“I Go to Eternal Death”: William Blake’s Milton as Materialist Underworld Journey

Abstract

This article extends and redirects the critical conversation around the relationship of Blake’s epics to nationalism and imperialism, as well as to materialism, by situating Milton: A Poem in relationship to contemporary uses of the trope of the underworld descent ( katabasis in Greek). The article locates Blake’s revision of this trope as an important site of his radical acceptance of materiality and its challenge to the trend of other Romantic-era epics, and discourse about identity more broadly, to restrict individuals in ways conducive to empire. Considering the material implications of Blake’s concept of self-annihilation and the use of the underworld in other epics, especially those of the Romantic epic revival, I show how Blake reinvents the trope: his Milton does not merely gain knowledge but undergoes a materialist self-annihilation, accepting the radical discontinuities and flux of the material world, which undercuts the conceptual categories that have been shaped by developing ideologies of nationalism and imperialism. Blake revises katabasis to reorient his audience’s understanding of identity, to encourage readers to see themselves not as atomized essences trapped in discursive categories (“Selfhood,” in Blake’s parlance) but dynamic participants in a material flux. Blake prompts his readers to recognize the material conditions that bind them to others, and his art can thus provide a basis of human solidarity across national, racial, and cultural lines.