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[CROSSTALK]

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A series of talks entitled

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Great Writers Inspire would be freely incomplete Without the poet and

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painter of William Blake prize inspiration of pretty much everything and

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claim that the nature of my work is visionary or imaginative.

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He also said, this world of imagination is the world returns he.

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Blake for me is the most exciting and radical writer in English literature.

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I'm currently writing a book called Blake Myth and the Enlightenment.

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And I'm looking how is work stages a struggle between the very modern desire

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to banish repressive superstitions and a more unfamiliar enthusiasm,

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the visionary powers of prophecy myth and imagination.

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This tension in Blake's thought is what for me makes his work so extraordinary.

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In 1855, Blake's one time follower, the painter John Linnell,

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described him as a saint amongst the infidels and a heretic of the orthodox.

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And he speaks to the mischievous and complicated ways in which Blake thought.

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But far from being an eccentric lunatic,

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which many of his own time under the 19th century took him for.

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Blake was a dynamic thinker with a philosophical depth to his conviction

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that the way human beings perceive the world is not uniform or fixed, but

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in fact is a continually creative process.

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Blake constantly reminded his audience of the power of the imagination and

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challenges them to liberate themselves from passive and habitual and

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socially imposed ways of perceiving reality,

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which he described in his poem London as the mind forged manacles.

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Writing in 1799 to perhaps a reasonably confused clergyman who complained

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about his paintings Blake had formed that this world is a world of imagination and

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vision.

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I see everything I paint in this world but not everybody sees alike.

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To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is more beautiful than the sun.

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And the bag warm with use of money has more beautiful proportions than

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a vine filled with grapes.

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He went on, to me this world is all one continued vision of fancy and

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imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so.

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Inspiration and imagination, the very grounds of human existence for Blake.

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This aim to shake his readers' perceptions of the world around them speaks to

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the tumultuous times in which Blake lived.

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He was born in 1757 in Broad Street, Soho, in London.

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And he was largely self-educated, but a very voracious and

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combative reader as well as a skilled painter and engraver, for

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he was trained at the Royal Academy of Art.

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Blake was resident in London for almost all of his life.

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Except for a very small period in which he resided in the village of

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Helfen by the sea in Sussex.

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He experienced the momentous impact on Britain of the American Revolution and

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the war following, and the French Revolution and

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the long series of Revolutionary Wars in Europe.

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He witnessed also the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

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At first hand through his work as a reproductive engraver, and

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working for the book trade.

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With the assistance of his devoted wife Catherine,

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he printed his own works in a negative medium called illuminated printing,

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combining his own visionary poetry and

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images in beautiful individually colored unique books.

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In his famous Songs of Innocence and

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have experienced his prophetic work such as America and Europe, and

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his later, extremely confusing epics, Milton and Jerusalem.

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Blake produced the spiritual history of humanity from the very beginnings of

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humanful to the Millennium and the end of history,

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as well as charting the events of his own time from a visionary perspective.

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Blake wrote in an apocalyptic religious idiom that harks back to the series of

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the Old Testament prophets, like Isaiah Ezekiel and St.

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John the divine, but also people who are influenced by these writers,

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in particular the 17th century republican and poet John Milton.

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Yet Blake also found himself within an incredibly progressive and

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modern London culture.

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Between 1780 and 1801, he worked as an engraver, providing illustrations for

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books published by the Unitarian Publisher Joseph Johnson, who is based in St.

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Paul's Churchyard in the city of London.

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Unitarianism was a rational form of Protestantism,

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which repudiated the tyranny at the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.

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Johnson published some of the most contentious books the 1780s and 1790s,

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notably the controversial theology of justice Bruce Lee,

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who now know better as a pioneer and chemists.

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And the works of the doctor and polymath, Erasmus Darwin, whose 1794 work,

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Zoonomia, described the theory of developmental evolution,

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which his grandson, Charles Darwin, would become more famous for revising.

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Erasmus Darwin's poem, The Botanic Garden of 1791,

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especially the section on the loves of the plants, was hugely successful and

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delighted and scandalized, contemporary readers, with its ingenious and

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licentious descriptions of the unorthodox sexual lives of humanized fans.

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Blake produced engravings for Johnson to accompany Darwin's text, and

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his own depictions of human like planets in the book and foul, and

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Songs Of Innocence and of experience suggests Darwin's poem was a surprising

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inspiration for his great visions of nature.

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In 1791, Johnson also employed Blake to illustrate a book of titles for

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children entitled Original Stories from Real Life by Mary Wollstonecraft.

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Wollstonecraft his most famous book was 1792 feminist polemic, a Vindication

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of the Rights of Women, which argues forcefully that women are naturally men's

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mental equals, and only left inferior as a result of poor education and

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the prejudices of contemporary European society.

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Blake seems to have sympathized with the restricted lot of women with the Book of

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Fell in 1789 and Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793.

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Both taking an unusual interest in female freedom.

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Is later, long mythological poems extremely disturbing and

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that powerful depictions of sexual conflict defy any easy

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categorizations as feminist or misogynist.

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Johnson Circle was also at the vanguard of political radicalism.

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In 1790, Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest British dependence of

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the French Revolution in her vindication of the rights of men which Joseph Jameson

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published.

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He was also originated to have been the publisher of Thomas Payne's Radical Rights

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of Man, 1791 but at the last minute, fearing prosecution,

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he passed the book on to another publisher.

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Nevertheless, before fleeing England for France,

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because charges of sedition would have led to his execution.

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Thomas Paine was a regular part of Johnson circle mixing with politicians,

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campaigners, abolitionists, educators and poets who met under his roof.

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It's not clear whether Blake met all these writers, and

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much of his writings suggests he would have I think the odds were they're

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very confident and enthusiastic embrace of the power of reason.

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But he's worked for Johnson brought him into contact with their books, and

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with some of the most exciting and cutting edge ideas of his time.

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This environment of speculative free thinkers on religion, and

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most other matters would have been congenial and

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seems to have helped inspire Blake's works.

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Blake's extraordinary satirical masterpiece, The Marriage of Heaven and

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Hell, which he created and printed somewhere between 1790 and

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1793 boldly challenges the political, religious and sexual norms of his day.

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Text originated in a parody of the Swedish mystical Emanuel Swedenborg,

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his books Blake had been avidly reading in previous years.

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But increasingly, Blake began to be disappointed with some of the orthodoxies

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he felt were repeated in these books.

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Inspired by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and seemingly by the free

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thought of circle around Joseph Johnson, Blake chose to expand the scope of

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this text, opening up his rejection Swedenborg to attack orthodox religion and

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morality, and political repression and passive conformity.

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All of which he believed saps humans of their eternal energies.

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The almost hallucinatory, imaginative, and physical energy radiating throughout

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the book makes even the most ordinary perceptions open out into the infinite.

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How do you know that every bird that cuts the airy way,

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is an immense world of the light closed by your senses five.

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To achieve this result, Blake's text is fragmentary, and accompanied by

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bizarre and incomprehensible, and often inexplicable images.

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Bewildering form of the book helps to draw readers out that ordinary and

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passive thought patterns.

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Chief among these, avoiding the categories of human life.

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Blake redefines fundamentally the separate categories of good and

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evil preferring the dynamic clash between these countries.

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But the outsides of the book, he asserts, without countries is no progression,

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attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate,

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are necessary to human existence.

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From these countries spring what the religious called good and evil,

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good is the passive that obeys reason, evil is the active springing from energy.

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Good is heaven, evil is hell.

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This is immediately followed by the voice of the devil, who denies the separation of

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the body and the soul and insists that energy is the only life and

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from the body and reason is the boundless outward circumference of energy.

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And most resonantly energy is eternal to light.

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The profane and the divine realms push together and they dynamically combine.

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Blake was a passionate Christian, but a startlingly unorthodox kind.

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He criticized priests in the established church.

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Adopting a cognitive democratic faith and the hierarchical religion,

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he believes that men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

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They originate with the imagination are shown at the top of this plate in the way

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that humans perceive the natural world through a process of repression.

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These different kinds of religious ideas and

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visions get compressed into one single deity.

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Picture at the bottom who Blake would call yearism or nobodody.

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Blake likes Jesus is active on the side of the devil's revolutionary who

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threatens institutions, laws and God of the Orthodox, and the devil,

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obvious that no virtue can exist without breaking the ten commandments.

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Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse not from rules.

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In recent protests at St.

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Paul's Cathedral, think Blake's Jesus would have been among the attendants.

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In one section, Blake's favorite Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and

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Ezekiel Visitin writer for dinner, and he questions them about their visions,

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Isaiah onto the toes that Blake saw prophecy not as otherworldly mysticism but

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as philosophical and political power.

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I saw no Gods nor heard any in a finite organical perception that my senses

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discovered the infinite everything.

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Flight Blake Isaiah is convinced that the voice of honest indignation is

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the voice of God.

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And he cared not for the consequences, but wrote, by contrast,

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such vital spiritual energy, the representatives of orthodox religion,

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the angels whom the narrator encounters are hypocritical, haughty, and repressed.

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The writer delights in converting one of them to be a devil.

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We often read the Bible together and it's infernal or diabolical sense,

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they promises to give the world the Bible of hell, which may be comprised by Blake's

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dark and foreboding long poems from the book of years and onwards.

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As a literary critic to Blake is amazingly modern.

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In the marriage, the voice of the devil utters the famous pronouncement that

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in the great epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton wrote in fetters

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when he wrote of angels and God and liberty when of devils and how,

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because he was a true poet of the devil's party without knowing it.

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Like independent insight comes along force cycle and I psychoanalytic literary

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criticism, and its whole text is a dazzling and disorientating tour de force,

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challenging the reader to re-imagine their place in the world.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]