This is the first full study of all of William Blake's illustrations to Milton's poetry. It includes complete discussions of Blake's designs to L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the Nativity Ode, Comus, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained as well as related visual works like various essays in Milton portraiture. Included are over a hundred black and white illustrations and 54 color plates.
Blake's designs to Milton's poems are best understood as visual essays in criticism that represent Blake's deliberate attempt to correct what he regarded as errors of vision that hampered Milton's ability to articulate his own visionary reading of human experience. As he does overtly in poems like his epic Milton, in the illustrations Blake likewise strips away these vestiges of erroneous vision, revealing the visionary core of Milton's works, including their often subversive readings of the relationship of humanity and God.
The discussion of Blake's designs proceeds within the context of eighteenth-century illustration of Milton, a long visual tradition that is examined in detail in the book.
University of Nebraska Press, 1983