Milton: A Poem in Two Books

Overview
William Blake’s Milton: A Poem in Two Books is a visionary epic that fuses myth, autobiography, and literary criticism to stage the return of John Milton from Eternity to correct the spiritual errors Blake believed haunted Milton’s work and England’s culture. Written and engraved as an illuminated book beginning in 1804, the poem opens with a prophetic preface that includes the lyric later known as Jerusalem, a call to build a new spiritual community through imaginative labor. The action unfolds across Blake’s symbolic geography of Albion (Britain) and the Eternal realms, where characters personify states of mind: Los the prophetic artist, Urizen restrictive reason, Satan the hardened selfhood, and Ololon the feminine emanation of Milton.

Book the First
The poem begins with a bardic summons that denounces hired religion and timid scholarship, urging a mental fight for the New Jerusalem. In Eternity, Milton hears the bard’s song and recognizes in it a judgment upon his own legacy: the idolization of moral law, the suppression of generous love, and a failure to honor the feminine principle. Vowing to set right these errors, he undertakes self-annihilation, the surrender of the isolated ego that Blake calls Selfhood. Casting off his Spectre, Milton descends through the spiritual heavens into time and space.

Milton’s path carries him through the imaginative London of Blake’s myth and down to the rural coast of Felpham, where Blake was living. In a startling act of incarnation, Milton enters Blake’s left foot, the portal of prophetic perception. Blake becomes both witness and participant, feeling the fiery pain and exaltation of this indwelling. Los, the eternal form of artistic imagination, forges the instruments and furnaces by which Milton’s inner errors will be exposed and burned away. Satan emerges not as a distant fiend but as Milton’s own hardened shadow, the moralistic, accusatory self that mistakes law for vision. Against him stand the energies of Los and of Jesus, the Divine Humanity, whose law is creative forgiveness. Book the First closes with Milton poised to begin his purification within the mortal world, an act that will have consequences for Albion at large.

Book the Second
Attention shifts to Ololon, the collective feminine counterpart of Milton in Eternity. Hearing of Milton’s descent, she confronts his severity toward what he had called the female will and resolves to follow him. Appearing in a humble, veiled habit, Ololon descends through the landscapes of London and the downs toward Blake’s cottage at Felpham. Her journey is a counterpoint to Milton’s: where he seeks to purge the false masculine pride that calcifies into Satan, she seeks to rectify the injured feminine that withdraws into passivity or resentment.

Arriving in Blake’s garden, Ololon beholds the tempest of purification. Los’s furnaces blaze; the winds of judgment sweep over Albion; the sea and stars answer to the tumult of an inner apocalypse. Milton confronts Satan as his own projected selfhood and rejects him, choosing instead the path of imaginative mercy. Ololon, in an act of radical humility, offers herself to unite with Milton not as possession but as restored companionship. Their reunion, achieved through mutual self-renunciation, dissolves the partitions between male and female, poet and prophet, time and Eternity. The vision widens to a communal horizon: the building of Golgonooza, the city of art; the awakening of Albion; the approach of the Last Judgment understood as a transformation of perception, where contraries are embraced in the human form divine.

Themes and Vision
Blake recasts Milton not as an authority to be revered but as a living spirit capable of growth, returning to amend his own tradition. The poem argues that true regeneration begins with the annihilation of isolated selfhood and the recovery of the imaginative will, where love and forgiveness supplant accusation and law. Through the union of Milton and Ololon, Blake insists that wholeness requires the reintegration of the feminine. Rooted in English places yet ranging across Eternity, Milton offers a prophetic map for remaking culture by remaking perception, the work Blake names building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.