In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1793), Blake writes with a strong prophetic voice, bringing to light a new set of proverbs, a new poetics, distorting and overturning traditional wisdom. Blake challenges the status quo, questioning stagnant and conventional thinking. As if in front of an assembled crowd, he shouts, “All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following errors...” (MHH 4). It is a searing, powerful and poetic production, a collection of proverbs that easily glosses over those still shackled in those abandoned “mind-forged manacles” (London 27). Blake's words, like those of a prophet, at first throw us into confusion. He wants to lead the reader off the beaten path, through the dark forest, making us feel as if we are lost, with the hope of entering a new clearing; a new understanding of our being, opening the “doors of perception” (MHH 39). (We can only imagine how confused the disciples were when Christ declared, “But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” accepting the commandment against lust, marginalized in the series of ten, and making it central to his teaching, completely reorganizing the social landscape around the question of desire.) Blake wishes to reverse the relationship between Energy and Reason, between Imagination/Vision and Materialism, otherwise known as the “Vegetable Relationship” (Mil 5.35). Such a dramatic paradigm shift requires a dramatic approach, which Blake finds in the hyperbolic poetics of the prophets. But why is hyperbole necessary? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Blake condemns the "Report of the Five Senses" (MHH 35), that abyss, seen as the foundation not only of Lockean thought, but also the Age of Reason, which leads Man astray; the prophet must recall him. In the section “A Memorable Fancy,” Blake puts words into the mouths of Isaiah and Ezekiel to fit his new vision. He makes Isaiah profess: "I have not seen any God nor heard any, in a finite organic perception", and Ezekiel states: "we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius... was the first principle and all the others derivatives" (35 ). The Poetic Genius, the prophet, goes beyond the corresponding theory of truth, of rectitudo, adaequatio, assimilatio, convenience, to enter the poetics of prophecy, the hyperbolic theory of truth. It is not we who grasp and evaluate their revelations, but they who grasp us. Blake's writing style is not a testament to what we can sit before us and measure, what we can resist and against. It goes beyond what we can perceive with our physical organs; “Man's perceptions are not limited by the organs of perception. It perceives more than the senses (even if acute) can discover” (NNR 2). Blake's writing style is a testament to what we can "perceive" with our Vision and Imagination, as he poetically says: Now I see a fourfold vision And a fourfold vision is given to me It is fourfold in my supreme pleasure And thrice in sweet Beulah night and always double. May God preserve us from Newton's single vision and sleep (TB, 722.83-8). Blake personifies the banality of single vision, the limits of reason, the "vegetal relationship", manifested through the limited creation of closed and general systems and generalization concepts, in the god Urizen (a play between "your reason" and the Greek horizo , which means “to limit”). Urizen's mechanical creation is sterile; it is capable only of the predictable repetition of the Same, not of something purely different in and of itself, which” 1802.” 720-22.
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