High Road to Hell: Milton, Blake, McCarthy

Abstract

This article demonstrates that the poetry of William Blake irradiates Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, where it occupies one side of a dialectical relationship with the work of another poet, John Milton. The essay’s argument is that the poetic works of Milton and Blake strain against one another from within McCarthy’s prose to determinately shape how we read the novel. It seeks to show how an understanding of why certain literary influences are enunciated will contribute to our knowledge of the book’s relationship to its thematic content and historical referents.