Creating new flesh on the Demon cold’
Blake's Milton and the Apotheoses of a Poet
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880523 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Fallon (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2005-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00121.x |
| OpenAlex | W2095568780 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Traditional readings of the so‐called ‘Bard's Song’, which opens Milton , construe it as a biographical or historical allegory. To counter such interpretations, I place Blake's poem in the context of a Whiggish literary tradition in which Milton's enthusiastic Protestantism is downplayed, producing a cultural icon who is distanced from the militant expressions of ‘mental fight’ in his prose. Likewise, I identify how poetic apotheoses produced an abstract and disembodied Milton in the guise of a God, an angel or a hero. By a commitment to grotesque realism, Blake's Milton reclaims the enthusiastic and tangibly physical metaphors of Milton's prose. Noting the allusions to Milton's works in the ‘Bard's Song’ suggests a reading of Milton in which Blake portrays a self‐divided poet composing Paradise Lost . Blake's grotesque Milton reverses this process of his apotheosis and reaffirms the renewal of a collective and distinctly physical human body
Allegory · Apotheosis · Art · Behold · Context (archaeology · Literature · Paradise · Paradise lost · Poetry · Theology · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Moravian Church and William Blake · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |