How The Complete Poems drew on Job
A documented line of influence: William Blake demonstrably engaged Unknown’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
Relevance
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On The Complete Poems’s page
- The book Blake read his own neglected life through — he reperused Job obsessively and identified with its tested man
- The whirlwind voice conjuring Behemoth and Leviathan haunts 'The Tyger' and its question of what fearful hand could frame such a thing
- Blake closed the loop with 22 engraved 'Illustrations of the Book of Job' (1826) — reading the original shows you the source of his most awestruck verse
On Job’s page
- Blake returned to Job his whole life — he 'devoted himself to a perusal and reperusal' of it and Ezekiel, and personally identified with the suffering man
- That obsession culminates in his 22 'Illustrations of the Book of Job' (1826), the summit of his pictorial engagement with the text
- Job's whirlwind — God answering out of the storm with Behemoth and Leviathan — stands behind the terrifying maker of 'The Tyger'