Selfhood and Self-Annihilation in Blake’s Milton

Abstract

The fourth act of Prometheus Unbound records the effects of loving-kindness as the new boundary condition for universal relations and verbally celebrates the arrival of outer revolution realized through inner transformation. The mythic key to Shelley’s poetic operations in Prometheus reflects his “deeply held commitment to the oneness of human experience” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 103). Shelley was well-versed in this type of knowledge through a “copious reading project” that included Oriental studies from Sir William Jones’s Works and Robertson’s Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India but which was also informed by British literary works of Oriental interest by Byron, Elphinstone, Faber, Owenson, Southey, and others (M. Williams 171–2). The scientifically-oriented view of myth pursued by Western scholars extended enlightenment methods to categorize mythic representation, leading to the construction of a family of world religions that ultimately included Buddhism (King 44–8; Masuzawa 125–38). This procedure, as prior analysis in chapters 1 and 2 indicates, was deeply bound up with Oriental colonialism, and Shelley was not immune to the appropriation of Asiatic knowledge for literary effects, a point made in different ways in studies by Leask (1–12) and Makdisi (1–22, 100–21).

Our greatest enemy is to consider ourselves more important than others, which leads us and others to certain ruin. From this attachment to ‘I’ arises all the harm, fear, and suffering in this world.

(The Fourteenth Dalai Lama)

The Eye altering alters all.

(Blake)