Taking Blake too Seriously

As I suggested eleven months ago in a Highbrow memorandum, there is a "risk" in taking William Blake too seriously. Further thoughts along these lines:
  
I find him inspiring, full of anthropological and psychological insights, but I am also weary of where he can lead his admirers. The more I read about him the more I am skeptical. As a  philosopher, he is not as rigorous as his exuberance might suggest. On Locke, for example, his criticisms are over the top and he is dead wrong, and then on top of his haughty and sanctimonious declamations he equivocates--perhaps he realized he was in over his head? A survey of his work and his "claims" demonstrates that he does a lot of equivocating. Along these lines, somewhere he says he is not interested in being precise or accurate, but is rather interested in "consistency"--I take it that he means he is more interested in producing an "impressive composition" than he is in expressing philosophical understanding. I think his claims concerning his superiority to Milton have deceived people. He is no where near Milton as a scholar, a theologian, a historian, a politician, a psychologist, a philologist, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a poet, a professional, a well-connected man of the world, a revolutionary, or what have you. Also, his stuff in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell about Milton being of the devil's party is absurd... But many people take this as a point of departure for claiming Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost. There is a little too much Rousseau in Blake. At a Blake conference someone more knowledgeable than me explained that as the French Revolution went south and plunged into violence, Blake stopped printing Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was withdrawing from the moral relativism and claims for the veracity of "passion" that Marriage espouses. Also, the biographers present ample evidence that Blake wrote some pretty absurd advertisements for his shows in which he made over-the-top claims about himself, his genius, and his prophetic powers. People in the late-18th century art word laughed at this horn blowing, and it seems to me their laughter was justified.