14 January 2016, The Tablet

England’s outsider

by Hilary Davies

 
Eternity’s Sunrise: the imaginative world of William BlakeLeo Damrosch(YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 344 PP, £18.99) Tablet bookshop price £17.10 • tel 01420 592974 What are we to make of William Blake? Cockney visionary and mystic, madman, poet of genius, political revolutionary, dissenter and radical, proto-ecologist, gnostic myth builder, start­lingly inventive relief engraver, benighted journeyman, prefigurer of modern psychology: he has been described as all of these. It is a daunting list. And one which should give us pause.Studies of his art, prophetic writings and poetry have been legion; and the Protean nature of Blake’s imagination allows commentators of widely differing convictions to find in him a champion of their own views. Any new work on him will
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