ABSTRACT
Of the three prophetic books proper—The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem—Milton is the least successful. Although the poem does indeed contain lovely passages, mostly about Felpham, it is on the whole eccentric, shrill, and defiant of its audience. Its comparatively superficial tone and level of attack seem almost to disown the profound psychological insight arrived at so painfully in The Four Zoas. Milton is full of uneasily maintained, rather than inevitable, tensions. It contains to an annoying degree long lists of unexplained characters and place names, and mischievous nonsense names. Its wilful obscurity seems to me much more indicative of a disturbed state of mind in its author than does the painful but sincere struggle for clear vision of the first prophetic book. The Four Zoas is an ordering of hurtful experience directed towards re-integration. Its difficulty and obscurity arise from what Blake was trying to say, and to say for the first time without any of the short-cuts of terminology or of accepted knowledge that we have today. The vision itself, no matter how awkwardly expressed, is coherent and positive, and it strives towards healing and truth. There is something grand about the conception of The Four Zoas. Milton, in contrast, seems in many ways petty and idiosyncratic, a kind of bitter and agitated reaction or aftermath to the perception of a truth too far from present reality to endure. Milton is concerned largely with Blake's private quarrel with Hayley, which widens out to embrace his quarrel with all of the forces that hinder true art.
