블레이크와 예언적 글쓰기

Abstract

From the earliest period of his poetic career, Blake displays many characteristics in connection with the prophetic tradition. Blake belongs to this tradition not so much because of his use of the structures and devices of the Bible as because of his stance, his purpose of delivering humankind, and his transfiguring perception that simultaneously sees the past, present, and future, the divine, the human, and the natural, the subject and the object, the cause and the effect. These characteristics are embodied more clearly in his voice, his distinct metaphoric and grammatically ambiguous style, and his simultaneously critical and affirming use of allusions to the Bible and Milton. Blake renders his prophetic perception of the world through his own rhetorical and experimental poetic devices such as syntactical and semantic ambiguities, and organic and transfiguring uses of religious, political, and literary traditions. And he also revisions the visions and rhetoric of his predecessors and delivers the reader’s mentality from the confines of established conception and conventional modes of thinking and awakens man’s dormant capacity for perception of the infinite in the world. Finally, Blake intends to build ‘New Jerusalem’ or Eternity, a democratic world, in which the variety and individuality of all individuals coexist in harmony and all of beings have a organic and active relationship to each other.