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Harold Bloom. Blake’s Apocalypse. Garden City (NY): Doubleday, 1963.

     Harold Bloom's Blake's Apocalypse, subtitled A Study in Poetic Argument, leads the reader on a journey through the works of William Blake, beginning with the earliest Poetical Sketches and ending with the epic Jerusalem. Bloom’s study, as described by David Fite, is considered "notable for its strong affinities to the work of Frye on myth and romance, Abrams on the Romantic imagination and the structure of the Romantic lyric, and Pottle on the ‘case of Shelley’" (6-7). Harold Bloom, sharing with Frye what Fite calls "crucial beliefs about Romanticism," glorifies the power of the mythmaking visionary imagination and insists that visionary poetry requires a reading in terms of itself, in terms of the types of visionary moments that it tries to present (16).

      In attempting to focus primarily on the works considered "apocalyptic" within our own definition, Chapter 5, entitled "Revolution and Prophecy," begins with a reading of The French Revolution. Bloom explains that the historical aspect of the poem is social unrest, images of the natural world collapsing, symbolized in the dominant image of the cloud as "the failure of vision to achieve a clear form" (62). The poem ends with the emphasis placed upon revelation, "the uncovering of a human form heretofore enshrouded by the illusion of Space," which is where Blake’s desires the emphasis to stand (66). Following the reading of The French Revolution, Bloom considers The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which he considers Blake’s transitional work. In this poem the autonomy of each human imagination is emphasized. It is here that Blake offers the idea that "Man is the form that God creates and loves, and so God must be a man." But the fact that "man is only partly God, is the burden that Blake’s poems exist to lighten, and hope at last to annihilate" (68).

      Journeying to Chapter 9, entitled "The First Epic: Vala, or The Four Zoas," Bloom awards this as "the most fully articulated myth ever invented by a single imagination" (200). The subject of The Four Zoas is an intellectual battle making Blake’s visualization of Apocalypse quite original. By the completion of the epic, Science is victor, being the "complete knowledge or human consciousness of art at its most coherent and comprehensive." The strife between contraries is the intellectual war that forbids Blake’s heaven to become static (309).

      In Chapter 11, entitled "Prelude to Apocalypse: Milton," Bloom asserts that this work is centered on theodicy and self-recognition – God’s justice and man’s realization of that justice in his relation to God, written to invoke Milton as a savior for Blake and for England (339). Again provoking the relations between man and God, in Milton Blake justifies the ways of God to men by claiming that "certain men have the courage to cast out what is not human in them, and so become Man, and to become Man is to have become God" (402).

      The final chapter is devoted to and entitled, "Blake’s Epic: Jerusalem," which Bloom calls Blake’s personal word or poetic argument in its achieved form, the only rival being Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Jerusalem is comparable to Paradise Lost in that it attempts "a cosmic survey of the fallen condition" (403). Blake’s reading of the Bible is significant in interpreting Jerusalem, although Bloom claims that he made a costly imaginative error in "directly identifying prophecy and apocalypse" (434). But we are reminded by the author that we must remember the time that Blake was faced with: "an age of tyranny and war in which the inherited assumptions of his culture quite properly seemed to him altogether Satanic, and in which he alone seemed to be in keeping faith with imagination and religious humanism" (434).

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. Blake’s Apocalypse. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1963.

Fite, David. Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985.