A portion of his life

The scope of "A Portion of His Life" has deliberately been restricted to a significant aspect of Milton's influence that has not before been seriously considered in Blake criticism: Blake's conception, expressed in poetry and art, of "the female portion," his Miltonic view of woman. Arguing that the female personages who appear in Blake's continuously developing mythic structures in his major works are not "women" in any realistic sense, Freed shows that in his principal representations of femaleness Blake draws repeatedly on certain of Milton's archetypal female personages - notably Eve and Sin of Paradise Lost, Nature in the Hymn on the Nativity of Christ, and the Lady of Comus - and, moreover, that Milton's poetry is often in the most literal sense the materia prima of Blake's. Freed reviews other philosophical and literary elements comprising Blake's concept of femaleness - his study of the Hebrew Bible and of alchemical treatises, his reading of Spenser and Shakespeare - and considers aspects of Blake's own life that led him to find new dimensions in the life and works of Milton.