Notes

• If the Urizen books contain Blake’s account of Genesis, written and depicted from the ‘devilish’ perspective of a ‘Bible of Hell’, then the continental prophecies present his critical reckoning with the history of his own times, a fascinatingly complex and multi-faceted account of the struggle between revolutionary counter-revolutionary thought of the first half of the 1790s. In America, the first of the continental poems, Blake moves away from his earlier mode of historical allegory and enters the realm of prophetic utterance. In poetry and imagery alike, Blake’s prophecies follow Old Testament models in the sense that they are less concerned with prediction than with the process of social and political criticism. While America still contains many historical references, these are integrated in a mythical ‘plot’ that transcends the narrow confines of historical reportage and pamphleteering. In Europe and in ‘Africa’ and ‘Asia’ (the two parts that make up The Song of Los) Blake is even less concerned with concrete historical events than in developing the myth of Orc and Urizen, Enitharmon and Los which describes and criticizes the intricate structure of social oppression that the author saw as resulting from human kind’s history under the rule of organised state religion. Each of the three books also attempts to point a way toward the prerequisites for the equally complex process of millenial liberation. The commentary aims to introduce readers of the three books to the structural unity and many-layered meaning of Blake’s visual-verbal myth-making, and to guide them through the maze of critical approaches and interpretation that they have elicited