prophetic irony, in which the abyss between aspiration and institution is both anticipated and denounced. The specific difficulty in reading The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is to mark the limits of its irony: where does Blake speak straight? In Blake, rhetoric subsumes dialectic, and usurps' its place of privilege. But the process of usurpation is not clear, though this is no flaw in Blake as poet and polemicist. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a miniature “anatomy,” in Northrop Frye's recently formulated sense of the term, and reserves to itself the anatomy's peculiar right to mingle satire with vision, furious laughter with the tonal complexity involved in any projection of the four or more last things.

Note 1 in page 502 David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, 1954), pp. 160-166.

Note 2 in page 502 Fearful Symmetry (Princeton, 1947), p. 194.

Note 3 in page 504 Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1948), p. 735.