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William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the strangest and most incendiary works in the Western canon: a prophetic satire in which angels argue with devils, moral law is inverted, and the energies of rebellion are elevated above the pieties of reason. Written and engraved in the 1790s, it remains a work that resists containment—at once poem, manifesto, theology, and attack.
In this volume, the text is placed under pressure by Hal Foster, a defining critic of contemporary art and visual culture, and a central voice in the journal October. Known for his work on psychoanalysis, the avant-garde, and the afterlives of modernism, Foster brings to Blake neither reverence nor dismissal, but a sharp, testing intelligence.
His annotations move restlessly across the page: clarifying Blake’s symbolic system, challenging his mysticism, tracing unexpected continuities into modern and contemporary art, and, at times, puncturing the text’s prophetic authority with dry, surgical wit. The result is not a guide but a confrontation, a running argument conducted in the margins of a visionary work that has lost none of its volatility.
William Blake was an English poet, printmaker, and visionary whose illuminated books fused text and image into a singular artistic form. Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, he is now regarded as a central figure of Romanticism, whose work defies convention in its mythology, symbolism, and prophetic intensity.
Hal Foster is an American art critic and historian, and a longtime editor of October. A leading voice in contemporary criticism, he is known for his writings on modernism, the avant-garde, and the intersections of art, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory.