William Blake (1757-1827)
From
his childhood Blake was a strange, eccentric, brilliant visionary. When
he walked the streets of London or in the fields beyond the city, Blake
actually saw and spoke to angels and spirits. He drew pictures of these
spirits copied from his visionary world. His poems, he claimed, were
narrated to him by angels. At age four, he saw God staring at him
through a window in his bedroom. At eight, he drew a picture of a tree
full of singing angels. Later in his life, after his beloved younger
brother had died, Blake insisted that he was able to hold conversations
with him from beyond the other side.
People thought Blake was
mad, but Blake thought that the world was mad, mad with its anxiety and
bloodshed, its repressive morality, and its selfish lovelessness. Blake
thought that the modern world was ruled by a race of Druids, people who
used human sacrifice as the basis of its hold on power. Any society
that could turn children into chimney sweeps could not be regarded as
civilized.
At the core of society’s problems Blake saw a failure
of the imagination: man had enslaved himself to reason. Blake’s life
work as a poet and artist was to show how the Golden Age could be
restored in England (quote from Milton.) When revolution broke out in
France, Blake believed the millennium was at hand. The Songs of
Innocence and Experience (1789-1796) were written in protest against
contemporary society, and read imaginatively, they describe a possible
path to a New Jerusalem in England.
For Blake, the possibility
of salvation lay in the human imagination. He disdained the scientific
and materialist bent in English intellectual thought throughout the
Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Bacon, Newton and Locke
(as well as the Deists) had rejected biblical revelation and derived
their religious beliefs from scientific observation of the harmonious
machine of nature. Blake also disagreed with the growing adherents of
the philosophy of utilitarianism: utilitarians believed that a moral
choice could be calculated by measuring how an action would benefit the
greatest good for the greatest number of people in society. (The poor
always seem to get left out in that deal.)
Blake's
conception of metaphysics and morality was very different from the
mechanistic universe imagined by the philosophes. He believed that
reality is not external to the observer; it actually is composed by the
mind. Through imagination we perceive objects, and our thoughts and
feelings blend with the object to create an individual reality. What we
see reflects our inner life. Through using the imagination we reach
beyond the scientific world to experience a truth reflecting an eternal
order. When we must make a moral choice, there frequently is no logical
and rational path to take. We must exercise our moral imagination to
resolve the paradox. This action strengthens our moral faculty and
provides a tool which can be used to transform society for the better.
In Songs of Innocence and Experience,
Blake pairs poems with seemingly contradictory messages, To resolve the
paradox, we must rely upon our imagination, that eternal part of our
nature, and thus achieve moral experience. 
Check out The
Blake Archive
The
Lamb vs. The
Tyger
The
Chimney Sweep vs. The
Chimney Sweep
Holy
Thursday vs. Holy
Thursday
The
Divine Image vs. The Human Abstract
The
Little Girl Lost vs. The
Little Girl Found
The
Garden of Love vs. The
Sick Rose
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