Dana wrote:

Maybe, like Cathleen ni Houlihan selling her soul to the devil to buy bread for her tenants, he should have been willing to undergo the corruption to prevent mass deaths.

Dana, you must have some Auronar blood, because I was thinking about Countess Cathleen the other day (in relation to Blake, of course). After all, Yeats dedicated his play to a woman who (in his opinion) sacrificed the purity of her soul by engaging in a political struggle for a Cause. Another literary parallel I had in mind was from Osborne's Look Back in Anger:

"They all want to escape from the pain of being alive... It's no good trying to fool yourself. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint. Because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next."

In a way, this sums up Blake for me. He did not want to escape from the pain of being alive. He could have chosen to remain a saint, never hurt a living thing, etc., (and I think he had such a potential), but he wilfully gave this up. He wanted to act and change something in the world he lived in. Which inevitably implies messing up your soul.

N.