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Article: Blake's Book of Los and Visionary Economics.(William Blake)(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- ANQ
- Article date:
- September 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Between the infinite and the finite Blake's Book of Los (1795) rages. This prophetic poem, perhaps even more than The Book of Urizen (BU) (1794), bums with apocalyptic ire over the rationalization of passion and desire into order, balance, and security--into Urizen's "Solid," his one law.(1) And the one law that the wrath of Los spurns especially in his book was the increasingly dominant law of eighteenth-century economics--i.e., the law of supply and demand or of plenty and scarcity, abundance and loss.
Critics of The Book of Los, especially those eager to read sociopolitical quietism into Blake's work as early in the 1790s as possible, argue that its denouement ...