How The Complete Poems drew on Revelation
A documented line of influence: William Blake demonstrably engaged John’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
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On The Complete Poems’s page
- Blake's prophetic machinery — the Four Zoas above all — is built directly from John's Revelation
- The throne-beasts and apocalyptic visions he paints in watercolour are the same ones he reforges in verse; the line from John's Apocalypse to Milton and Jerusalem is the spine of his myth
- Knowing Revelation first turns Blake's hardest poems from private raving into a reader's recognizable revision of the last book of the Bible
On Revelation’s page
- Blake spent his life inside John's Apocalypse — he painted a celebrated watercolour series illustrating it (The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun)
- Then he seized its imagery whole for the prophetic poems — Milton, Jerusalem, the Four Zoas — building his mythology out of John's throne-beasts and last days