Notes
1 See Robert Kaufman's "Everybody
Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty"
in Modern Language Quarterly, 61:1 (March 2000) 131-155.
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2 Blake's notebook description
of the now-lost painting "[A Vision of The Last Judgment],"
probably written near the time of the completion and printing of three
of the four extant copies of Milton, suggest precisely this view
of the Last Judgment. In this description, "The Last Judgment is
an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science," thus figuring the last Judgment
as an aesthetic experience occasioned by what the description refers to
as "True Art" in opposition to an objective historical finality
that is guaranteed by a theological principle (E 565).
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3 If your browser does not
support Java, you will need to select the "non-Java" option
for the pages on the Blake Archive to which this article is linked in
order to view the plate.
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4 See Thomas Volger's excellent
article "RE: Naming MIL/TON" for an extended analysis of this
aspect of Milton.
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5 Sixfold, this emanative portion
of Milton, called, enigmatically enough, Ololon, represents Milton's three
wives and three daughters according to S. Foster Damon (307). As Blake's
concept of emanation is developed in The Four Zoas, Milton,
and Jerusalem, the term generally refers to a separate female part
of a character that appears or emanates in the state of existence often
referred to as generation, a state defined, in part, by sexual division
and generative reproduction. Ololon is, however, much more complex than
a biographical conflation of identities, of the legacy of Milton's treatment
of his wives and daughters, or the repetition in Blake's personal mythology
of the emanation in its conflation of the Christian mythos of the creation
of man and of sexual awareness as coincident with the expulsion from the
Edenic state. When Ololon appears it is as both a place located "in
Eden [as] a sweet River, of mild & liquid pearl," and a voice, referring
to itself as plural, of "those who Milton drove / Down into Ulro"
(21 [23]: 15-17, E 115).
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6 Much of what the Bard's song
describes are generally understood as a recapitulation, through the mythic
machinery of Blake’s The Four Zoas, of Blake’s own struggles to
produce his work while employed by William Hayley between 1800 and 1803
at Felpham.
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