‘Twixt earnest & joke’: Poetic Sovereignty

Abstract

Blake’s composite figure of God, priest and king — and prototype of the Spectre of the late epics — is variously dubbed ‘Urizen’ and ‘Nobodaddy’. In The Book of Urizen, he is a sublime demon:

His cold horrors silent, dark Urizen

Prepar’d: his ten thousands of thunders

Rang’d in gloom’d array stretch out across

The dread world, & the rolling of wheels

As of swelling seas, sound in his clouds

In his hills of stor’d snows, in his mountains

Of hail & ice; voices of terror

Are heard, like thunders of autumn,

When the cloud blazes over the harvests

(BLI, 3. 27–35)

I perceive that your Eye[s] is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom.

(Blake, letter to Dr Trusler)