The Shakespeare links

The third proof is edited, the final one. On to the master pdf and off to the printer. Ready for Xmas? Probably.

And about time...some of the post-moderns do seem to need a proverbial boot up their textual methodology so that their serious apparent contempt for Blake's poetry and their mutual conversation with their images of each other can be tested against Blake's text As as been oft been said, they now seem to have a private conversation.

..........Frye/Bloom are excellent and find limited evidence of cycles as does Raines, but for different reasons each believes Blake's mythic poetry ends in chaos. Ault/Dortort, likewise are interesting, and for reasons they share between themselves also find Blake's mythic poetry ends in chaos. The advocates of a cyclic myth seem to admire Blake, but lack deconstruction: the post-moderns seem not to give Blake the benefit of doubt, and dismiss the man-as-poet to be replaced by the critic.......

It may be that since his Yale Lectures of the early 1970's, Derrida's Freudian based methodology of discontinuity has overwhelmed postmodern Blake criticism; so ambiguity became their new meta-system.

In the research done and put forward in the web site here, and in print, namely:

Structure as a Key to Meaning in William Blake's The Four Zoas
William Blake's Jerusalem Explained
and now
Shakespeare's Heir: Blake's Doors of Perception in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem

there is no chaos of creative management by Blake...not even in syntax, grammar or rhetoric. The binary stasis, the either/or of Frye/Bloom or Ault/Dortort, has been left behind........ and a fresh canon of information is now advanced, argued from the texts more closely than has previously been accomplished.

...In a proverbial nutshell, it is shown beyond reasonable critical doubt that Blake is not a grammatical illiterate, nor in creative confusion...... let alone living in the poetic psychosis of a self-subversive-who-is-always-in-syntactical-ambiguity as demanded of us by Ault and Dortort................ A pseudo-principle seems to have been set into Urizenic stone: namely, because no plot has been found to connect every line to every other line, then it must be that there is no coherent plot at all..........After this pseudo-principle became conventional wisdom any Blakean thematic interconnections become outlawed.... no linkage was accepted, all are ambiguous and pointing out ambiguity became 'a career goal'. All of Blake's themes/characters/events are presented as non-thematic (Ault) and ultimately as self-subverting (Dortort). For example, Dortort claims that 'Luvah' and the 'Saviour' are in some sense ambiguous variants of 'one being' and who is further identified with the being of Blake's Satan....Between them, they claim that the confusions thereby generated self-subvert Blake's narrative in both the The Four Zoas and Jerusalem.

It is shown these views of Blake's epics profoundly misunderstand his texts, characters and plots.

This new book, Shakespeare's Heir: Blake's Doors of Perception in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem, addresses the frozen either/or of current critical thought. In terms of the structure and the plot of the two epic poems, the book responds to the need of the field to move forward in critical confidence.

One key is to show beyond reasonable doubt that Blake wrote a specific and consistent chronology for The Four Zoas and for Jerusalem. The myth-cycle school and the post-moderns stand as one in three conclusion. namely:

(1) the epics/poems begin in medias res
(2) the myth/story is chaotic
(3) the respective works founder on their respective apocalypse

By contrast, in Shakespeare's Heir, it is shown these conclusions for different reasons have not been accurately argued from Blake's texts. In Shakespeare's Heir, a more systematic redaction methodology and hermeneutics is used and the conclusions thereby more soundly based.

Thus it is shown:

(1) The poems do NOT begin in medias res
(2) The two different myths are NOT chaotic, but are beautifully crafted and consistent and while they have elements in common, they but are not transportable from The Four Zoas to Jerusalem and vice-versa.
(3) The respective apocalypse are intricately crafted into eack epic and are proper, entirely credible poetic closures.


Ambiguity is often essential to poetry.