ABSTRACT
The Four Zoas — Vala as the poem was called for most of its composition — is Blake’s longest and perhaps his most difficult work. It occupied him for some ten years, from about 1797 to 1807, and is both the summation of the first period of his writing and a preparation for the two long poems on which he spent the last fifteen years of his writing life. The work is unfinished and exists in a unique manuscript from which it is not certain Blake ever intended to engrave and print in his usual way. The beautiful copperplate hand in which the early parts of the manuscript are written may indicate that a handwritten copy, illuminated with watercolours, was intended from the start, and that the manuscript became more like a working draft, difficult to read and less finished in appearance, only with the later additions and reworkings. Left in this unfinished state The Four Zoas is a proto-Modernist poem which, like the Cantos, exhibits the processes of its composition. By 1807 Blake may well have felt, like Pound, ‘I cannot make it cohere’ (Canto 116), but if we accept that some of the work of helping the poem cohere lies in creative reading ‘it coheres all right’ — at least as well as the much more radically fragmented art to which twentieth-century readers have become accustomed. Probably the least read of all the major English Romantic poems, The Four Zoas contains some of Blake’s most powerful fragments and overall it is in many ways his most exciting and successful work: its unresolved clashes of perspective and its exhibition of process are profoundly in tune with Blake’s fundamental relativism and his ethic of a permanent dynamic of change. In its immense elaboration and development of his mythology, and in the importance it gives to a new and idiosyncratic presentation of Jesus, The Four Zoas also registers many 89crucial shifts in Blake’s outlook.
