Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

$0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cover art

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

By: William Blake
Narrated by: Matthew Schmitz
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £3.99

Buy Now for £3.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
activate_primeday_promo_in_buybox_DT

Listeners also enjoyed...

William Blake: Essential Poems cover art
The Great Divorce cover art
Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps cover art
The Varieties of Religious Experience cover art
The Story of Philosophy cover art
The Red Book cover art

Summary

Brought to you by Altrusian Grace Media and narrated by Matthew Schmitz.

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. It opens with an introduction of a short poem entitled "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air".

William Blake claims that John Milton was a true poet and his epic poem Paradise Lost was "of the Devil's party without knowing it". He also claims that Milton's Satan was truly his Messiah. The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical ferment and political conflict during 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 criticised 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 depolarised 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.

©2023 Matthew Schmitz (P)2023 Matthew Schmitz

What listeners say about The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.