The Marriage of Heaven and HellWilliam BlakeOmniClassics · Literature
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William BlakeBlake overturns moral certainties through visionary encounters, unsettling proverbs, and comic prophecy.
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About the book
Blake's short work mixes verse, prophetic prose, infernal proverbs, and imagined encounters to question the boundaries conventionally drawn between good and evil. Energy and restraint become contending forces in a universe that cannot be understood by suppressing one side of its contraries. Speakers travel through visionary scenes, discuss poetry and religion, and expose the limitations of systems that mistake their own categories for final truth. The work's treatment of angels and devils is deliberately provocative, while its response to Swedenborg and its reflections on Milton give the argument particular literary targets. This English text conveys the verbal sequence of Blake's experiment. Its changes of voice reward careful attention to who is speaking and what a given certainty costs.
- Contraries and energy
- Religious authority
- Visionary imagination
Why read it
A compact encounter with Blake's ability to make philosophical argument strange, funny, and intellectually disruptive.
English text from the 1906 Luce edition