SOURCE: "Blake's News from Hell: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the Lucianic Tradition," in ELH, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring, 1976, pp. 74-99.

In this essay Tannenbaum examines The Marriage of Heaven and Hell less as polemic than as satire, situating it firmly in the Lucianic or "News from Hell" tradition.

Yet what can satire, whether grave or gay?
 It may correct a foible, may chastise
 The freaks of fashion, regulate the dress,
 Retrench a sword-blade, or displace a patch;
 But where are its sublimer trophies found?
 What vice has it subdu'd? whose heart reclaim'd
 By rigour, or whom laugh'd into reform?
 Alas! Leviathan is not so tam'd:
 Laugh'd at, he laughs again; and, stricken hard,
 Turns to the stroke his adamantine scales,
 That fear no discipline of human hands.
 —William Cowper

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.

—William...