The Book of Copper and the Anvil of Death: Gothic Elements of William Blake’s Creation Myth

Abstract

This Joint Degree thesis will pull largely from William Blake’s major poems and visual art between America, A Prophecy (1793) and Jerusalem (1820) in order to contribute to a dimension of the discussion of Blake’s later “prophecies” that has not received much attention in Blake scholarship until fairly recently. This dimension is the Gothic elements of Blake’s oeuvre, which extend well beyond the artist’s predilection for graveyard imagery. With recent scholarship by David Punter as its base, the thesis will demonstrate that the substance of William Blake’s creation myth (concerning two demiurges, Urizen and Los, and their part in the simultaneous creation and fall of both mankind and the material world) lies upon Gothic bones. The narrative web Blake spins, like those of Faust and Shelley, among others, relies upon a hubristic seeker of arcane and profane knowledge creating something monstrous.

The thesis will be broken into three parts. Part one will center around the nature of the arcane knowledge itself. This section will first demonstrate that Blake believed himself to be the possessor of divinely-bestowed, powerful knowledge before showing — largely through visual analysis of Blake’s illustrations — that he gave this same knowledge to his two major players in the creation myth: Urizen and Los. The second section will develop this line of thinking with several bits of in-depth analysis of the characters themselves and their actions in the poetry, showing that the source of this knowledge within the narrative is, in true Gothic fashion, the grave. The third and final section will turn to the abominable result of Urizen and Los’s machinations: fallen man, who is monstrous in his very nature.