‘Of Combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud’: William Blake’s _Urizen_ as Steam Engine, Albion Mill, and Notes Toward a Materialist Method for the Anthropocene

This article reads William Blake’s '[First] Book of Urizen' (1794) as a mytho-political response to early industrial modernity, positioning Urizen as a metaphysical emblem of combustion, enclosure, and machinic reason. Interpreting Blake’s illuminated plates in relation to the architecture and ideology of Albion Mill—London’s first large-scale steam-powered flour mill—I argue that Urizen functions not as abstract cosmology, but as a materialist diagram of fossil modernity. The essay draws from Romantic media studies, ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities to reframe Blake’s image-texts as anticipatory infrastructures: speculative constellations of ecological violence and poetic resistance. In Blake’s visual language, steam becomes scripture, cloud becomes control, and Urizen becomes a spectral machine conjuring law. The article proposes a method of infrastructural reading that attends to how poetic form can metabolize planetary crisis—inviting new modes of historical consciousness and critique in the Anthropocene.