Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination
Mark Vernon (Hurst, £27.50)
TWO WILLIAM BLAKES VIE FOR dominance. One the one hand, there’s the gently mystical Blake of England’s “green and pleasant land” — the Blake of the Women’s Institute, Tate Britain, illustrated tea towels, and a London no higher than St Paul’s; a Blake concerned with “dark Satanic mills”, the abolition of slavery and the magic of exotic animals.
On the other, there’s a wild, hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie Blake, naked in his garden, touched by vital and romantic madness who exhorts his readers to tear down institutions, abolish authority and who (seemingly) justifies all manner of psychedelic and sexual experimentation; the Blake of the road of excess and the palace of wisdom, the doors of perception and desire, a…
