William Blake's Prophetic Books - Overview

Overview

In these works, concluding with the epic Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion, he elaborated a personal invented mythology (mythopoeia). The mythopoeia is largely Biblical in inspiration; apart from that, it has been extensively debated for both its political and religious content.

While The French Revolution from 1791 is not illustrated and is usually excluded from the list of prophetic books David V. Erdman contends that the separation of this work from the corpus removes a key to the symbolism used by Blake. Another work, Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797), begun while Blake was residing in Felpham, was abandoned in draft form; of this abandoning by Blake Northrop Frye has commented that "nyone who cares about poetry or painting must see in unfinished state a major cultural disaster".