But He Talked of the Temple of Man's Body Blake's Revelation Un-locked

The impetus to write this book was to come to terms with how William Blake uses language, mainly to answer the question why he twists words out of their ordinary significations, creates his own ones, gives those he creates a variety of referents. These are aspects of his poetry that put many readers off, while others still tend to treat this linguistic behaviour as a nuisance which must be put up with if one wants to get at Blake's thought. "But He Talked of the Temple of Man's Body" builds a response to Blake's thought through an analysis of his linguistic practices. While attempting to comprehend what the poet says (about man, his potential, the world he lives in, the God he believes in), the book is at the same time an attempt to understand why Blake says what he says the way he says it. The starting point for such an analysis of Blake's poetry is not Derrida but Locke, not of Grammatology but An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, particularly its Book Three, Of Words, which is a quintessence of the rationalist philosophy of language. As Part I of "But He Talked" ... demonstrates, Locke turned words into bricks and used them to build a sophisticated system of science and morality, which Borkowska calls 'The Temple of Rationalism'. As the remaining two Parts (Part II: 'Destroying the Temple - Rending the Veil', and Part III: 'Rebuilding the Temple') show, Blake's linguistic practices were aimed to disentangle the English language from this system, to open Locke's words onto a new range of meanings and make them capable of carrying non-Lockean significations. The book's position is that reading Blake through deconstructive theories does not really capture the ultimate sense of his poetry.