ABSTRACT
1804 became for William Blake a personal time capsule containing the entirety of his remaining life in art. In 1800, William Hayley's patronage bid to rescue him from the dead end, but within two or three years that too, had come to naught. By 1804, then, Blake's career had arrived full circle. 1804 can thus be seen to mark, for Blake, a recovery of the innocence he had lost "twenty years" earlier in 1784 when his vision began to be contaminated by professional envy, frustration and, increasingly, compensatory grandiosity. One infers that the 1804 letter's more rueful "twenty years" of "ruin" alludes, not to Blake's career ups and downs per se, but to his reaction of "annoyance" at them, by which he held himself hostage to Fortune. "1804" sheds further light on John Milton's invocation, and the Bard's ensuing tale of Satan's usurpation of the Harrow of Poetry.
