SOURCE: "Blake and Newton: Argument as Art, Argument as Science," in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 10, 1981, pp. 205-26.

In the following essay, Peterfreund examines the direct relationship of William Blake's Milton to the Principia, demonstrating that Blake's work reveals the poet's opposition to Newton's physics and his conception of the universe.

There has been a good deal of discussion recently, by George S. Rousseau and others, about the status of the relationship between literature and science as modes of discourse.' Interestingly enough, much of what has been written about literature and science has been focused on the relationship of the two modes as viewed in the context of the eighteenth century, when the relationship of the two, clearly defined or otherwise, seems to have been the strongest. Problems with defining the status of the relationship seem to have arisen from the variety of its "surface" manifestations. These...