WILLIAM BLAKE VS. THE WORLD

A journey into the iconic poet’s sensuous, idiosyncratic mythology.

British cultural historian Higgs draws on neuroscience, psychology, comparative religion, physics, and philosophy to examine the mind of poet, artist, and visionary William Blake (1757-1827). Mocked in his own time and buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave, Blake has become a venerated figure in British culture. In 2018, more than 1,000 people gathered for the unveiling of a stone marker near where he is believed to be buried, and his artistry has been recognized by an exhibition at the Tate and other museums. Besides offering perceptive close analyses of Blake’s work (including the art that illustrates this volume), Higgs locates him within the turbulent political and religious contexts of his times: French and American Revolutions, the rise of industrialism, anti-Catholic rioting, the Enlightenment’s privileging of reason over imagination, and the advent of Romanticism. He ranges into theories of consciousness and the meaning and significance of imagination to unravel Blake’s fundamental idea “that we live in a mental model of reality, rather than reality itself.” Even God, Blake argued, was a creation of the human mind. Higgs examines Blake’s fascination with—and divergence from—scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whom Blake critiqued in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In discussing the “blazing originality” of Blake’s imaginings, Higgs proposes they may reflect the heightened mental states of hyperphantasia or synaesthesia. “The increased empathy and anxiety experienced by hyperphantasics,” writes the author, “suggests a link between Blake’s politics and moral outrage and the strength of his imagination.” Although some of his contemporaries deemed him a madman, Blake was esteemed by many Romantic poets who saw him as a kindred spirit. Higgs acknowledges that Blake’s apparent misogyny, growing paranoia, and views on nature and reason make him troubling to contemporary readers, but he makes an earnest case for the enduring relevance of Blake’s central argument: “that the imagination is divine.”

An appreciative, well-informed portrait.