8

city of Art constitute an agency of salvation for man. ... He [Blake] gave up The Four Zoas because it explained, too well and in too many ways, how the world had reached the darkness of his own times, but explained hardly at all what that darkness was, and how it was to be enlightened.26

This absence of consensus on the poem's chronology among critics who argue that Blake constructed a mythology naturally leant support to the view that the methodology of archetypal or mythological criticism was inappropriate. John Beer considers the problem and decides that

no attempt to find a common myth which can be applied equally to the various spheres of man's physical, social, political and religious activity has succeeded .... Organizing patterns like the myth which he developed for Vala irritate by their manifest failure to reconcile disparate forms of experience as often as they please by their facilities of identification.²⁷

Such criticisms, from both parties, so to speak, led. Ronald L. Grimes to consider whether the poem has a beginning, a middle and an end in a formal literary sense, and he concludes:

The Four Zoas . . . begins in Medias Res. A daughter of Beulah is commanded to tell of Los' fall into division and his resurrection to unity, and to begin the story with Tharmas. We do not see Tharmas fall. He has already fallen, so we never see an Edenic beginning into which division intrudes. The poem begins in the middle, and the middle only occasionally recalls what the beginning is like. The beginning is either remembered or envisioned as being like the end. It is important to note that Blake does not begin his poem at the beginning, nor does the image of an undifferentiated or primordial unity ever occur.

Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse A Study in Poetic Argument (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963), pp. 283-284; see also Morton D. Paley, Energy and the Imagination A Study, of the Development of Blake's Thought (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 90.

Beer, Blake's Humanism, p. 202.

28

Grimes, "Time and Space in Blake's Major Prophecies," Blake's

sublime Allegory, pp. 72-73.