WILLIAM BLAKE VS THE WORLD
JOHN HIGGS
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 400pp, £20
Interviewed in Mental Health Today, John Higgs talked about William Blake’s depressions. ‘I find it interesting that he recognises his experience as a disease…this feels very modern… It’s a reminder that how these things are perceived changes over time – and that we can go backwards as well as forwards.’
Higgs’s new book is an attempt to take Blake’s brilliant, visionary sometimes eccentric imaginative world and look at it through the lens of today’s understanding. In the
Times, Rachel Campbell-johnston was impressed: ‘Higgs’s prose has a diamond-hard clarity. He knows how to make us relate. The modern-day equivalent of the 1780 anti-catholic Gordon Riots would be a far-right anti-muslim protest, he explains. Wordsworth and Coleridge are the Mccartney and Lennon of Romanticism. Studying the brain to understand consciousness is like studying the insides of a television in a sports bar to understand what is happening in the cup final.’
But Roger Lewis in the Telegraph had some doubts. ‘Though on the whole I find Blake contrivedly giddy and portentous, and the concept that we all live “in a mental model of reality rather than reality itself” is one I can take or leave, I enjoy the mercurial, gnomic epigrams: “Opposition is true friendship”; “Energy is eternal delight”; “Everything that lives is holy”. I agree with the notion that the trouble with heaven is it would be hell, and faced with the regimentation of existence (bills, brown envelopes, insurance premiums, Pilates, governments telling us off) “a sprinkling of chaos is needed”.’