Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
"Without Contraries is no Progression." With this simple statement in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake posited, in 1790, a process -- a Hegelian dialectic of sorts, if you will -- that has underscored much of his poetry and has revealed itself in his etchings and engravings. But what, exactly, this Blakean hypothesis means is open to debate. One way to explicate this notion is to look at it in terms of a process of reunification or "recursion" wherein one falls from the Blakean space of "Innocence" (or is dragged kicking and screaming) to the rather terrestrial sphere of "Experience," only to progress further on to some other position. This last is indeed vague, for within the Blakean text the recuperation is always merely an attempt, an implication, at least, that the Romantic condition may not be a forever unattainable goal [1].
Repository Citation
Kelleway, Kelly. "The Strange Attraction of Blake's Urizen." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss1/14