This course will begin with a brief study of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and go on to a reading of a bit of The Four Zoas and all of Milton. The study of these works involves the question of how Blake read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. That will bring us to the theme of the course: Blake’s reading and his always interesting and often provocative annotations to books he owned. Among those we will consider are the annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms, certain volumes of Swedenborg, Watson’s Apology for the Bible, Bacon’s Essays, Reynold’s Discourses on Art, Spurzheim’s Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, Berkeley’s Siris, and Wordsworth’s Poems and The Excursion. Also, though we do not have Blake’s annotations, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Each member of the class will be responsible for reporting on one of these texts and expanding the report into a paper.

Texts:

• The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. David V. Erdman (ed).
• William Blake. Milton: A Poem. Robert N. Essick (ed).