Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument was published by Doubleday in 1963 and was Bloom’s first major work of criticism — the book that established his reputation as a reader of extraordinary power and that demonstrated the method he would refine over the next fifty years. The book provides comprehensive readings of Blake’s prophetic poems — The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem — texts so difficult that most readers and many scholars simply gave up on them.
Bloom’s achievement was to demonstrate that Blake’s prophecies are not chaotic visions but carefully structured arguments — that the elaborate mythology (the Zoas, the Emanations, the Spectres, the struggles of Los and Urizen) constitutes a coherent philosophical system comparable to Hegel’s or Schelling’s, expressed in visionary rather than discursive form. He reads the prophetic books as one reads philosophy: tracking the development of ideas, the resolution of contradictions, the dialectical movement of the argument.
The book established several positions that would become Bloom’s lifelong commitments: the belief that great poetry is essentially a form of thinking (not feeling or imagining); the conviction that difficulty is not a flaw but a feature of the greatest art; and the method of close reading that treats every word and image as contributing to a total argument. It remains one of the essential works of Blake criticism and the indispensable starting point for Bloom’s subsequent career.
Collecting Blake’s Apocalypse
First edition (Doubleday, New York, 1963): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$35