DiscoverExpanding Eyes: A Visionary EducationEpisode 229: William Blake’s The Four Zoas. A Brief Plot Synopsis as Scaffolding for a Poem That Does Not Have a Sequential Plot. Why the Poem Can’t Be Read as a Linear, Causal Sequence.
Episode 229: William Blake’s The Four Zoas. A Brief Plot Synopsis as Scaffolding for a Poem That Does Not Have a Sequential Plot. Why the Poem Can’t Be Read as a Linear, Causal Sequence.

Episode 229: William Blake’s The Four Zoas. A Brief Plot Synopsis as Scaffolding for a Poem That Does Not Have a Sequential Plot. Why the Poem Can’t Be Read as a Linear, Causal Sequence.

Update: 2025-08-17
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Description

A quick run-through of the plot elements in the first half of Blake’s The Four Zoas. But then a discussion of why such a synopsis is only a useful fiction or scaffolding. The poem describes a higher order of reality falling into the lower one and becoming it. Things are metamorphosing into their fallen forms, the forms we call ordinary reality. This is a fall from a circumference to an alienated center.

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Episode 229: William Blake’s The Four Zoas. A Brief Plot Synopsis as Scaffolding for a Poem That Does Not Have a Sequential Plot. Why the Poem Can’t Be Read as a Linear, Causal Sequence.

Episode 229: William Blake’s The Four Zoas. A Brief Plot Synopsis as Scaffolding for a Poem That Does Not Have a Sequential Plot. Why the Poem Can’t Be Read as a Linear, Causal Sequence.

Michael Dolzani