At the same time he positions himself as a marginalized outsider, he does not attempt to cut himself off from the world; to have a dialectic vision is, after all, to engage the world. A prophet who speaks only to the saved speaks to no one but himself or herself. But he does so by means of an imaginative embrace that looks forward to the expansive and embracing visions of Whitman. We can see this in some of the proverbs of hell that form the center of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and begin to radiate outward to embrace the world: “The most sublime act is to set another before you,” “One thought fills immensity.” So it is not surprising to find Blake saying in a few pages later, “All deities reside in the human breast.” By now the marriage has been consummated and blessed by imagination so that the book can end with the line, “For every thing that lives is Holy.” This is an astounding turnaround: a book that begins with a radical challenge to accepted belief, with a combative desire to take on the central power structure, ends up by creating its own inner harmony, its own world, from which it can embrace everything, including what it once criticized. The margin has been transformed into a center.

This is an astounding turnaround:
a book that begins with a radical challenge to accepted belief, with a combative desire to take on the central power structure, ends up creating its own inner harmony, its own world, from which it can embrace everything, including what it once criticized. The margin has been transformed into a center.

Blake’s poetic move is an heroic one, and we see similar strategies from the brief Songs of Innocence and Experience all the way to his epic, Jerusalem, where the characters who have been marginalized by the narrator suddenly realize it is their responsibility to form a center before the poem ends. It is based upon a certain freedom the periphery gives the speaker. It is a freedom manifest in the sudden shifts in tone, the unexpectedness of the book where almost anything can happen next, from walking among the fires of hell to dispelling imaginary monsters. It is a freedom that produces “The Proverbs of Hell” — a free verse poem that seems discontinuous on the surface, but in fact keeps progressing to more radical deconstructions of contemporary modes of thought: “What is now proved was once only imagined,” he states. Poetically, it is a freedom the narrator has because he situates himself in the wilderness, like the prophet Rintrah in the opening lyric of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Sociologically, it is the freedom Blake has because he is not caught up in the politics of poetry of his day: his copies sold a scant few books, mostly in the tens or dozens, and he was looked upon by all in the so-called poetic establishment — except for Coleridge — as either insane or inconsequential. He was, for instance, no Robert Southey, the poet laureate who wrote an epic a year and was far better known and a far more popular writer than, say, Keats, or Coleridge, but who is today long forgotten except as the object of Byron’s great satire in The Vision of Judgement.

Of course, Blake was not the only poet of his day to understand that the only legitimate role of the poet was on the periphery. This Romantic dialectic of periphery and center is defined succinctly by Schelling in Of Human Freedom, “Self-will may seek to be, as a particular will, that which it is only in its identity with the universal will. It may seek to be at the periphery that which it is only insofar as it remains at the center (just as the quiet will in the calm of the depths of nature is also universal precisely because it stays in the depths).”^[4] And William Wordsworth, for example, in “Lines Composed a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” remembers how alienated and maginalized from his family, nature, the whole world he felt in his childhood until he remembers

It is imagination, once again, that embraces the “all,” that brings the poet from the periphery to a new center constructed from that very periphery, constructed from a sense of absence, loss, and deprivation. It is a center that he can project into the future for his sister to whom the poem is addressed.