AMBIGUOUS BLASPHEMY: BLAKE AND THE ONTOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

One of the more curious features of Blake's prophetic canon is that each poem or cluster of poems describes the same event. Not only do several of the poems retell similar actions, but in a few instances Blake repeats his poetry verbatim. Such overlapping might reasonably suggest that the canon is simply a series of revisions of a single poem, but Blake's distinct titling of the poems argues something else. Just as each poem describes the recovery of the divine Word, the canon as a whole dramatizes the rise from Ulroan (utilitarian) to Edenic (poetic) perception of language. Although the poems appear to be governed by rhetorical democracy--every Minute Particular is given equal weight which makes it difficult to impose a hierarchy on actions, ideas, or the words themselves--a single metaphor predominates in each poem. The metaphors describe a gradual rise from the material elements to spirit: in the revolutionary poems the word behaves like fire; in The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, the central image is that of upheaval, earthquake; the howling of The Four Zoas suggests wind as well as beast and depicts the advance of the word from inanimate to animate status; Milton describes the next stage in which the word assumes human characteristics; and, finally, Jerusalem reveals the divine status of the word.; As I shall demonstrate in my discussion of the prophecies, a close examination of Blake's apocalyptic visions of language shows the eventual falling away of metaphor and confirms his own sublime recognition that "In Eternity one Thing never Changes into another Thing ; Each Identity is Eternal. . . ." I shall begin my analysis by showing how "The Tyger" wrestles with the inherent ambiguity of the fallen tongue, and I shall conclude with Heidegger's solution to the problem of metaphor. Throughout the dissertation I shall argue that, according to Blake, the Poetic Genius allows one to escape the fundamental deceit of language and recover, as Heidegger puts it, the authentic "word that alone gives being to the thing."...