<P> The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a book by the English poet and printmaker William Blake . It is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own intensely personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs . Like his other books, it was published as printed sheets from etched plates containing prose, poetry and illustrations . The plates were then coloured by Blake and his wife Catherine . </P> <P> The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical ferment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution . The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell, published in Latin 33 years earlier . Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake in several places in the Marriage . Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral strictures and his Manichaean view of good and evil led Blake to express a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are equally part of the divine order; hence, a marriage of heaven and hell . The book is written in prose, except for the opening "Argument" and the "Song of Liberty". The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost . </P>

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