ABSTRACT
Read|looked at from very diverse, even conflicting, theoretical and critical perspectives throughout the years, Blake’s are a special case of complex multiform works, invented and executed at that specific “historical period in which he found himself, a period from whose vantage point Blake could assess the consequences of the Newtonian world scheme and the systems which had made it possible” (Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton, 1974, 45). As “the original form of the Newtonian perspective” (Ault 41), Urizen emerges from the six illuminated books—America, Europe, The Song of Los, The First Book of Urizen, The Book of Los and The Book of Ahania (1793–1795)—“which have every appearance
of having been intended to form a more or less co-ordinated project of poetic inquiry into the origins of man, religion and the development of political, sexual and social systems.” (The Urizen Books, ed. David Worrall, 1995, 9). First, does this very beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century constitute a particularly prolific historical vantage point from which to read|look at Blake’s complex multiform works again, and to interact with the previous very diverse, sometimes even conflicting, practices of reading|looking at them? Secondly, given the fact that Blake’s verbo-visual creations were inextricably invented and executed by him as draughtsman, poet, engraver and painter, and as a Londoner working between the 1780s and the 1820s, is it imperative to read|look at his poetic inquiry into the development of social, political, religious, scientific, and artistic systems in technico-historical terms?
