For lovers of William Blake – because he kept the divine vision in time of trouble.
IF THE WORLD HATES YOU, KNOW THAT IT HATED ME FIRST
‘Reading the 7 shortlisted entries for this year’s Tithe Grant Award was a great pleasure, and also an eye-opener, reminding me once again that Blake was a man out of time who would have had much to say to any era. From terrorism to social media, Segways to Trump, consumerism to overmedication, slavery to mechanisation, the 7 letter writers skilfully dissected today’s woes both general and particular, imitating Blake’s unique voice.
However, one entry in particular read as if Blake himself were speaking. It was that wonderful marriage of an exuberant, almost jazz-like rhythm and tone with righteous indignation that yet maintains a child’s-eye view of the world. For channelling the visionary Blake and giving us a letter the man himself would have approved of, the 2017 Tithe Grant Award goes to Will Franken.’
Our congratulations to Will Franken, a person who escapes description: actor, comedian, satirist, film-maker and scholar of 18th Century literature.
Will Franken reads the winning letter from the 2017 Tithe Grant Award : awe-full to read, extraordinary to hear.
https://t.co/evsAJouVrh
Here is Will Franken’s Award winning letter as text:
The Blake Archive aims to become the scholarly resource for all of Blake’s works including every word and image. Here is a brief tutorial on how to search the concordance to identify a phrase you suspect might have been written by Blake.
We announce the death of Dr Margaret MacDonald. For many years Margaret hosted a reading group that explored the texts of William Blake at a time when there were few resources for appreciating Blake’s work in depth. Like many Blakeans, Margaret was a woman of extraordinary accomplishment.
‘Dr MacDonald had for most of her life been inspired by the radical poet William Blake and was an enthusiastic member of the Blake Society, holding a reading group at her home in Grafton Terrace.’
Wednesday 21 February 2018 at 6 pm
Waterstones Bookshop, 82 Gower Street, London WC1E 6EQ
Composer Graham Treacher will be joined by Professor Jason Whittaker, Head of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln, to unpick Blake’s visionary texts Milton and Jerusalem and the process through which Treacher has translated these into music.
The evening will include a screening of the new multi-media work Divine Madness : The Visions of William Blake, first performed at King’s Place in the heart of Blake’s London in November 2016. Scored for Tenor solo (Charles Daniels), actor (Oliver Ford Davies) and six viols (Fretwork) with a background visual score by Robert Golden, the work tackles the complexities of Jerusalem using texts from Milton to make sense of Blake’s final and intriguing poem. It culminates in a new setting of 'And did those Feet in Ancient Time'.
Blake Society Members and students: £4, non-members £6. Tickets from:
The sinister and sublime, in transcendent watercolors.
Among William Blake’s last works was a series of illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was an ambitious project for a man of 67 to begin, and he didn’t live to complete it. Even in its unfinished state, however, the series is a rich and fascinating work of art that can add to our understanding of Blake’s philosophy and artistic goals, and be enjoyed for its strange beauty.
‘My analysis will focus largely on aspects of Blake’s theology that are at odds with Dante’s, and that moved Blake to illustrate the Comedy as a way of correcting or completing its message. We will see that Dante, true to his age, conceives of God as existing in a separate realm, far above our fallen world. Blake does not accept the idea of a God that is apart from mankind. Indeed, for Blake it is the false perception of separateness from God that it is at the heart of so many of our woes.
I also discuss Blake’s views on the goals and possibilities of art, an aesthetic theory that derives in large part from his theological principle that God and man are not divided. Whereas Dante accepts the traditional Christian view that limited human reason is inadequate to understand God, and that human language lacks the power to describe Heaven, Blake sees such an admission as an unnecessary falling-short. The true prophet, for Blake, is a poet who makes God manifest, either in words or in pictures. Blake rejects Dante’s repeated claims that human art is inadequate to show God’s full majesty, and works to realise in fullness the message that the Italian poet found impossible to convey.’
Here you'll find seven illustrations from Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Each picture is accompanied by an explanation and an original audio recording from the 1812 translation of Dante that Blake himself used when making his designs. So this is your chance to learn not just about Blake, but also about the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321).
‘An “Atheist,” for Blake, is someone guilty of “worshipping the natural world.” Blake believed that the natural world we perceive is only a tiny fraction of the real universe, and the rules of logic and demonstration are mere abstractions derived from it. Therefore any poet hoping to explain God’s ways who employs logical argument rather than direct revelation is using the wrong method. The truth of religion is shown through embodying God – incarnation – and not through reason.’
Blake remarked, “Dante saw devils where I see none. I see only good.”
Me? I shall carry on listening to the debate Blake and Dante are continually engaged in on the very top shelf of books in the living room.
Here's my own work on William Blake:
I've never been too happy with that title, given Blake's emphasis on Imagination and Spirit. Reality: It's Immaterial.
Fine presentation here from Helene Domon
‘There was no one like William Blake. There had been no one like him before and there has been no one like him since. He’s unique not only among English poets but among writers and artists from anywhere in the world. Poets and critics of his own time were unsure whether he was mad; Wordsworth thought he undoubtedly was but said there was something in Blake’s madness that interested him more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.’
Kathleen Raine, who has died aged 95, was a poet who believed in the sacred nature of all life, all true art and wisdom, and her own calling. She knew as a child that poetry was her vocation.
William Blake was her master, and she shared his belief that "one power alone makes a poet - imagination, the divine vision".
When asked how she wished people to remember her, Kathleen Raine said she would rather they didn't. Or that Blake's words be said of her: "That in time of trouble, I kept the divine vision".
All is not lost. We may yet leave the flatland of single vision behind.
Blake is difficult but very much worth the effort; he is endlessly inspiring.
E.P. Thompson's conclusion to "Witness Against the Beast" is worth thinking about.
"The busy perfectionists and benevolent rationalists of 1791-6 nearly all ended up ... as disenchanted men. Human nature, they decided, had let them down and proved stubborn in resistance to enlightenment. But William Blake, by denying even in the Songs of Experience a supreme societal value to rationality, did not suffer from the same kind of disenchantment. His vision had been not into the rational government of man but into the liberation of an unrealised potential, an alternative nature, within man: a nature masked by circumstance, repressed by the Moral Law, concealed by Mystery and self-defeated by the other nature of 'self-love'. It was the intensity of this vision, which derived from sources far older than the Enlightenment, which made it impossible for Blake to fall into the courses of apostasy. When he drew apart from the deists and when the revolutionary fires burned low in the early 1800s, Blake had his own way of 'keeping the divine vision in time of trouble'. This way had been prepared long before by the Ranters and the Diggers in their defeat, who had retired from activist strife to Gerrard Winstanley's 'kingdom within, which moth and rust does not corrupt'. And so Blake also took the characteristic antinomian retreat into more esoteric ways, handing on to the initiates 'The Everlasting Gospel'. There is obscurity and perhaps even some oddity in this. But there is never the least sign of submission to 'Satan's Kingdom'. Never, on any page of Blake, is there the least complicity with the kingdom of the Beast."
Terry Eagleton, Preface to Edward Larrissy, “William Blake” (1985 Basil Blackwell)
‘Blake is England's greatest revolutionary artist, and it is therefore not wholly mischievous to ask why he has met with such widespread acclaim from a critical orthodoxy hardly revolutionary in its interests. Several answers suggest themselves, beyond the obvious fact that dead revolutionaries are a good deal more acceptable than living ones. It is not always easy to know exactly what he is saying; his political vision often assumes the shape of a timeless drama of energy and repression, which is rather more palatable to liberal humanist taste than talk of popular insurrection; and the critical acclaim has in any case been far from universal, relegating as it has sometimes done the more overtly revolutionary writings as turgid obscurantism, and retrieving a few songs more susceptible of New Critical treatment. Blake's richness of ambiguity, in short, has tended to redeem his poetry for those who find any more didactic political intent incompatible with the 'literary'.
Part of the originality of Edward Larrissy's study lies in its subtle awareness of the relationship between Blake's symbolic ambiguity and his strenuous political engagement, aspects of his work sometimes seen as antithetical. To be effective, revolutionary desire for Blake must achieve its appropriate artistic and institutional forms; but in order to remain faithful to itself it must also cast a distancing ironic eye upon all such forms, which will always be something less than the energies they contain. So it is, as Larrissy demonstrates, that form in Blake is always at once limiting and liberatory —just as energy and enslavement, law and desire, come to figure in his work as mutual conditions of one another. A way of putting this point, then, is to claim that Blake's poetry throws into question the false distinction, common to our own time, between a monolithic political commitment on the one hand, and an endless ironic open-mindedness (whether New Critical or de-constructive) on the other.
Without in the least denigrating the mystical or esoteric Blake — who is not, after all, easily separable from the political one - Larrissy shows just what an astonishingly thoroughgoing radical Blake is, alert to the interlockings of class and sexual oppression, steeped in the radical Protestant tradition, surprisingly modern in his subtle view of ideology and deeply at one with the viewpoint of the emergent working class of nineteenth-century England. In "all of this, there is no doubt that he is of the devil's party, and knows it. Yet without relinquishing anything of the force of such a politics, Blake is painfully conscious of how it must be articulated in the idioms and conventions of a given, limited history - and it is from this double vision, Larrissy claims, that his famous duplicities and ambiguities arise. Prizing the 'original', he is forced to be an inveterate parodist of others' works; valuing a pure, primordial voice, he 'grafts' and splices different discourses together; deeply serious about innocence and Utopian joy, he draws sardonic attention to the limited forms or enclosures within which alone such innocence can thrive. Denouncing injustice and oppression, he veers ironically around to scrutinize the credentials of the very voices which deliver such denunciations.
In all of these ways, Blake's poetry undermines the authoritarianism of a single meaning, and so begins to transfigure our habits of reading. Larrissy offers us a Blake who, like Brecht in our own time, is beyond both political dogmatism and liberal scepticism, and through whose work we may therefore begin to explore the significance of that far less familiar, more unsettling stance we may term revolutionary ambiguity.’
Terry Eagleton
In fine, Blake is a challenging figure indeed. We may yet leave the flatland of single vision behind.
The Blake Society
The Blake Society honours and celebrates William Blake (1757-1827), engraver, poet, painter & prophet. We are a serious but not a stuffy group. We bring together scholars and enthusiasts, amateurs and professionals on equal terms; and have been meeting regularly in London since 1985. Our speaker series includes scholars, artists, writers, radicals, and mystics.
We look for opportunities to continue the work that Blake began: exploring new modes of expression, and awakening the artist and prophet in each individual.
The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock: but of wisdom, no clock can measure (William Blake).
On Blake’s harvest and vintage of the nations that he feels will happen in the fullness of time and that wars will cease.
May he be proved right.
Let’s get out of the flatlands and appreciate the four-fold vision.
Jerusalem - the palace of the imagination.
By Graham Treacher