Rewriting Milton: Orality and Writing in Blake's Milton.

PIERCE, JOHN B.

MILTON IS A POEM HEAVILY COMMITTED TO THE GRAPHIC NATURE OF acts of writing and to its own writtenness. The only one of Blake's works specifically called a "Poem," its subtitle--"a Poem in 2 Books"-makes clear that its poetic status is specifically attributed to its written form as a book. Moreover, its ostensible subject matter is the rewriting of the works and influences of an earlier writer and therefore presupposes a significant value in the written word, its transformations and its transformative power. Within the poem itself, Milton is depicted writing "In iron tablets" (17:10) and "in thunder smoke and fire" (7:13); the Shadowy Female wears a garment "written all over ... in Human Words" (18:12), while Ololon descends to Milton at the end of the poem in "Clouds ... folded as a Garment dipped in blood / Written within & without in woven letters" (42:12-13).(1) Yet, the moment of action for the character of Milton in the poem springs from a specifically oral event--a Bard's song.(2) The portrait of Eternity that appears at the beginning of the second book of Milton advocates the power of breath and the spoken word as the forces behind the "Wars of Eternity" (30:9), the construction of "the Universe stupendous" (30:20) and the creation of all "Mental forms" (30:20). In addition, Milton's journey is the rewriting of more than just his written record: the object of correction is Milton's body of texts as transformed by discourses both oral and written which influence and are influenced by cultural fields of religion, politics, and aesthetics (to name just a few).(3)

The competing modes of representation and communication--writing and speech, the graphic and the oral, or what Ong has termed literacy and orality(4)--do not result in a polarity of practices, however; nor do they resolve in a privileging of one over the other. Instead, the conceptual fields which characterize writing and speech interpenetrate and form an apocalyptic discourse that incorporates important dimensions of both modes of representation. The refrain from the Bard's song--" Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation"(5)--most forcefully manifests this interpenetration and overlap. It communicates orally the urgent message that Milton must revise his written legacy if he (and the culture he influences) is to be prepared for the Last Judgment; it also self-consciously represents the work of a graphic medium to "Mark" or represent the fleeting moments of orality for the reader. The refrain draws both Milton and the reader into a field of discourse in which the spoken is marked or inscribed by the written and the written is an agency of the inspired moment of speaking prophecy.

Robert Essick sees this interpenetration of the written and the spoken, the graphic and the oral, as a fundamental dimension of Blake's "model of verbal production."(6) By linking the written and the spoken, Blake engages in what Essick terms a form of "oral writing [which] brings a printed text something of ... [an] increased presence of the accidental productions of spoken language" (191).(7) The recovery of the kind of spontaneity which characterizes the oral complements and revitalizes the premeditated and fixed dimensions of graphic media, as Essick argues, and reincorporates the immediacy of inspiration with the studied reflection of execution. While Essick's arguments about Blake's "model of verbal production" inform the background of my essay, I am here more directly engaged in exploring the way in which the graphic and the oral, the written and the spoken, are used as conceptual fields in Milton. As a conceptual field, writing has been traditionally allied with permanence, rational reflection and the dissemination of its content widely over the material contexts of time and space. In contrast, speech has been characterized by immediacy, spontaneity and a passionate expressiveness. In facing this dichotomy, Blake resists the temptation to make his own acts of writing conform to either one of these conventional oppositions. Instead, he uses the idea of writing as a mediating power, one which attempts to incorporate the conventions of both writing and speech and thereby fully engage with the complex and polyvalent dimensions of language as a whole. Without orality, literacy alone eviscerates human existence, leaving it a hollow shell of material abstraction, an alienating technology that dominates the shadows and spectres of human consciousness as the portrait of the Shadowy Female in Book 1 shows. At the beginning of Book 2, orality offers the alternative vitality of energized imaginations warring "To build the Universe stupendous" (30:20), but the "Mental forms" (30:20) created lack the stable ground necessary for the continuities of human culture. When the two engage as contraries, literacy becomes the outward bound and circumference of orality, giving "a habitation & a place" (30:24) to the "wonders of Eternity" (30:27). Milton anatomizes the full field of discourse as an interplay of orality and literacy in which the energy of orality revitalizes the forms of writing abstracted from the sources of poetic inspiration in the period between Milton's death and Blake's move to Felpham.

The Critique of Writing

The most direct critique of writing in Milton appears in the Shadowy Female's description of her garments of cruelty. Overall, her "articulate howlings" (18:4) emphasize the exteriority of her garments. She states that she "will put on the Human Form & take the Image of God / Even Pity & Humanity but my Clothing shall be Cruelty" (18:19-20) and thus indicates that these exterior coverings bear no relationship to what they cover. This false exteriority extends to the markings on the garment, situating them well within a Western tradition that considers "writing, the letter, the sensible inscription . as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos."(8) Within this tradition, argues Derrida, writing has naturally and unquestioningly been considered the "`clothing'" of speech (Of Grammatology 35). For the Shadowy Female, the fabric of language is designed to enslave rather than embody human expression and is a simple manifestation of "Cruelty." As exterior markings on an exterior covering, writing has the same status as artistic representation in Plato's Republic. Both are at three removes from the form they embody and both hide rather than reveal what they veil. Just as the bed depicted by the artist in Socrates' tale is an imitation of the imitation produced by the artisan who reproduces the intelligible Form in the abstract realm of ideas, so the writings on the Shadowy Female's garment represent in verbal form the cruelty represented by the garment itself which in turn covers and thus represents the inner bodily form of the Shadowy Female. Blake's allegory is additionally complicated, however, by the meaning of this bodily form and the value the reader is expected to attribute to the Shadowy Female's proclamation that she will take on "the Image of God" (18:19). On the one hand, the adoption of "the Human Form & ... the Image of God" (18:19) may represent the confused logic of a mind that, however much steeped in error, is ultimately drawn into alignment with divine forms, but on the other hand (and more likely), it is an action of deception and self-aggrandizement. Given the larger context, the Shadowy Female speaks ironically about appropriating "the Image of God" as a mechanism to enslave humanity, and Orc's angry response ("When thou attemptest to put on the Human Form, my wrath / Burns to the top of heaven against thee in Jealousy & Fear" [18:31-32]) suggests that her statement is entirely manipulative.

An elaborate parody of the armour worn by the Christian soldier, the description of her garment makes use of the usual displacements typical of metaphor. It includes a "fringe" representing "Pestilence" (18:17), a "girdle" of "War" (18:17), a "breastplate" of "Holiness" (18;21), "ornaments" "of broken hearts" (1822): and "precious stones of anxiety & care & desperation & death" (18:23). The elements which escape metaphorical displacement are the "Writings" and inwoven figures on the ceremonial gown: I will have Writings written all over it in Human Words That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read And get by rote as a hard task of a life of sixty years I will have Kings inwoven upon it, & Councellors & Mighty Men The Famine shall clasp it together with buckles & Clasps And the Pestilence shall be its fringe & the War its girdle. (18:12-17)

The exclusion of these two elements from the parody of Christian dress highlights the always already metaphorical nature of phonetic and ideographic representations. Any metaphorical displacement of such markings would be redundant and would possibly obscure the recognition of the inherently figural nature of graphic marks. Thus, the absence of metaphorical displacement for the writings and woven patterns separates them and their signifying power from the other accoutrements on the garments of cruelty.

Given such obvious emphasis, the description of these phonetic and ideographic markings merits closer examination. In the speech quoted above, the Shadowy Female's connection of writing with memory and a technology of expression difficult to obtain marks a connection with Plato's Phaedrus. Theuth, the god "who first discovered ... writing" offers writing to the Egyptian king Thamus as "`a potion for memory and for wisdom'"(79). Thamus, however, offers a counter argument, stating that writing will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.(9)

The Shadowy Female's assertions about the "hard task" (18:14) of learning to read her lessons defines her form of writing as external to human consciousness; it is indeed dependent "on signs that belong to others" (Plato 79), and her statement that it is written in "Human Words" (18:12) can only be read with the grimmest of ironies. Writing is envisioned in the form of what Walter Ong has called a "technology." Ong argues that the exteriority of writing and its requirement of the "use of tools and other equipment: styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more" (81-82) renders it a technology which modifies the process of human signification.(10) Alien and alienating to the human body, writing can become the perceived container of human knowledge and thereby usurp and dominate the productions of knowledge provided by the interior agencies of inspiration and imagination. As the Shadowy Female would have it (and perhaps the Egyptian king Thamus), human consciousness, knowledge and memory may be enslaved by exterior and arbitrary markings. Memory in turn threatens to become a technology in the presence of writing. The hard task of rote learning replaces the vitality of imaginative recreation with the passive act of exact reconstruction according to external correspondences.(11)

The ultimate manifestation of an aesthetic of exteriority is a culture which will "for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War" (E 95). The interconnection of writing and warring emerges strikingly in the inwoven patterns which also embellish the Shadowy Female's garments of cruelty, patterns which form a contrast and complement to "Writings" used by her to enslave human faculties in "a life of sixty years" (18:14). The "Kings ... & Councellors & Mighty Men" 18:15) woven on the Shadowy Female's garment are part of an ideographic system which makes explicit the political dimension of subservience and exploitation that emanates from and resides in the mental enslavement of knowledge embodied in phonetic "Writings ... in Human Words."(12) The entire metaphor of the Shadowy Female's garment expands the critique of writing to include all graphic forms defined by their instrumentality and used as technology of exteriority, objective representations, alienation and abstraction.

The use of writing as a technology creates a verbal universe producing a subjectivity divorced from the active control of discursive exchange. This is the fate of Milton in the opening scene of Blake's poem. It depicts the afterlife of Miltonic discourse as trapped within a form of writing envisioned as a technology. The "intricate mazes of Providence" (2:17) that Milton ponders during his "One hundred years" "in Eternity" (2:16-17) have at least one source in the philosophical arguments undertaken by the fallen angels in Book 2 of Paradise Lost. Milton, or again more precisely, Miltonic discourse, is thereby well entrenched in a hell of disputes over abstraction rather than human concern. The intricate mazes are abstract and artificial forms constructed from philosophical disputations about theology arising from the texts of the historical Milton and his discursive heirs. These mazes which presumably form the cornerstone of "Miltons Religion" (22:39) that Rintrah and Palamabron blame for the theological, political and social error that threatens to destroy the current age are clusters of discourse; since they are based on the disputes about "Providence," their resolution is impossible and continued disputation only further builds the mazes which entrap Eternity itself. The statement that Milton in Eternity "obey'd, he murmur'd not, he was silent" (2:18) indicates the silencing of Miltonic discourse in the war of contraries and progressive exchange. The portrait of Milton's mortal part hardened into the Rock Sinai points out the state of his discourse under the influence of writing as a technology leading to abstraction, cruelty and objectification.

Blake presents Milton's "Mortal part" (20:10) as a collection of "Seven rocky masses terrible in the Desarts of Midian" (17:17). As the "Rock Sinai" (17:14), this Milton is a system of discourse structuring and promulgating the moral imperatives enabling a religion of self-righteousness. Surrounded as he is by his wives and daughters also in the form of mountains in Midian, this Milton and his companions represent a conceptual framework encased in a material existence characterized by a "corruption" (17:15) that is more mental than physical. Indeed, the desert landscape with its rocky extrusions creates the sense of an ironic or anti-sublime in which the opacity of mountainous bodies frustrates rather than facilitates a passage beyond the moments of blockage antecedent to the exhilaration of release.(13) This scene of apparently interminable opacity is also a scene of writing--that of Milton's composition and dictation of his late poetry. Blake critiques not just patriarchy but ontologically shared oppression showing that writing from the physical body enslaves and is enslaving. The mountainous body of Milton, like the garments of the Shadowy Female, limits writing to sites of exteriority, shells, rocky surfaces and all forms of opaque covering and to the recording of a discourse of oppression and cruelty. The "Cruelties of Ulro" (17:9) are made manifest through a writing that is dependent on and defined by technological intervention. The "iron tablets" (17:10) which record these cruelties are only a synecdoche for the content of the markings on them. These tablets transform and objectify the words written on them giving the knowledge they display a seeming autonomy and permanence. These writings are not solipsistic, however, but are part of a network of language that disseminates itself into a pervasive system of discourse. Milton's writings derive from the perceived Cruelties of Ulro (and thereby seem to constitute a mimesis infected by material oppression), and then pass to the wives and daughters who in turn write his dictates and subsequently disseminate them into a larger cultural matrix.

An additional point of some importance needs to be made about this scene of writing. The dictation to his mountainous wives and daughters issues in a surprisingly insubstantial form: "They sat rangd round him as the rocks of Horeb round the land / Of Canaan: and they wrote in thunder smoke and fire / His dictate" (17:12-14). The pyrotechnics here owe something to a tradition of apocalyptic pronouncement, but the technology of writing is here less permanent, less immune to transformations by time, space and the elements of their construction. The temporary and changeable form of these dictated writings indicates that the moral dictates, the contemplations of Providence and the gospel of self-righteousness are all part of a false covering, an outer garment whose relation to potential inner significance remains obscured. Moreover, we know the oral dictates of Milton's corruptible self are further corrupted by the material agencies of the natural world, and the resulting discursive network is itself an illusory substance based on inadequate reflections--all smoke and mirrors. The particular images of "thunder smoke and fire" connect these dictates with divine proclamation (like that of the Ten Commandments delivered in Sinai to Moses) and suggest a theological absolutism. The authority of these signifiers is vested in the authority of a singular transcendental signified that validates them; however, as Blake later demonstrates, such absolutism is only an extension of discourse connected to Satan and his proclamation of absolute authority: Satan heard! Coming in a cloud, with trumpets & flaming fire Saying I am God the judge of all, the living & the dead Fall therefore down & worship me, submit thy supreme Dictate, to my eternal Will & to nay dictate bow. (38:50-53)

The exteriority of writing, the dictate that manifests itself as objective authority, thus has its ultimate expression in a Satanic body, one fearful to behold from without but of hollow "desolations" (38:15) when experienced from within. The thunder, smoke and fire are the insubstantiality of blackened shapes riding into obscurity; the iron tablets propound an appearance of permanence, an appearance which usurps the potentiality and modifications of human inspiration.

The Orality of Eternity

As we have seen, the technology of writing invests signification in the power of the mark which, by virtue of its exteriority, separates thought from expression. As a result, the apparently objectified form of expression leads to a belief in an objective knowledge which in turn encapsulates increasingly abstract concepts alien to direct human experience. It is not far from this abstract knowledge to the use of written language as an instrument of tyranny appropriated by the literate to enslave the illiterate. This critique of writing as a technology finds its counterpoint in the more favorable portrait: of speech as the embodiment of Eternity. The first plate of Book 2 offers a complex analogy comparing orality and Eternity: Lo the Eternal Great Humanity To whom be Glory & Dominion Evermore Amen Walks among all his awful Family seen in every face As the breath of the Almighty. such are the words of man to man In the great Wars of Eternity, in fury of Poetic Inspiration, To build the Universe stupendous: Mental forms Creating. (30:15-20)

In this analogy, "the words of man to man" are likened to "the breath of the Almighty" which manifests a vision of "the Eternal Great Humanity / ... / in every rice." Oral discourse is Eternity; it unites "man to man" in the "awful Family" that emanates from and constitutes "the Eternal Great Humanity"; and it constitutes the identity of humanity and divinity. The entire analogy investigates the power of signification through the metaphor of the breath in contrast to the metaphor of the mark at the core of the technology of writing.

Opposed to the breach between thought and expression consequent on the intervention of the written mark, the orality of Eternity joins thought and expression by uniting the breath of inspiration with the forms created. Words and their significance are no longer conveyed by exterior markings but directly through "the breath of the Almighty." The marks of divinity are "seen in every face" as the breath of inspiration which is coincident with the expressive form of the spoken word. These marks offer a stark contrast to the "Marks of weakness, marks of woe" that characterize the isolated, non-verbalizing existence of Blake's "London" (E 26-27). There the speaker describes a universe of silent misery or inarticulate cries and sighs which express moral outrage or inner despair but never lead to meaningful verbal exchange. The coincidence of breath, words and communication unites inspiration with execution and allies meaning directly with verbal exchange. Interior meaning and exterior forms of signification collapse into each other rendering such distinctions unnecessary. This vision of "the words of man to man" asserts that meaning is simultaneous with communal exchange and that this verbal universe defines eternity and divinity as human existence. Eternity, divinity and the transcendental signified exist not as the enclosed content of a signifying mark but as a result of the process of signification itself.

The union of thought and expression, inspiration and execution in turn prevents the work of abstraction. Blake describes the orality of Eternity as a participatory human phenomenon whose modes of interaction are highly contextual. The attachment of "Glory & Dominion" to "Humanity" rather than divinity and of "the breath of the Almighty" to "the words of man to man" rather than god to god reorients potential abstractions to the concrete particularities of human contexts. According to Ong, "In the absence of elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience, oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human lifeworld, assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings" (42). These specific human contexts are in keeping with the concrete applied nature of oral societies; "Oral cultures," Ong writes, "tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld" (49). In Milton, Eternity is rendered in the form of verbal exchange between human beings rather than in a transcendent setting, removing the tendency to think of it in terms of the abstract categories of extended time and expanded space. Blake satirizes the tendency to enlarge such abstract categories in his description of the Mundane Shell as "an immense / Hardend shadow of all things upon our Vegetated Earth / Enlarg'd into dimension & deform'd into indefinite space" (17:21-23). As this passage reveals, enlarged and deformed concepts are simple abstractions and extrapolations from the known measurements of the material world.

By truncating the tendency to abstraction, Blake also avoids creating an Eternity which validates the inscription of knowledge in an external objectified form and thereby avoids creating a belief in objectified knowledge. Blake's Eternity departs slightly from Ong's description of oral societies in what it creates and consequently in its critique of objectified knowledge. Ong emphasizes the ephemeral nature of oral culture. Connected as it is to sound, and sound to the vanishings of temporal enactment, oral culture is based on the sensory experience of language that, like sound itself, "exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent" (Ong 32). Thus the culture like its oral language "resists a holding action [or] stabilization" (32). Blake's Eternity does have a degree of evanescence, but its resistance to stabilization does not lead to its disappearance. Blake's representation of orality, first of all, is not simply aural but visual as well and therefore is part of a more diversified sensory experience. The "breath of the Almighty" is unequivocally "seen in every face" (my emphasis; 30:17-18). Visual verification of orality gives it a sense of the substantial but the fixing of the visual in the "breath / ... / in every face" complicates simple notions of objective forms. The visible breath in the other's face is like that experienced in one's own (i.e., it is in "every face"). Second, the "Wars" of oral exchange are constantly constructive: they "build" rather than destroy "the Universe stupendous" consequent upon speech. Their evanescence is qualified by their construction of a universe larger than the individual speech event, and this structure does not exist apart from everyone's verbal participation in it. Finally, the emergent structures are described in the participial phrase "Mental forms Creating" (30:20) and thereby denote constant action and a perpetual state of continually changing mental events. The phrase itself has an interpretive undecidability about it, an indeterminacy that assures its continued consideration. When viewed as part of an inverted syntax, the phrase suggests that "the words of man to man" are engaged in creating "Mental forms": in this case words create thoughts. On the other hand, the colon seems to set off "Mental forms Creating" as an appositive to "the Universe stupendous." This contending reading suggests that the mental construct of a "Universe stupendous" is the precondition of continued acts of creating: thought is the precondition of further acts of verbalization. The indeterminacy enforces the identity of words and mental forms, execution and inspiration, speech and thought. In either case the "mode of action" (Ong 32) inherent in oral language gives oral culture an ongoing vitality that enables continued free exchange and continued construction. Any resistant or objectified form is only a reified form of the continued energetic exchange of eternity, a fallen perception rather than a fallen object.

Finally, while writing technologies, founded as they are on questionable elements of objectified knowledge and abstraction, are utilized as instruments of enslavement, the orality of Eternity fosters a sense of community. Quite simply, "oral communication unites people in groups" (Ong 69). Blake's metaphor of the "awful Family" as the form in which "the Eternal Great Humanity" manifests itself as "the breath of the Almighty" instates communal experience as the central ingredient in the creation of the verbal "Universe stupendous." Oral communities are not, however, necessarily devoted to passive acceptance and peaceful exchange. Ong suggests that most oral cultures function within a verbal arena which is "agonistically toned"; "Writing," he argues, "fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. It separates the knower from the known. By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle" (43-44). The orality of Eternity described in Milton carries forward this agonistic context. It is a process of signification that builds meaning through "Wars of Eternity." This warring nature recalls the constant tension and conflict necessary to the progressive movement of contraries, and stands in opposition to the passive acceptance of written dictates as portrayed in the description of Milton dictating to his wives and daughters. The struggle adds the "fury" to "Poetic Inspiration" (30:19) and the "Creating" power to the "Mental forms" (30:20) that coexist with inspiration.

On the whole, the portrait of orality offered here seems largely positive, but it does require certain qualifications. These qualifications come in part from comments Blake makes in A Vision of the Last Judgment and in part from Milton itself. In A Vision of the Last Judgment Blake observes, "Many Persons such as Paine & Voltaire, <with <some of> the Ancient Greeks> say we will not Converse concerning Good & Evil we will live in Paradise & Liberty You may do so in Spirit but not in the <Mortal> Body as you pretend till after the Last Judgment" (E 564). Blake's comment demonstrates a commitment to the contextualization of human discourse, whether it be about morality, paradise or liberty. The central error Blake diagnoses here is the attempt by Paine, Voltaire and the Greeks to avoid all discussion of" Good & Evil" and to devote themselves to a world of paradise and liberty that is available through their spiritual beings at the expense of "the <Mortal> Body." As Blake goes on to point out, "while we are in the world of Mortality we Must Suffer The Whole Creation Groans to be delivered there will always be as many Hypocrites born as Honest Men & they will always have superior Power in Mortal Things" (E 564). The failure to recognize the contextual force of" Mortal Things" will lead to a failure to diagnose, comment on and potentially remedy human ills. This commitment to contexts, even if they are material, mortal ones, conditions and delimits the degree of privilege we should accord to the orality of Eternity. While it may be sufficient for Eternity, the contexts in which the art and poetry of Milton (and indeed all manufactured arts) are constructed dictate the need for writing as the supplement by which the fullness of oral speech is made present. As the "Introduction" to the Songs of Innocence shows, the dissemination of even the simplest inspiration requires its transformation into a written form which again can be transformed into the orality of reciting songs that "Every child may joy to hear" (E 7). The same is true of Milton. Blake's recourse to the Daughters of Beulah as "Muses who inspire the Poets Song" (2:1) recalls the well-entrenched convention of the epic connecting inspiration with the aural experience of the orality of a higher world of creation. The imperative that initiates the invocation itself is of two types: first, to "Record the journey of immortal Milton" (2:2); and second, to "Tell also of the False Tongue" (2:10). The dual modes of recording and telling, writing and speaking seem designed to reinforce each other. The elaborate instruction for the Daughters of Beulah's song to Come into my hand By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm From out the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry The Eternal Great Humanity Divine, planted his Paradise, And in it caus'd the Spectres of the Dead to take sweet forms In likeness of himself (2:5-10)

asserts a specific situational context for this act of writing and argues for a complete interplay of orality and writing. The descending power of inspiration is analogous to the descent of the Spectres of the Dead as they "take sweet forms / In likeness of" the "Eternal Great Humanity Divine." When pressed further, the analogy suggests identity between the graphic forms of writing and drawing with the Spectres; both are descending forms finding regeneration in their "likeness" to the "Eternal Great Humanity" who, as we have seen, is "the breath of the Almighty," the epitome of orality itself. This very plate describing the orality of Eternity at the opening of Book 2, even as it seems to privilege speech also offers a plea from the Daughters of Beulah themselves for Eternity to create "a habitation & a place" (30:24) to protect them from being consumed by "these wonders of Eternity" (30:27). The context created for these emanations is the Shadowy "Temporal Habitation" (30:29) of the land of Beulah itself. Similarly in the construction of Blake's poem, the orality of Eternity requires the "Temporal Habitation" of the written form, but not that represented in the garment of cruelty worn by the Shadowy Female or in the dictation by Milton of his poems to his wives and daughters. The orality of Eternity becomes the true contrary of the mortality of writing in the depiction of Los's printing press and the garments of blood worn by Ololon at the climax of the poem.

The Aurality of Writing

The description of Los's printing press with its privileged position as an instrument of preparation of human souls for the Last Judgment might initially seem to suggest a further technologization of the word and a further distancing and objectification of signification. Yet the attachment of the printing press to Los, who is described as "Within labouring, beholding Without" (3:37), seems to qualify the simple identification of the printing press with the exteriorized technology of writing. The connection of the press with Los and his labour suggests instead a reinvestment of creative consciousness in the modes of production of meaning: the printing press is as much an extension of his body as his anvil and furnaces are. Placed "eastward of Golgonooza, before the Seat / Of Satan" (27:1-2), the press is also an extension of Golgonooza into the material abstraction of Satan's world.(14) Indeed, the printing press itself seems a liminal image, facilitating the transition between the city of art and the world of material abstraction. On the one hand, the eastern gate is the location of the wild thyme and crystal rock from which the lark mounts to signal the Last Judgment and renewal of the earth. On the other, the eastern gate opens out onto the Lake of Udan Adan and Satan's Seat, both images of abstraction and materialism. This dual dimension is highlighted in the two streams exiting the crystal rock at the gate, one leading to transcendence by passing through Golgonooza and Beulah to Eden, the other to material abstraction by passing through the Aerial Void and back to Satan's Seat: Just in this Moment when the morning odours rise abroad And first from the Wild Thyme, stands a Fountain in a rock Of crystal flowing into two Streams, one flows thro Golgonooza And thro Beulah to Eden beneath Los's western Wall The other flows thro the Aerial Void & all the Churches Meeting again in Golgonooza beyond Satans Seat. (35:48-53)

If Golgonooza is "the spiritual Four-fold London eternal" (6:1), the printing press is the point of liminality between the spiritual city of art and the material form of London. Like the crystal rock, it is a point of dissemination between worlds, neither wholly inside the walled city of Golgonooza nor wholly outside the control of Los, the city's principal inhabitant. Still the fact that the press lies in the purview of Satan's Seat indicates its participation in a material world which can partake in (and even cause) human misery.

The description of the functioning of the printing press indicates that nothing in the material universe entirely escapes the compulsions of necessity, and that for the spiritual dimension of Golgonooza to appear, passage through Los's printing press is necessary if not inevitable. In working the printing press Los "lays his words in order above the mortal brain / As cogs are formd in a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel" (27:9-10). All graphic expression, like "every Generated Body" (26:31) must pass through the mechanisms of Los's city, and without the recognition of this process, one is, like "Paine & Voltaire <with <some of> the Ancient Greeks>" (E 564) blind to the error of one's own perceptions. Blake's use of the printing press as a liminal image between the spiritual four-fold Golgonooza and the Vegetated form of London demonstrates his own self-consciousness about the contexts enforced by living within the material structures of the Mundane Shell. Thus, a world of pure orality is insufficient given Blake's immediate context and is only available in any large scale way in the mediated form of manufactured text. The recouping of mechanistic metaphors is thus part of the necessary mediation found in the material form of art. This mediation of art in Golgonooza through the agency of the printing press prepares for the appearance of Ololon in a "Garment dipped in blood / Written within & without" (42:13) at the end of the poem.

Ololon's final descent in the poem is both its climax--the redemption of Milton's emanation--and its final repudiation of the version of graphic representation seen in the garment of cruelty worn by the Shadowy Female. Ololon's garment, like Los's printing press, is part of an attempt to recoup the exteriority of writing and to make graphic signification a contrap/to the orality. As contraries, the graphic and the oral invest the garments of thought with meaning. Ololon's final appearance creates an organic relationship between writing and orality, the productions of Golgonooza and Eternity, as both are mediated through the materiality (represented in the Polypus) of fallen time and space (represented in the Mundane Shell).

The immediate context for Ololon's final epiphany is a dialogue or, more properly, the near failure of a verbal exchange between herself and Milton. The subject of this exchange is the abandonment of "the Sexual Garments ... / Hiding the Human Lineaments" (41:25-26). These garments, the material "Portion" of Ololon, impede "the severe contentions / Of Friendship" (41:32-33) and frustrate attempts at the discourse of Eternity in which they become contraries (see 41:35). Ololon's response to Milton's assertion that "All that can be annihilated must be annihilated" (40:30) is a trembling reply that enacts the separation of her "Sexual" from "Human Power" (41:30-39): Is this our Femin[in]e Portion the Six-fold Miltonic Female Terribly this Portion trembles before thee O awful Man Altho' our Human Power can sustain the severe contentions Of Friendship, our Sexual cannot: but flies into the Ulro. Hence arose all our terrors in Eternity! & now remembrance Returns upon us! are we Contraries O Milton, Thou & I. (41:30-35)

This speech enacts the separation described in the following lines and attests to the power of oral utterance as dramatic action. The return of "remembrance" is the return of an active engagement of memory with the imagination and is not a passive recreation of an external memory, but an active reengagement with Milton as her contrary.

After the initial separation of her human and sexual portions, Ololon descends and unites with the Starry Eight, who themselves unite into the form of "One Man Jesus the Saviour" (42:11). The human form of Ololon then becomes "a Garment dipped in Blood" (42:12) covering the limbs of the "One Man": Then as a Moony Ark Ololon descended to Felphams Vale In clouds of blood, in streams of gore, with dreadful thunderings Into the Fires of Intellect that rejoic'd in Felphams Vale Around the Starry Eight: with one accord the Starry Eight became One Man Jesus the Saviour. wonderful! round his limbs The Clouds of Ololon folded as a Garment dipped in blood Written within & without in woven letters: & the Writing Is the Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression: A Garment of War, I heard it namd the Woof of Six Thousand Years. (42:7-15)

Ololon's descent as a "Moony Ark" manifests the appearance of a new covenant, and the foregrounding of the Written markings on her garments after she joins with the "One Man Jesus the Saviour" indicates that this new covenant rewrites and energizes previous visible representations of the relation between the human and divine and the nature of graphic representation itself. The union of Milton and the Seven Angels of the Presence as "the Starry Eight" into the singular form of "One Man Jesus the Saviour" erases any distance or distinction between the human and the divine, thereby setting up the fundamental ground of this new covenant. Moreover, as a singular form representing a unified community, the "One Man" who includes Milton and the Seven Angels of the Presence (and, by this point in the poem, Blake and Los) represents a republican rather than a hierarchical structure for human life. The human form of Ololon which then unites with the One Man does so in the form of a garment which does not shape or restrict but further humanizes the "Lineaments" of the divine man. The woven writings which decorate the "Garment dipped in blood" illustrate the centrality of writing in humanizing the divine and delivering the human from enslavement to the material world; they are crucial to the narrator's perception of Ololon's descent and union with the One Man while he is in the "mortal state" (42:26) and the experience of "Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body" (42:27). Together the "Lineaments" of the One Man and the garment form of Ololon recuperate the power of writing from mere exteriority and show how it is crucial to a signifying process that defines humanity. This garment image forms a direct counterpoint to the negating garment of cruelty worn by the Shadowy Female and her claim that she "will put on the Human Form & take the Image of God" (18:19). As exterior garment, Ololon becomes the contrary rather than the dominant and determining form of the body she covers. The "One Man Jesus the Saviour," engaged as he is in "the severe contentions / Of Friendship" (41:32-33), embodies the orality of Eternity. Ololon, as exterior garment, would seem to be the visible signifier which further conveys their orality to the "mortal state" (42:26). The description of the garment "Written within & without" indicates that she does not represent the pure exteriority of writing. The distinction of inside and outside here loses meaning because the garment becomes a total signifying structure involving none of the traditional distinctions between inner meaning and outer form.

Indeed one of the difficulties in describing Ololon at this point arises from the figural identifications of her with "a Garment dipped in blood." What covers the "One Man" is a garment of Ololon: that is, not the garment Ololon herself wears but the garment that is Ololon. This distinction separates the "Garment dipped in blood" from the Shadowy Female's garment of cruelty: the latter is clearly a covering extrinsic to the subject associated with it; the former is a direct manifestation of Ololon's identity and thus a representational form that cannot be described as either exterior or interior to the principle of identity. Neither does the written form of the garment carry the conventional association of writing with static representation. The "clouds of blood ... streams of gore, [and] ... dreadful thunderings" energize the signifying power represented by the writings woven in her garment. "The reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space" (82) that Ong sees as typical of writing and print is no longer evident. Although the narrator first describes her as a visual phenomenon, his final impression in the quotation above is an auditory one: "I heard it namd the Woof of Six Thousand Years" (42:15). Through an imagistic synaesthesia, Ololon's garment as contrary to the "One Man" represents the aurality of writing. No longer a "quiescent visible phenomenon" (Ong 77), writing has an energy, vitality and aurality that lifts it out of the passive state of a visible object.

The final lines accentuate the synaesthesia of signification by representing a host of sensual delights. The sound of the lark, the smell of the Wild Thyme and the panting of Oothoon find reception in Los's listening and Rintrah and Palamabron's watching. As the last line states, this collection of signifiers signals preparation for "the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations" (43:1) and indicates that the rewriting of writing resulting from Ololon's descent is an important element in triggering a preparation for the Last Judgment. The recognition that writing is the outward bound or circumference of orality initiates a progression of contraries that allows for a form of signification that incorporates events in one's immediate environment (in this case Blake's purview of Felphams' Vale) into a universe signifying its own potential renovation towards apocalypse. The "Divine Revelation in the Litteral expression" (42:14) overcomes or overturns the binary oppositions of inside and outside, speech and writing, and form and content, oppositions which tend to array themselves in a hierarchical relationship in which one term negates rather than contends with what should be its contrary. When writing is freed from the principles of objectivity, abstraction, passivity and exteriority, it becomes the instrument for expanding human perception.

Conclusion: The Phenomenology of Writing

The transformative power of reading has been most fully explored in the phenomenology of Georges Poulet. In "Phenomenology of Reading," Poulet argues that the act of reading causes "the physical objects around me to disappear, including the very book I am reading ... [and] it replaces those external objects with a congeries of mental objects in close rapport with my own consciousness."(15) The "fusion of two consciousnesses" (60) Poulet describes can be likened to the severe contentions of contraries that characterize the orality of eternity. For Poulet, the result of such engagements and transformations is an animation of the work of art: "And so I ought not to hesitate to recognize that so long as it is animated by this vital inbreathing inspired by the act of reading, a work of literature becomes (at the expense of the reader whose own life it suspends) a sort of human being, that it is a mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects" (59). These kinds of comments illuminate Milton's entrance into Blake, making it analogous to the act of reading: But Milton entering my Foot; I saw in the nether Regions of the Imagination; also all men on Earth, And all in Heaven, saw in the nether regions of the Imagination In Ulro beneath Beulah, the vast breach of Miltons descent. But I knew not that it was Milton, for man cannot know What passes in his members till periods of Space & Time Reveal the secrets of Eternity: for more extensive Than any other earthly things, are Mans earthly lineaments. (21:4-11)

The dissolving of the object world into "the nether/Regions of the Imagination," the mysterious expansion and transformation of consciousness and the "vital inbreathing" that reconstitutes an exterior body of discourse as "a sort of human being" find common expression in Poulet and Blake. Yet as important as these connections are, Blake is additionally interested in carrying this phenomenology of reading over into a phenomenology of writing through the agency of writing's aurality.

As we have seen, the aurality of writing brings about a transformation of apparently objective graphic marks into the spoken word and an active auditory experience. In both the "Introduction" to Innocence and Ololon's final descent in Milton, the graphic mark must be disconnected from the oral and aural to disseminate and continue the process of inspiration and recreation. As contraries orality and writing create a body of discourse capable of organic growth and continual change. As writing gains a speaking voice through acts of reading, it gains an active life embodied in an active thinking consciousness. Acts of writing which follow acts of reading incorporate the conventions of orality with those of writing. The notion that this aurality of writing leads to a body of discourse that is animated through reading and subsequent rewriting is a rather ideal one, and Blake's poem scrutinizes and critiques the forms such rewritings take. As part of this conclusion, I want to view the title page of Milton as offering an anatomy of the conflict of orality and writing.

The title page has been subject to several interesting and illuminating commentaries, including that of Thomas Vogler, who notes the detail of "Milton's (?) own hand ... shown reaching through & `breaching' the name, thereby creating the `Breach of Miltons descent' (34:42)."(16) In this argument, Vogler draws particular attention to the "chirographic splitting" of "MIL/TON" on the title page as part of "a complex act of un/renaming" (142), and I would like to place his idea of "chirographic splitting" into the context of my own arguments on the aurality of writing. The configuration of text on the title page draws attention to writing as a visual, objective and, to some degree, decorative marking. The separation of the single word "MIL/TON," the continuance of the title sideways down the right-hand side of the page and the inscription of "The Author & Printer W Blake 1804" sideways up the left-hand side draw attention to the conventional tendency to think of, or better, to view, printed text in a linear fashion from left to right and top to bottom. Only the quotation from Paradise Lost--"To Justify the Ways of God to Men"--appears in conventional fashion, and yet the thematic ironies attendant on this reference undermine any of its pretensions to conventionality and stability. To be sure, Blake's approximation of handwritten text liberates his etching from the extreme conventions of typographic text, but it is still subject to these basic expectations. The conventions of linearity and uniformity, as Derrida has argued, typify Western concepts of language and the book; in turn these conventions condition the Western notion of history which, he argues, "has no doubt always been associated with a linear scheme of the unfolding of presence, where the line relates the final presence to the orignary [sic] presence according to the straight line or the circle" (Of Grammatology 85). Blake's title plate and his entire poem stand as a challenge to the linearity of the book even as they use the form of the book to convey this challenge. The naked human form of Milton on the title page forces its way through the textual components of the title page just as the title begins its linear unfolding of the protagonist's name. A human form disrupts the linearity of writing in such a way that the written word must conform to the organizing principles of the human form rather than the other way around. This depiction of written words surrounding and framing Milton provides a chirographic analogy to the textual description of the final descent of Ololon who is "folded as a Garment dipped in blood / Written within & without" (42: 12-13) and coveting the limbs of the "One Man Jesus the Saviour" (42:11). Just as Ololon's writtenness complements the orality of Eternity embodied in the Starry Eight who become the One Man, so the surrounding text on the title page clothes and conveys the identity of the naked human form.

At the same time that writing attempts to convey orality and human form, it fails to do so (at least in part). The naked human form clothed by the written words surrounding it also threatens to breach the containments of writing. This observation brings us closer to the poem's argument about the act of reading itself. Unless the act of reading is transformative, it leaves the body of discourse, the complement of ideas and concepts that are encoded in language, a passive and domineering exteriority. Just as the aurality of writing is a transformative action changing apparently objective graphic marks into the spoken words of an active auditory experience, the act of reading liberates the prior act of writing from the conventionality of linear expression.

Blake's rewriting of Milton, on the other hand, throws the written body into a field of discourse of non-linearity, plurivocity and imagination. De Luca points out that the poem is organized as "a structure of concentrically embedded frames" (110) which defy easy linear reconstruction. Beyond the narratological impediment to reading, however, the poem portrays Milton as a pluridimensional character. I have already cited examples of the non-linearity of form, but would like to explore further an aspect of the poem's plurivocity in its portrayal of Milton. The author is rewritten not as a singular form with a singular site of intentions, but as a series of discursive fields. The poem opens with a Milton trapped in his own false heaven, one of obedience, passivity and philosophical disputation. There is the Milton perpetually descending to reunite with his emanation. Milton also appears in the form of Mount Sinai as the lawgiver dictating divine commands to his wives and daughters. He is also a heroic giant reacting against the errors of reason by placing humanizing clay on Urizen. In addition, we are presented with the Milton who joins Blake and transforms his perception of the material world from an enclosing form to "a bright sandal formd immortal of precious stones & gold" (21:13), which Blake straps on his foot "to walk forward thro' Eternity" (21:14). Finally, there is the Milton who appears before Ololon and unites with her, preparing the way for the Last Judgment. All these Miltons emerge from an act of reading that enhances what Derrida calls "pluri-dimensional symbolic thought" (Of Grammatology 86). While Blake may tend to favor certain portraits of Milton over others, his act of writing presents a range of Miltons rather than a singular author. Moreover, the temporal relation of these Miltons (although I have described them consecutively) is more overlapping than sequential. Blake emphasizes their non-linear relationship in a much-quoted passage describing at least three of these Miltons: Silent Milton stood before The darkend Urizen; as the sculptor silent stands before His forming image; he walks round it patient labouring. Thus Milton stood forming bright Urizen, while his Mortal part Sat frozen in the rock of Horeb: and his Redeemed portion, Thus form'd the Clay of Urizen; but within that portion His real Human walkd above in power and majesty Tho darkend; and the Seven Angels of the Presence attended him. (20:7-14)

Yet Blake's refusal to abandon temporality in favor of total simultaneity (Cf. Of Grammatology 85) appears in the description of time (and space) in Los's construction of Golgonooza: Every Time less than a pulsation of the artery Is equal in its period & value to Six Thousand Years. For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events of Time start forth & are concievd in such a Period Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. (28:62-29:3)

Here the appearance of linearity as a sense of pulsations is complemented by the content of the pulsations: "a Globule of Mans blood, opens / Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow" (29:21-22). Time is no longer measured as a simple linearity but also a spatial expansion. Neither wholly consecutive nor wholly simultaneous, temporality shapes itself around "the Poets Work" of oral and written creation. In the end the critique of Milton ranges beyond the content of his writings and ranges into the arena of signification itself. Milton has become the site of conflict over forms of language, oral and written, and the field of discourse and its transformations through acts of reading and writing. The rewriting of Milton is thus not an adaptation of his work or a simple correction of errors in his poetic style, theology or characterization. Such actions would simply set Blake in the place of Milton's spectre, destroying one form of error only to "be a greater in thy [Milton's Shadow's] place" (38:30). Instead, Blake rewrites Milton as a multifaceted state of discourse, not singular in its manifestation but multiple in its meanings. This Milton becomes a dispersion of subject positions, ranging from the inspired position within the orality of Eternity to the visible mark of the written form.

(1.) All references to Blake's text are from David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, newly revised ed. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982).

(2.) The Bard's Song in Milton has received extensive treatment. See Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947) 325-26, Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1:963) 309-23, Susan Fox, Poetic Form in Blake's Milton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976) 28--60, David E. James, Written Within and Without: A Study of Blake's Milton (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977) 10-54; John H. Sutherland, "Blake's Milton: The Bard's Song," Colby Library Quarterly 13 (1977): 142-57, and Mark Bracher, Being Form'd: Thinking Through Blake's Milton (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1985) 35-75.

(3.) Joseph Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of Milton (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1975) has suggested that there are actually "two distinct kinds of error for which Milton is being held accountable": "Milton's own mental failings that infect his vision" and "the obstacle to vision created by Milton's eighteenth-century commentators" (39-40). I tend here to discount response to the former and stress the idea that the Milton of the poem is a discursive field rather than a representation of a historical personage. Throughout this examination, I view Blake's Milton as an act of writing in response to the field of discourse made up of his works and the thought and works his texts influenced, inspired or even distorted in the century lying between Milton and Blake. For more on eighteenth-century views of Milton, see Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1922) 3-71 and Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) passim.

(4.) Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982) uses the terms "orality" and "literacy" as modes of thought and expression that define the identity of their respective human cultures. Orality has an obvious application to modes of thought and expression in "cultures with no knowledge at all of writing" (1); Ong uses literacy in a broad sense to incorporate modes of thought and writing emanating from and conditioned by the graphic media of both writing and print.

(5.) Repeated at 2:25, 7:16, 7:48, 9:7 and 11:31.

(6.) William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 181.

(7.) Although he does not deal directly with the conflict between the oral and the written, Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) also often an extensive analysis of how "Accidents in printing or inking ... were often used creatively" by Blake (102).

(8.) Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974) 35.

(9.) Phaedrus: with a Selection of Early Greek Poems and Fragments about Love, trans, with intro. and notes by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995) 79-80.

(10.) Morris Eaves offers a different approach to the technology of Blake's printing practices in The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) 153-272.

(11.) Jacques Derrida's gloss on the attack against memory in Plato makes clear the distinction between the appropriate operation of the internal faculty of memory and its demise as a technology of passive reconstruction: "What Plato is attacking ... is not simply recourse to memory but, within such recourse, the substitution of the mnemonic device for live memory" (Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981] 108-9). Blake's attack on Greek and Roman writers in his Preface to Milton implicitly suggests such a set of distinctions. He does not seem set against memory in its totality but against simple reproductive memory which usurps the role of inspiration. The arguments of the Preface contend that artists conspiring with the "Daughters of Memory" create "Stolen and Perverted Writings," writings imitated from the "Grand Works of the more ancient & consciously & professedly Inspired Men" such as Shakespeare, Milton and the Prophets of the Old Testament (E 95). These writings, indebted as they are to passive reconstruction from a mechanical memory rather than active creation from inspiration, are structured in relation to an aesthetics of exteriority. For more on Blake's response to Classical writers, see Peter Fisher, "Blake's Attacks on the Classical Tradition," Philological Quarterly 40 (1961): 1-18.

(12.) The phonetic system of writing has been defined by Saussure in Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1966) as one which "tries to reproduce the succession of sounds that make up a word. Phonetic systems are sometimes syllabic, sometimes alphabetic, i.e., based on the irreducible elements used in speaking" (26). Phonetic writing exists in comparison with what Saussure calls an "ideographic system" in which "each word is represented by a single sign that is unrelated to the sounds of the word itself" (25).

(13.) See Vincent Arthur De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 24-25.

(14.) For a full discussion of the geography surrounding Golgonooza and its significance see Donald Ault, Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974) 34-45.

(15.) Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1 (1969): 55-(16.) homas A. Vogler, "Re: Naming MIL/TON," in Unnam'd Forms: Blake and Textuality, eds. Nelson Hilton and Thomas A. Vogler (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 142. See also Peter Otto, Constructive Vision and Visionary Deconstruction: Los, Eternity, and the Productions of Time in the Later Poetry of William Blake (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) 38-40, and Milton a Poem and the Final Illuminated Works: The Ghost of Abel, On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil, Laocoon, eds. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, vol. 5 of Blake's Illuminated Books, gen. ed., David Bindman (Princeton: William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1993) 20.

JOHN B. PIERCE is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Canada. He has published on authors ranging from Blake and Shelley to Samuel Richardson in journals such as Philological Quarterly, Eighteenth. Century Fiction, and Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. His first book, Flexible Design: Revisionary Poetics in William Blake's Vala or the Four Zoas (McGill-Queen's, 1998), explores the manuscript of the poem as a site of narrative experiment. Most recently he has co-edited (with Shelley King) Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray for Oxford World's Classics, and her The Father and Daughter with Dangers of Coquetry for Broadview Literary Texts.