Conclusion

Abstract

Jerusalem shows that Blake’s obsession with sexuality was, if anything, stronger in his later prophecies than in the earlier ones. What has changed is the emphasis and the attitude. Sexual liberation has been replaced by forgiveness of sins as a means of salvation. Looking back at Blake’s libidinal first phase, we can see that his shift from revolutionary to radical Christian is understandable not simply as a possible conclusion by him that revolution leads to tyranny or that power corrupts, but rather in terms of his inability to continue facing the guilt that the expression of aggressive and sexual ideas produced in him. In order to understand the force of Blake’s guilt in the early period, we had to get beneath his defensive idealisations of energy and observe the strength and omnipresence of impulses of rage, envy and sadism. This was not always easy. Blake’s defence against guilt at that time was a rhetoric of blame in which the tyrant father was always guilty, coupled with powerfully seductive images of sexual and aggressive energy: flaming, naked bodies, prisons broken open, females reddening like ripening grapes.KeywordsEmotional ContentSexual LiberationSexual IdeaNaked BodyUnnatural ConsanguinityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.