Analogous to the experience of creating, but not owning, and tending, but not being, our children, poets create and tend, but neither own nor are their poems. Addressing the issues of biography and autobiography in my writing, I assert that I am all of the characters and none of the characters. I become inspired to create a persona and then I tend it as it grows, making it up as I go along. William Blake, in Visions of the Daughters of Albion, creates a world of characters with distinct voices, mainly female, and by virtue of this removes himself from the question of authorial identification with personae in the text. Yet as a poet, he is all and none of his characters. In places, the bleeding between of Blake’s voice and Oothoon’s voice brings us very close to an overtly personal identity in the text.

“The speaker in the argument is Oothoon, who represents thwarted love” (Wu 94). The Argument, an evenly broken two stanza short poem, stands out against densely-packed prosaic poetic of the two hundred twenty six lines of Visions which follow. Our attention is directed. The speaker, often in dialogue and often in narration, is identified as “I.” The “I” of the narrator refers to Oothoon, the proposed speaker and supposed self of the poem, in the third person, and introduces herself into dialogue while narrating forcefully upon the most personal of statements,

I cry, “Love! Love! Love! Happy, happy Love! Free as a mountain wind!” Can that be love, that drinks another as a sponge drinks water?

While the background of Blakean social and political commentary exists in Albion, he expresses through the character, or persona, or imaginary self, ideas pertaining to the self in love, in nature, and in society. While reading Albion, I lost track of the speaker’s identity, beginning instead to hear the comfortable voice of poet as speaker of the multiple social self. This is the voice I identify with Blake’s poetry. The social critic who tries to find a mindful placement of self in society. His cuture, guided toward oppression by the overbearing combination of Church and State, plays the role of omniscient antagonist, balanced against the individualistic narrator.

In Wu‘s catalogue of Selected Contents by Theme, Albion is listed as a Women’s Right’s poem. Indeed, it is. Oothon, the "I" or "self" of the poem, is deflowered, debased in the eyes of the church, her community, and her lover – indeed, it was he who had at her first – yet she asserts, “I bathe my wings / And I am white and pure to hover round Theotormon’s breast.” Blake’s narrative flows from the point of view of Oothon, who may or may not represent Blake’s personal point of view, but who represents a poignant viewpoint, regardless. Blake places his individual in a society and explores her feelings, and the dramatic outcome of her story, while at the same time speaking on behalf of the universal human experience: “Arise and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy.”