ABSTRACT
The Book of Urizen proves to be a "self-consuming artifact" designed to liberate readerly agency from the fixed horizon of representations constituted by the text. The poem is an obstacle for overcoming. The reader's repudiation of the inert fully self-represented Urizen - a figure who subsumes the completed poem itself. The mounting power of Blakean storytelling to skew rational argument may be illustrated by comparing Urizen's satire with the similar critique William Blake had launched in his early tractate. The Book of Urizen uses myth and metaphor to convey both sides simultaneously, in Contrary fashion. The poem's narrative tells a dark, despairing version of No Natural Religion a's account of John Locke's reduction of perception to sense. In The Book of Urizen, Blake embraces David Hume's negative critique as being the skeptical-rationalist Contrary of his own prophetic project to create Utopias whose reality is immanent in the mind.
