William Blake and the Language of Adam

Book excerpt: Setting William Blake's language concepts and practices within the broad context of linguistic history, this book offers a new perspective on his poetry. Essick first looks in detail at four of Blake's paintings and addresses some basic questions in semiotic theory based on the history of the "motivated sign" idea from Plato to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Converting this background into a hermeneutic, he then demonstrates Blake's contributions to the mystical tradition and his critique of 18th-century linguistic doctrines, presenting a parodic deconstruction of rationalist sign theory in The Book of Urizen. Finally, Essick looks at Blake's compositional practices, his development of these into a transactional view of language, and the apocalyptic reordering of the relationship between meaning and being in Jerusalem.