[CROSSTALK]
A series of talks entitled
Great Writers Inspire would be freely incomplete Without the poet and
painter of William Blake prize inspiration of pretty much everything and
claim that the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative.
He also said, this world of imagination is the world returns he.
Blake for me is the most exciting and radical writer in English literature.
I'm currently writing a book called Blake Myth and the Enlightenment.
And I'm looking how is work stages a struggle between the very modern desire
to banish repressive superstitions and a more unfamiliar enthusiasm,
the visionary powers of prophecy myth and imagination.
This tension in Blake's thought is what for me makes his work so extraordinary.
In 1855, Blake's one time follower, the painter John Linnell,
described him as a saint amongst the infidels and a heretic of the orthodox.
And he speaks to the mischievous and complicated ways in which Blake thought.
But far from being an eccentric lunatic,
which many of his own time under the 19th century took him for.
Blake was a dynamic thinker with a philosophical depth to his conviction
that the way human beings perceive the world is not uniform or fixed, but
in fact is a continually creative process.
Blake constantly reminded his audience of the power of the imagination and
challenges them to liberate themselves from passive and habitual and
socially imposed ways of perceiving reality,
which he described in his poem London as the mind forged manacles.
Writing in 1799 to perhaps a reasonably confused clergyman who complained
about his paintings Blake had formed that this world is a world of imagination and
vision.
I see everything I paint in this world but not everybody sees alike.
To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is more beautiful than the sun.
And the bag warm with use of money has more beautiful proportions than
a vine filled with grapes.
He went on, to me this world is all one continued vision of fancy and
imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so.
Inspiration and imagination, the very grounds of human existence for Blake.
This aim to shake his readers' perceptions of the world around them speaks to
the tumultuous times in which Blake lived.
He was born in 1757 in Broad Street, Soho, in London.
And he was largely self-educated, but a very voracious and
combative reader as well as a skilled painter and engraver, for
he was trained at the Royal Academy of Art.
Blake was resident in London for almost all of his life.
Except for a very small period in which he resided in the village of
Helfen by the sea in Sussex.
He experienced the momentous impact on Britain of the American Revolution and
the war following, and the French Revolution and
the long series of Revolutionary Wars in Europe.
He witnessed also the onset of the Industrial Revolution.
At first hand through his work as a reproductive engraver, and
working for the book trade.
With the assistance of his devoted wife Catherine,
he printed his own works in a negative medium called illuminated printing,
combining his own visionary poetry and
images in beautiful individually colored unique books.
In his famous Songs of Innocence and
have experienced his prophetic work such as America and Europe, and
his later, extremely confusing epics, Milton and Jerusalem.
Blake produced the spiritual history of humanity from the very beginnings of
humanful to the Millennium and the end of history,
as well as charting the events of his own time from a visionary perspective.
Blake wrote in an apocalyptic religious idiom that harks back to the series of
the Old Testament prophets, like Isaiah Ezekiel and St.
John the divine, but also people who are influenced by these writers,
in particular the 17th century republican and poet John Milton.
Yet Blake also found himself within an incredibly progressive and
modern London culture.
Between 1780 and 1801, he worked as an engraver, providing illustrations for
books published by the Unitarian Publisher Joseph Johnson, who is based in St.
Paul's Churchyard in the city of London.
Unitarianism was a rational form of Protestantism,
which repudiated the tyranny at the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.
Johnson published some of the most contentious books the 1780s and 1790s,
notably the controversial theology of justice Bruce Lee,
who now know better as a pioneer and chemists.
And the works of the doctor and polymath, Erasmus Darwin, whose 1794 work,
Zoonomia, described the theory of developmental evolution,
which his grandson, Charles Darwin, would become more famous for revising.
Erasmus Darwin's poem, The Botanic Garden of 1791,
especially the section on the loves of the plants, was hugely successful and
delighted and scandalized, contemporary readers, with its ingenious and
licentious descriptions of the unorthodox sexual lives of humanized fans.
Blake produced engravings for Johnson to accompany Darwin's text, and
his own depictions of human like planets in the book and foul, and
Songs Of Innocence and of experience suggests Darwin's poem was a surprising
inspiration for his great visions of nature.
In 1791, Johnson also employed Blake to illustrate a book of titles for
children entitled Original Stories from Real Life by Mary Wollstonecraft.
Wollstonecraft his most famous book was 1792 feminist polemic, a Vindication
of the Rights of Women, which argues forcefully that women are naturally men's
mental equals, and only left inferior as a result of poor education and
the prejudices of contemporary European society.
Blake seems to have sympathized with the restricted lot of women with the Book of
Fell in 1789 and Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793.
Both taking an unusual interest in female freedom.
Is later, long mythological poems extremely disturbing and
that powerful depictions of sexual conflict defy any easy
categorizations as feminist or misogynist.
Johnson Circle was also at the vanguard of political radicalism.
In 1790, Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest British dependence of
the French Revolution in her vindication of the rights of men which Joseph Jameson
published.
He was also originated to have been the publisher of Thomas Payne's Radical Rights
of Man, 1791 but at the last minute, fearing prosecution,
he passed the book on to another publisher.
Nevertheless, before fleeing England for France,
because charges of sedition would have led to his execution.
Thomas Paine was a regular part of Johnson circle mixing with politicians,
campaigners, abolitionists, educators and poets who met under his roof.
It's not clear whether Blake met all these writers, and
much of his writings suggests he would have I think the odds were they're
very confident and enthusiastic embrace of the power of reason.
But he's worked for Johnson brought him into contact with their books, and
with some of the most exciting and cutting edge ideas of his time.
This environment of speculative free thinkers on religion, and
most other matters would have been congenial and
seems to have helped inspire Blake's works.
Blake's extraordinary satirical masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, which he created and printed somewhere between 1790 and
1793 boldly challenges the political, religious and sexual norms of his day.
Text originated in a parody of the Swedish mystical Emanuel Swedenborg,
his books Blake had been avidly reading in previous years.
But increasingly, Blake began to be disappointed with some of the orthodoxies
he felt were repeated in these books.
Inspired by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and seemingly by the free
thought of circle around Joseph Johnson, Blake chose to expand the scope of
this text, opening up his rejection Swedenborg to attack orthodox religion and
morality, and political repression and passive conformity.
All of which he believed saps humans of their eternal energies.
The almost hallucinatory, imaginative, and physical energy radiating throughout
the book makes even the most ordinary perceptions open out into the infinite.
How do you know that every bird that cuts the airy way,
is an immense world of the light closed by your senses five.
To achieve this result, Blake's text is fragmentary, and accompanied by
bizarre and incomprehensible, and often inexplicable images.
Bewildering form of the book helps to draw readers out that ordinary and
passive thought patterns.
Chief among these, avoiding the categories of human life.
Blake redefines fundamentally the separate categories of good and
evil preferring the dynamic clash between these countries.
But the outsides of the book, he asserts, without countries is no progression,
attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate,
are necessary to human existence.
From these countries spring what the religious called good and evil,
good is the passive that obeys reason, evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is heaven, evil is hell.
This is immediately followed by the voice of the devil, who denies the separation of
the body and the soul and insists that energy is the only life and
from the body and reason is the boundless outward circumference of energy.
And most resonantly energy is eternal to light.
The profane and the divine realms push together and they dynamically combine.
Blake was a passionate Christian, but a startlingly unorthodox kind.
He criticized priests in the established church.
Adopting a cognitive democratic faith and the hierarchical religion,
he believes that men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.
They originate with the imagination are shown at the top of this plate in the way
that humans perceive the natural world through a process of repression.
These different kinds of religious ideas and
visions get compressed into one single deity.
Picture at the bottom who Blake would call yearism or nobodody.
Blake likes Jesus is active on the side of the devil's revolutionary who
threatens institutions, laws and God of the Orthodox, and the devil,
obvious that no virtue can exist without breaking the ten commandments.
Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse not from rules.
In recent protests at St.
Paul's Cathedral, think Blake's Jesus would have been among the attendants.
In one section, Blake's favorite Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and
Ezekiel Visitin writer for dinner, and he questions them about their visions,
Isaiah onto the toes that Blake saw prophecy not as otherworldly mysticism but
as philosophical and political power.
I saw no Gods nor heard any in a finite organical perception that my senses
discovered the infinite everything.
Flight Blake Isaiah is convinced that the voice of honest indignation is
the voice of God.
And he cared not for the consequences, but wrote, by contrast,
such vital spiritual energy, the representatives of orthodox religion,
the angels whom the narrator encounters are hypocritical, haughty, and repressed.
The writer delights in converting one of them to be a devil.
We often read the Bible together and it's infernal or diabolical sense,
they promises to give the world the Bible of hell, which may be comprised by Blake's
dark and foreboding long poems from the book of years and onwards.
As a literary critic to Blake is amazingly modern.
In the marriage, the voice of the devil utters the famous pronouncement that
in the great epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton wrote in fetters
when he wrote of angels and God and liberty when of devils and how,
because he was a true poet of the devil's party without knowing it.
Like independent insight comes along force cycle and I psychoanalytic literary
criticism, and its whole text is a dazzling and disorientating tour de force,
challenging the reader to re-imagine their place in the world.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]