3

The debate was given fresh impetus by Helen T. McNeil's recent hypothesis that the poem has no systematic cosmology, mythology or chronology. Her suggestion that the work is "anti-mimetic" has

shaped subsequent argument on the structure and meaning of the poem

by such scholars as Joseph Antony Wittreich Jr., and Brian Wilkie 9 and

Mary Lynn Johnson, and has an important bearing on the conclusion

of this thesis. Before considering McNeil's position, we must examine the significant critical opinions which led to her insights.

In his important study of Blake's understanding of the psychology of revolution. Mark Schorer aknowledges that Albion falls into Zoas and Emanations and is subsequently re-unified:

The Four Zoas rests on this pattern, but the pattern is not easily extracted, since Blake did his best to conceal it; for it was an intellectual pattern, after all the fury a pattern of logic.10

The existence of this broad "pattern" alone, to Schorer, is not sufficient to demonstrate that Blake had created a detailed and consis­tent mythology:

6 Helen T. McNeil, "The Formal Art of The Four Zoas," Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, eds. David V. Erdman, John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 380.

7 Ibid., p. 379.

8 Joseph Antony Wittreich Jr., "Opening the Seals: Blake's Epics and the Milton Tradition," Blake's Sublime Allegory, eds. Curran and Wittreich Jr. (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), p. 42.

9 Brian Wilkie, Mary Lynn Johnson, "On Reading The Four Zoas:

Inscape and Analogy," Blake's Sublime Allegory, eds. Curran, Wittreich Jr., p. 204.

10 Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Vision (New York:

Vintage Books, 1959), p. 289.