From Transgender to Transparent: The Tiresias ‘Politic’ in Blake.

“I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest.”

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. ll. 228-229

William Blake’s relationship with Dante’s Divine Comedy is an overt one; his illustrations ascertain his knowledge with the narrative poem. Ample scholarship has examined

“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s”: Blake’s response to established institutions.

Why is liberty important to this period, and how does the concept of liberty shape the period’s writing?

Blake identifies the established and most dominant institutions of the Eighteenth-Century as both the state and the Church, institutions that he addresses in his Song of Liberty. These institutions are successful in so far as they enforce and regulate society, but this established authority is problematic.