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Harold Bloom suggests that William Blake's poem The Four Zoas shows "the great difficulty of dialectical apocalypse." Yet, Bloom uses a useful word, "prophetic irony," to make us see the abyss between aspiration in poetry and intuition in reading. Bloom's 'prophetic irony' is supposedly a good idea that brings together unstable, ambiguous, covert episodes as found in the poem into a unity. Yet, is Blake an ironist dealing with such episodes to create the stable, coherent, overt vision of humanity in the poetic structure? I am not sure Blake is an ironist; nonetheless, it is cogent to see the poem through based on the idea of prophetic irony in order to understand its subject matter: a vision of humanity where the first perfect, eternal, integrated, divine Man, named Albion, begins to fall by following inner four faculties, such as reason, senses, imagination, and passion, unhumanistically as far as they become separated and independent in psychic activities. Each of ‘Four Zoas’ allegorically alludes to ‘Four Living Creatures’ (Ezekiel 1:5), which are known to refer to ‘Imagination,’ ‘Reasons,’ ‘Passions’ or ‘Emotions,’ and ‘Senses’ or ‘Body,’ as symbolized in the names of four characters in the story respectively: Urthona, Urizen, Luvah, and Tharmas. In the story, the four characters are actually denounced, yet ironically anticipated, while serving to recover its original identity, perfect, eternal, integrated, and divine, from the Fall. The poem aims to announce the apocalyptic vision of divine humanity by means of such prophetic irony as Blake puts into the entire development of ‘Nine Nights.’ As Wayne Booth defines the term, ‘irony,’ Blake's irony should be stable if he is consistent, not speculative. Firstly, the divine or eternal man, Albion, loses his identity of divine and human natures which brings about the fall. Secondly, Ablion struggles to regain this identity in the fallen world which is redeemed by Jesus. Lastly, Albion announces the apocalypse. The design in Blake's poetry constitutes the eternal life of a man who is God, yet still raising some essential issues to us living in the age of post-humanism: who human is and what human is.

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번호 참고문헌 국회도서관 소장유무
1 강엽. 영국 종교시와 윌리엄 블레이크 시를 중심으로 낙원회복 운동 . 한국학술정보(주),2010. 미소장
2 Altizer, Thomas J. J. The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake. Ann Arbor: Michigan State UP, 1967. 미소장
3 Blake, William. The Complete Writings. Ed. G. Keynes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966.[Abbreviated as CW) 미소장
4 Bloom, Harold. "Dialectics in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." In English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. A. H. Abrams. New York: Oxford UP, 1960. 76-83. 미소장
5 Booth, Wayne. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974. 미소장
6 Burdon, Christopher. "William Blake." In The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. Ed. Andrew Hass,, David Jasper, and Elizabeth Jay. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 448-464. 미소장
7 Ellmann, Richard and Charles Feidelson, Jr., eds. The Modern Tradition: Background of Modern Literature. London & New York: Oxford UP,1965. 미소장
8 Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947. 미소장
9 Gleckner, R. F. The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1959. 미소장
10 Johnson, Mary L. and Grant, John E. Blake's Poetry and Designs. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979. 미소장
11 Johnson, M. and Wilkie, B. "On Reading The Four Zoas: Inscape and Analogy." In Blake's Sublime Allegory. Ed. S. Curran and J. Wittreich. Madison:U of Wisconsin P, 1973. 203-32. 미소장
12 Ryan, R, M. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789-1824. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 미소장