Blake’s heaven
Ian Simmons discovers in a wider social context what it meant to be the visionary William Blake while David V Barrett explores the political and religious background behind his personal mythology
William Blake vs The World
John Higgs
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2021
Hb, 390pp, £20, ISBN 9781474614351
Divine Images
The Life and Work of William Blake
Jason Whittaker
Reaktion Books 2021
Hb, 392pp, £25, ISBN 9781789142877
In the nearly two centuries since his death, William Blake has gone from being an obscure artist, widely deemed “mad”, to a cultural icon, albeit an oft misunderstood one. This is not entirely surprising; in both his poetry and his art, Blake’s imagery is highly personal and inaccessible, so that his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, concluded that Blake was making no effort to be comprehensible as it made his work easier and more fun to do.
Subsequent biographers have likewise struggled to catch the essence of the man and even today academic research into Blake’s work has not unravelled all its mysteries. John Higgs, though, is less concerned with the biographical detail and more with what it meant to be William Blake, nearly 200 years ago, and how his distinctive works emerged from his unique nature and the milieu in which he found himself. He is well positioned to tackle this considerable task, having written books on other visionary creatives such as the KLF and Timothy Leary, and been a close associate of others such as psychedelic pioneer Brian Barritt and FT’s own late, great, Steve Moore. As a result, he is not daunted by the prospect of tackling Blake’s personal universe head on.
Drawing on up-to-date psychological research, Higgs grasps the essence of Blake and makes it as comprehensible as it is ever likely to be for a non-specialist audience. He grounds this exploration by placing Blake in his neuroscientific context, making it clear that he was a rare individual who can see a permanent visionary world that is as real to him as the physical world is to us. Grasping that Blake was existing in a different state of consciousness from most other people allows Higgs to take the journey into Blake’s inner world. He draws threads from history, comparative religion, cultural studies, the counterculture and even quantum physics to elucidate exactly what Blake was seeing, what it meant to him and how it all fits together, in one of the most singular personal mythologies ever created. Reading this, I got a sense for the first time of how Blake’s poetry and pictures mesh and what the mystical underpinnings of all this are.
Blake has been claimed by everyone from psychedelic voyagers to English nationalists and Higgs is insightful as to why so many people today find him powerful and relevant while he still transcends any box they might try to put him in. I have read many books about Blake over the years, but this feels like the only one that remotely bottles the magic; with this book Higgs has reached a completely new level.
Blake was existing in a different state of consciousness from most other people
In his gorgeously illustrated biography of William Blake, Jason Whittaker also explores the poet and artist’s personal mythology.
Blake’s religious ideas were controversial from very early on; one of his first illustrated books was All Religions Are One: they all stem from the human imagination, “each Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where call’d the Spirit of Prophecy”. He was opposed to the prevailing belief of the time, deism, that a supreme being set creation going, then had no further involvement in it; he rejected the concept of a God out there, but believed that God is “revealed entirely within and through man”, through our experience of mercy, peace, pity and love.
He also rejected dualism, the two opposed principles of body and soul, especially the idea that “Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body & that Reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul”; instead, “Energy is the only life… Energy is Eternal Delight” – hence his enlightened and liberated views on sexuality. (Whittaker reminds us that Blake had illustrated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life and was greatly influenced by her A Vindication of the Rights of Women, particularly in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion.)
In Blake’s complex personal mythology, Urizen is effectively both the domineering Old Testament God and Satan, “the forces of convention and tradition”, while Orc is “the spirit of revolution”. Whitaker sees Blake’s beliefs stemming originally from the French and American Revolutions; his mythology is “an imaginative recreation of the political events of his day that will chart the difficult task of undoing millennia of falsehood and repression”.
Oddly, for a biography focusing partly on where Blake’s spiritual ideas came from, Whittaker spends almost no time on the teachings of the Moravian Church that Blake’s mother attended, dismissively saying that you could be a member of both the Moravians and the Church of England, so Blake was really an Anglican. So whence his radical theology?
It’s incomprehensible that he only cites Marsha Keith Schuchard’s groundbreaking study of Blake’s spiritual and sexual beliefs, Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination, briefly in one footnote; it’s not even listed in the bibliography. He spends a little more time on Swedenborg, but again doesn’t really explore how his teachings also affected Blake. His concentration on political rather than religious influences on Blake’s unique mythology seems a blind spot.
Higgs ★★★★★
Whittaker ★★★★