Romantic Philosophy in The Mar
Romantic Philosophy in The Marriage of Heaven and HellThe Romantic period produced more poets who, at one time or another, aspired to become philosophers than in any other period in English literature. The Romantic poets felt a need for a metaphysical structure that would, conceptually, make explicit the mind set that had emerged from am era of revolutionary change in art, politics, and society. William Blake is one the philosophical poets of the era whose works attempt to get at philosophical truth through imaginative means. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake attempts reconciliation between good and evil through his awareness that the moral codes of society limit creative freedom.The Marriage of Heaven and Hell opens with an "Argument", which describes how the "just man" has been driven from his original state in Eden to become an outcast wandering in the wilderness. The "just man" represents the meek peasant coming out from under the feudal shadow into the "wilderness", the first stage of the Revolution. In the first lines of the reader is told that "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds swag on the deep", thus introducing an abstract personification. Rintrah may be unde
Blake asserts that the world can only be fully opened through the free, unrestricted use of creativity. "Energy is eternal delight": man should express his emotions with utter freedom. In this section, Blake has a conversation with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Blake's apparent enemy in "The Argument" is any confining state upon society and the individual. Blake's vision of hell is a replica of his society filled with threatening objects: a "Leviathan" whose "forehead was divided into streaks . Freud supports this as, for him, id impulses are designated as evil by society because their indulgence would retard the "process of sublimination by which culture achieves its end"(Rickman 215). But, Blake knows that society (reason) can control man's freedom "till it is only the shadow of desire". Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. When he looks at nature he sees man and man's creative ability: "Where man is not, nature is barren". In the last "Memorable Fancy", Blake writes that man must be allowed to reach freely into the depths of himself to find creativity. rstood to be a voice of the poet chastising society and welcoming the era of revolutionary change occurring in Europe, or as Hal Saunders-White writes,"Rintrah may be taken as the spokesperson for Blake's honest indignation"(18). Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead. The "Proverbs of Hell"(87-8) are Blake's commentary on the inadequacy of society: "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy seas, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man". Blake tells readers to "Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth" emphasizing the emotional sterility and lack of creativeness that marks monarchy.
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