William Blake's prophetic books

In these works, concluding with the epic Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, he elaborated a personal invented mythology (mythopoeia).

While The French Revolution from 1791 is not illustrated and is usually excluded from the list of prophetic books, David V. Erdman contends that the separation of this work from the corpus removes a key to the symbolism used by Blake.

This position is now rarely held by scholars of English literature, Blake having been one of the major beneficiaries of critical fashion during the twentieth century.

[citation needed] Northrop Frye and, following him, Harold Bloom have suggested that the difficulty of reading Blake's prophetic works can be overcome, and that the dismissive "mystical" tag applied to them is largely an obfuscation.

[citation needed] Blake's prophetic books, having often been dismissed until recent times, have had a tortuous publication history, unlike his lyric poems, which have been regarded as more direct and relatively unproblematic.