Blake and the Antiquarians: The Manuscript of The Four Zoas and the “Monumental Folios” of the Dilettanti and the Antiquarians

Antiquarian influences on Blake from the neoclassical underpinnings of the classical revival of the eighteenth century to more esoteric and suppressed aspects of the rites of pagan worship documented by the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Dilettanti illuminate aspects of Blake’s most voluminous, but unpublished poem in manuscript, Vala, or The Four Zoas. Particularly the illustrations of the manuscript have proven provocative. Richard Payne Knight’s scandalous The Worship of Priapus (1786) published by the Society of Dilettanti (with which Blake’s “master”, to whom he was apprenticed, Basire was associated, as well as the Society of Antiquaries) had an undeniable influence on Blake’s manuscript. In both works there is a disjunction between text and image; in both there is a questioning of Judeo-Christianity; and in both there is a suspicion of the way organized religion had coopted primal and sexual energies.