ABSTRACT
In the Interchapter of The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes that 'If to imagine is to misinterpret, which makes all poems antithetical to their precursors, then to imagine after a poet is to learn his own metaphors for his acts of reading'. If any poet tries to construct his readership, teach them, or transfer metaphors of how to read it is William Blake. As the centre of attention for Blake's verse is not the ordinary principles of narrative and epic, which involve linearity and successiveness, Milton must in some senses disrupt our experience of time. Blake actively attempts to instruct the reader in how to read Paradise Lost by avoiding the visionary limitations that attach to authorial intent. To liberate the text from the dogma of intentionality is, for Blake, a safeguard against readings against the grain which are based on moral quarrels with Milton's God.
