Books

London: Printed at the Trianon Press for the Trustees of the William Blake Trust, 1960. Limited Edition. Hardcover. Fine. Blake, William. One of 480 copies, folio size, unpaginated [27 plates and 4 pp. of commentary]. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", first published around 1794, is unlike the other Illuminated Books, being written in prose and lacking a central theme. The text endeavors to preface the philosophy of Blake's later books using paradox and satire. As explained by Keynes in his Bibliographical Statement, "God, Heaven, and Good he believed were the masks of reason and materialism, supporting restraint by law and formal religion. Satan, Hell, and Evil were the opposed forces of the imagination, poetic inspiration and free energy, typified paradoxically by the figures of Christ and Milton, both of whom were on the side of the free 'Devil' of art and imagination. The union, therefore, of Body and Spirit and the flowering of man's creative genius, in other words the…

An influential work by Blake that presents a vision of Heaven and Hell that defies traditional theological perspectives.