Looking through blogs.... it has been William Blake's Jerusalem Explained published by The William Blake Press and nothing else since last october.............so ignore the last several posts to read about extensions of the literary philosophy and methodology of analysis of Blake's Jerusalem. go back to april 07 in the blog

deconstructionism has been my focus....namely the connection between word and word, i've recalled the word logia...........avoiding imposition of preconceived system on Blake's system. the emergent meanings structured on architectures of possible meanings......kabbala.....classical....paracelsus... ossian and the gothic.... longinius and the sublime...moor and his hindu pantheon....bacon hobbes newton locke hume....the french enlightenment and the humanists....dante....swedenborg....boehme ..... the great chain of being as in 'the bard'......deism.....astrology......the industrial revolution and Blake's london, the french and american revolution ....the influences of paine, godwin and early feminism wollstonecraft....slavery, child labour and abuse, mercantalism, mendel and the prisons and (c.f.1797-1834, essay on population and the workfare/workhouse discourse ending in the poor act, 1834)...marxism...jung/freud/lacan...barthes ...derrida...linguistic analysis...foucauld... gramsci... structuralism, modernism and post-modernism....semiotics and the philosophy of the sign and grammatical studies.... even, i read, Blake's autodidacticism (an unconvincing theory holding that Blake was basically self-taught, which Bentley shows incorrect, that seems to suggest that Blake's poetry was 'automatic writing') and discourse and meta-analysis..... and every approach is full of insight. I replace none....I add Blake's plot or logia, the structure he consciously created and the myth he wrote, worked out in all its symmetrical beauty.

instead of conventional mediteranean mythic sources (as in homer, virgil, dante and more immediately, milton's Paradise Lost, Regained or Comus and the cambridge platonists) the weight of meaning Blake shaped into inter-related concepts and sounds was 'key-stoned' or set in a unique semiotic/semantic units like Alla....Ulro....Adan-Udan....the gate of the heart....the cup of Rahab....Entuthon Benethon....Bowlahoola.....Golgonooza.........and personality after personality....Tharmas......Enitharmon.....Palamabron....Bromion....the daughters of Beulah... all empty of pre-determined meaning save for the diachronic and sychronic meanings that are strictly contextual in Blake's myth and confined in its meaning to his linguistic seriality.....concepts like shadow.....shade....spectre....are a third micro family of sign....Blake's geography is yet another...Bath... London... Jerusalem... Babylon... Shiloh... England. These form vortices of resemblances and energy identities. In Blake's poetic method each 'minute particular' is always self-transcending in the ongoing expansion of Blake's articulated perceptions of existential-being-unto death.....and the logically unexpressed interplay of feeling for meaning.....Plates 94-100 symbolises this best........Blake's extraordinary expansion of language units to render meaningful his experiences of four-fold perceptual realities is possibly unequaled in English....concepts like sytagmatic, paradigmatic and pragmatic discourse....all help....but none are sufficient unto themselves.

Indeed, central to Blake's mythic unity is that all aspects of creation.... rocks, hills, rivers, mountains, oceans, cities, counties and countries, zoas, emanations, sons and daughters are conscious entities in Blake's vision of life. .....this means, for example, that the traditional literary distinction between humanity as 'soul-invested' or as locke holds, 'intelligence' invested conscious and moral being, and environment as existentially alienated though aesthetically recaptured being, is dissolved by Blake.....how, in un-deconstructed critical methodologies does one distinguish between the 'character' of Urizen, Los, Jerusalem or Vala and the 'character' of Bath? or the 'character' of the Atlantic?......typically, critical methodologies are corralled by 'plotlessness' and impenetrability pre-suppositions as to be unable to interpret the developed characters of Blake...

.....the commonplace current critical position position is denial (see blog april 07)....Blake's figures and their characters are thought NOT to be dramatically 'fully developed' is based, I find, on a paradigmatic failure in the field to perceive the plot and therefore the detailed and intricate relations between the each figure's being and actions, and, the continuum of such acts after such acts to become and form a linear whole.....what i show is that there is the gamut of emotion feeling act, blindness and moral and spiritual epiphanic and insight in each figure in Blake's plot as a whole......

I read of Blake's figures as NOT being 'fully developed' characters.....and i think, 'compared to whom'?...... Homer's 'Ajax'.......Chaucer's 'wife of Bath'....Lear and the 'fool'?

the modernist and post-modern methodologies exhaust sensibility, and empties language and perception of all but sound and grammatical relations......the semiotics of marks of sound, the repetitions lifted into phonetics and into alphanumonic language of discourse........... all are replayed in Blake's deconstructed poetics.... for language is re-expressed....even re-invented...by Blake to shape the momentums of meanings that culminate in the almost impossible simplicities of his prophetic clarities.....

.....there is something wonderful in Blake's ideas of English 'the rough structure'...........he re-expresses the nature of sound 3000 odd years after its first mesopotanian cuniform sounds-before-consonants were lifted out from the hieroglyph into a written form......

so.....go to april 2007 in the blog and walk backwards into blog-time. when you want to read about the movement from thought into print in William Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem Explained......