Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Pennington

SOURCE: "Innocence and Experience and the Imagination in the World of Peter Beagle," in Mythlore, Vol. 15, No. 4, Summer, 1989, pp. 10-16.

In the following essay, Pennington applies William Blake's philosophy of contraries to understand Beagle's work and its critical reception.

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence," writes William Blake in his radical and paradoxical The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a marriage that prompted C.S. Lewis to annul in The Great Divorce. In Blake's universe opposites attract and repel and inform one another. As Martin Nurmi explains;

A human world must be informed by opposed yet positive and complementary forces which, when allowed to interact without external restraint, impart to life a motion and a tension that make it creative.

This dialectic is extremely complex, for unlike Yin and Yang which separates light from...
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