Blake's Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas [Hardcover]

Peter Otto (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019818719X | ISBN-13: 978-0198187196 | Publication Date: October 18, 2001

Blake's Critique of Transcendence is the first full-length book to examine in any detail or consistency the relation between Blake's text and the visual designs in The Four Zoas, one of the most important works in Blake's oeuvre.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Otto's confidence in treating the poem and its illustrations will encourage the student to read this difficult poem...extensive bibliography is [] extremely useful."--Studies in Romanticism

"Successfully connects Blake's cultural milieu of transcendence to the embodiment at work in The Four Zoas.... Otto's insightful commentary unveils the strained relations within the poem extending from self to history, from spirit to body."--Wordsworth Cicle

About the Author

Peter Otto is Senior Lecturer in English, University of Melbourne

Product Details

• Hardcover: 392 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019818719X
• ISBN-13: 978-0198187196
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,431,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars beyond frye, April 6, 2009

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This review is from: Blake's Critique of Transcendence: Love, Jealousy, and the Sublime in The Four Zoas (Hardcover)

Some time ago I reread Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry before having another read through of the poems of William Blake including the longer poems The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Despite my appreciation of Frye's book I was struck by the disconnect between many of Frye's well-expressed and coherent ideas and the poems themselves. I noticed also that Frye barely quoted from any of the poems or analyzed any passage specifically. At that point I started to look around for other texts which offered a different viewpoint from Frye to see if my dissatisfaction was justified or not. The more I read the alternative views the more convinced I became that Frye's account was seriously deficient. I do not think he is entirely wrong or that there is nothing of value in his book. However, I strongly recommend that readers interested in Blake's poetry read alternative views. The ones I have found most useful and interesting include the current book listed here as well as the following: The Four Zoas (Photographic Facsimile (Magno & Erdman), Narrative Unbound (Donald Ault), The Dialectic of Vision (Fred Dortort), Dark Figures in the Desired Country (Gerda Norvig), The Traveler in the Evening (Morton Paley), Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Molly Rothenberg),Blake's Critique of Transcendence (Peter Otto) and some of the articles in Blake's Sublime Allegory (Curran & Wittreich Eds.) I might note that after doing all this reading of the poems and about Blake I am convinced that the unpublished The Four Zoas is the central and most significant poem Blake wrote and that both Milton and Jerusalem suffer in comparison with it. The problem that Blake may have realized with the Four Zoas was that it could never be published in its authentic form due to the graphic (for the time) psychosexual content of the illustrations (the subtitle of the poem is The Torments of Love and Jealousy).