The Valley Of Vision

The Author Of This Important Contribution To The Study Of Blake Was Tragically Drowned In ASailing Accident When He Had Almost Completed It In ManuscriptHis Was ACritical Mind Of Singular Erudition And PowerAs Is Abundantly Evidenced In These Chapters Which Northrop Frye Has Prepared For PublicationFisher Had Made ACareful Study Of Oriental Philosophy And Of Plato And The Neoplatonists And This Background Enabled Him To Make An Original And Fruitful Analysis Of His Central Interest, BlakeThe Book Is Not AStudy Of Blake's Sources But Of His ContextThe Author Is Trying To Answer The Question: Given Blake's General Point Of View, Why Does He Make The Specific Judgments He Does Make, Judgments Which So Often Seem Merely Glib Or Petulant Or PerverseBlake Himself, In Explaining APainting, Remarked: 'it Ought To Be Understood That The Persons, Moses And Abraham, Are Not Here Meant, But The States Signified By Those Names.' Fisher Explains What Blake Meant By 'states,' And Shows That Such Names As Plato, Bacon Or Newton, Or Such Terms As 'priest' Or 'deist' In Blake's Writings, Refer Not To Individuals But To Cultural Forces In Western Civilization, The Influence Of Which Accounted For The Social Conditions That Blake AttackedThe Attack Itself, Fisher Shows, Was Based On ARevolutionary Dialectic, ASense Of The Underlying Opposition Between Reactionaries Committed To Obscurantism And Social Injustice, The 'elect' As Blake Calls Them, And The Prophets Committed To AGreater Vision the 'reprobate', With The Mass Of The Public the 'redeemed' In Between.
'