NOTES


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 24 Speculation in this arena could focus on whether there is a purely arbitrary
relation between the verbal text and the Night Thouights illustrations (as Bentley
believes [Blake: "lVala," p.194]), whether the visual text was generated by the
verbal in the non-Nqiht Thoiglhts-framed pages (as Bentley believes [Blake: "Vala,"
p. 196]); whether Blake chose certain Night Thoights pages on which he would
write his verbal text because he already knew what the verbal text would be (i.e.,
he was copying from a prior draft); or whether he chose the Night Tllioights pages at
random, with these pages then exerting a subliminal effect on his production of
the verbal text (which would be impossible if, as is often assumed, the text in many
of these pages has been copied from a prior draft: but this, like most everything else
about the text is conjectural).
 Though I have thus far refused to incorporate such intuitive methods into my
readings of Blake, I have been working for several years with the relations existing
between verbal and visual dimensions in very different media, especially animated
cartoons, comic strips, and comic books. Some of my essays on verbal/visual
relations in Carl Barks' Donald Duck comic book stories, which may eventually
be applied to Blake as well, appear in The Carl Barks Library, 10 vols. ed. Bruce
Hamilton (Scottsdale: Another Rainbow, 1983-88, in progress).
 For a provocative account of Blake's relation to the suppressed erotic dimen-
sions of Christianity see David Wagenknecht, "Aftcrword" to Critical Paths: Blake
and the Argument of Method, ed. Dan Miller, Mark Bracher, and Donald Ault
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming 1987).
 27 See, for example, Stuart Curran, "Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century,"
Studies in English Literature 14 (1974), 639-40.
 28 S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. (originally pub-
lished 1924. Reprint ed. Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1958) and David V.
Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (originally published 1954. Reprint ed.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).
 2" R.S.Crane, Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1952. The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry
([Toronto:] University of Toronto Press, 1953), and Idea of the Humanities and
Essays Critical and Historical 2 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1967); see my
"Blake's De-Formation of Neo-Aristotelianis m" forthcoming in Critical Paths.
 3' Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)
Damrosch's impressive book places Blake in a double-bind: ifBlake succimbs to the
temptations of extraneous religious or philosophical systems then he has, in effect,
been co-opted by them; if, on the other hand, he fails to synthesize alternative or
competing philosophies into his comprehensive system, then he fails as a
philosopher and poet.
 ~3 War ofthe Titans: Blake's Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983). DiSalvo's interesting book tends to relate
Blake to a range of utopian visionary ideologies (including Native American
communal myths), demonstrating over and over how Blake's vision succeeds
where others fail or are only partial.
 32 Blake's "Four Zoas": The Design ofA Dream. Cambridge, Mass. and London,
1978.
 Wilkie andJohnson, viii-ix.
 3 Helen T. McNeil, "The Formal Art of The Four Zoas," in Blake's Visionary
Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton