ABSTRACT
William Blake resolves the apparent irreconcilability of Satan's eternal exclusion from the divine kingdom with the divine love and omnipotence and the eternal being of all things in God, by saying that there is no being called Satan, but a state so named, the "false body." States exist only so long as they are, as it were, occupied; and between the state called Christ and the state called Satan lie every possible kind of human personality, in the circles of hells and heavens: "these States Exist. There is one state to which Blake attaches a special importance: this he calls "Self-annihilation." In his pictorial representation of Milton, Blake has expressed, in the poet's gesture, the spiritual state of self-annihilation. In contrast with that commanding gesture of so many Renaissance depictions of Apollo bringing the world under the rule of his ordering harmony, Blake has been at pains to show the poet as one who is casting away everything he possesses.
