The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake claims that John Milton was a true poet and his epic poem Paradise Lost was "of the Devil's party without knowing it".

Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral strictures and his Manichaean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarised and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order; hence, a marriage of heaven and hell.

The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost.

Unlike those of Milton and Dante, Blake's conception of Hell begins not as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, somewhat Dionysian energy, opposed to the authoritarian and regulated perception of Heaven.

Blake's purpose is to create what he called a "memorable fancy" in order to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutional religion, which he describes thus: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.

Moreover, he explores the contrary nature of reason and of energy, believing that two types of people existed: the "energetic creators" and the "rational organizers", or, as he calls them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "devils" and "angels".

According to Michel Surya, French writer Georges Bataille threw pages of Blake's book into the casket of his friend and lover Colette Peignot on her death in 1938.

An allusion from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, depicting Aristotle's skeleton, is present in Wallace Stevens's poem "Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit".

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" is quoted by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in the 1988 movie Bull Durham, and can be seen in writing in a scene from David Cronenberg's 1975 film Shivers.

The quote also appears (slightly paraphrased as "the path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom") in the lyrics of the 1999 Enigma hit Gravity Of Love.