After completing Jerusalem and beginning the Job illustrations, his greatest prophecy and series of engraving, Blake focused his intellectual fires on a single engraved plate. Deriving its image of the famous Laocoön group from an earlier commercial work and distilling its visionary argument from a lifetime of spiritual warfare, Blake unifies the visual and the verbal in support of his assertion that politics, religion, and art form a whole.

Some questions I answer in this article: How are picture and text unified? How is this plate related to the rest of Blake's work? And why does God need redemption anyway? This plate is more than a collection of brilliant graffiti; it is a prophetic tablet.

* * * The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination * * *