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''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'' is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake. It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets from etched plates containing prose, poetry and illustrations. The plates were then coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine. The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical ferment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work ''Heaven and Hell'', published in Latin 33 years earlier. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake in several places in the ''Marriage''. Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral strictures and his Manichaean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order; hence, a marriage of heaven and hell. The book is written in prose, except for the opening "Argument" and the "Song of Liberty". The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's ''Divine Comedy'' and Milton's ''Paradise Lost''. ==Proverbs of Hell== Unlike that of Milton or Dante, Blake's conception of Hell begins not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven. Blake's purpose is to create what he called a "memorable fancy" in order to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion, which he describes thus: :"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. :And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; :Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; :Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. :And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things. :Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast." In the most famous part of the book, Blake reveals the Proverbs of Hell. These display a very different kind of wisdom from the Biblical Book of Proverbs. The diabolical proverbs are provocative and paradoxical. Their purpose is to energise thought. Several of Blake's proverbs have become famous: :"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." :"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." Blake explains that, :"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, :Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence. :From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. :Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing :from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Marriage of Heaven and Hell」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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