Romantic Philosophy in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
             The 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 understood 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).
             Blake's apparent enemy in "The Argument" is any confining state upon society and the individual. Blake recognizes that the tensions involved in the formation of culture are abstracted by society into morality: Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason. Evil is the active springing from energy. Go...