Chronology

1757	Born in London (28 November) to James Blake, a hosier, and his wife Catherine Wright Armitage Blake.
1767	Enrolled in Henry Pars’s drawing school.
1772	Apprenticed to James Basire, 31 Great Queen Street, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society.
1779	Apprenticeship ends. Becomes journeyman copy engraver. Admitted as student to Royal Academy of Art’s Schools of Design.
1780	Gordon Riots in London (June), in which Blake may have participated. Arrested on suspicion of spying during sketching trip on the River Medway.
1782	Marries Catherine Boucher (18 August).
1783	Publishes Poetical Sketches.
1784	Sets up printing and publishing partnership with James Parker at 27 Broad Street. Begins writing An Island in the Moon (c. 1784-85).
1787	Younger brother Robert dies (February).
c. 1788	Invents relief etching. Publishes All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion, first illuminated books.
1789	Publishes Songs of Innocence and begins The Book of Thel (1789-90). Writes Tiriel (c. 1789). Attends organizational meeting of the New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian) Church (April).
1790	Publishes The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
1791	Writes at least one part of several proposed parts of The French Revolution. Composes and engraves six original designs for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life.
1793	Publishes Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, and For Children: The Gates of Paradise. Engraves Albion rose.
1794	Publishes Europe: a Prophecy, Songs of Experience, and The [First] Book of Urizen.
1795	Publishes The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, and The Song of Los. Produces 12 large color-printed drawings. Works on 537 water color illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts.
c. 1796	Begins writing Vala, or The Four Zoas.
1797	Begins set of 116 water color illustrations to the poems of Thomas Gray for John Flaxman. Young’s Night Thoughts published with 43 plates engraved by Blake after his own designs.
1800	Moves to Felpham, Sussex, to work for patron William Hayley.
1801	Produces eight water color illustrations of Milton’s Comus for the Rev. Joseph Thomas, the first of several series of Milton illustrations that will later include the Nativity Ode, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained.
1803	Indicted on charges of sedition (October) as a result of a quarrel with a soldier, John Scolfield, whom he had evicted from his garden (August). Returns to London.
1804	Acquitted of sedition charges (January). Begins work on Milton a Poem and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
1805	Begins illustrations for Blair’s The Grave, to be published by Robert Cromek. Produces 19 water color illustrations of the Book of Job for Thomas Butts (c. 1805-6).
1809	Exhibits 16 paintings at 28 Broad Street, accompanied by a Descriptive Catalogue defending his theory and practice.
1818	Meets John Linnell. Begins sketching «Visionary Heads» for John Varley.
c. 1820	Publishes For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise.
1821	Virgil’s Pastorals, edited by Robert John Thornton, published with wood engravings by Blake.
1822	Publishes The Ghost of Abel and On Homers Poetry [and] On Virgil (c. 1822).
1824	Begins illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
1826	Publishes 21 engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job. Produces Laocoön (c. 1826). Begins Genesis Manuscript.
1827	Dies 12 August in his rooms at 3 Fountain Court.

http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/chronology.html

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/X4zGSrNqu0U" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Dr. quantum visits flatland
If you are using Internet Explorer you might have problems to play the video. If so, click on the link above to watch it.

As the circle in the story you’ve just watched, modern physicists have started to realise that in order to have a coherence in all the laws that rule the universe, there has to be, not one, but many more dimensions. Modern discoveries in many fields now show us that William Blake was centuries ahead of his time.

So, why do we describe as mad a man that sees things that most, yet not everyone else, of the people does not see.

As modern physicist and professor at the University of Southern California Itzhak Bars explains:

“Extra space dimensions aren’t easy to imagine — in everyday life, nobody ever notices more than three. Any move you make can be described as the sum of movements in three directions — up-down, back and forth, or sideways. Similarly, any location can be described by three numbers (on Earth, latitude, longitude and altitude), corresponding to space’s three dimensions.

Other dimensions could exist, however, if they were curled up in little balls, too tiny to notice. If you moved through one of those dimensions, you’d get back to where you started so fast you’d never realize that you had moved. An extra dimension of space could really be there, it’s just so small that we don’t see it.

Something as tiny as a subatomic particle, though, might detect the presence of extra dimensions. In fact, Bars said, certain properties of matter’s basic particles, such as electric charge, may have something to do with how those particles interact with tiny invisible dimensions of space.”

http://www.physorg.com/news98468776.html, 8 November, 2010.

WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTES

Annotations to Lavater (1788)

True superstition is ignorant honesty & this is beloved of god and man.

Forgiveness of enemies can only come upon their repentance.

Active Evil is better than Passive Good.

They suppose that Woman’s Love is Sin; in consequence all the Loves & Graces with them are Sin.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air;

Hungry clouds swag on the deep.

The Argument

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

The Argument

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

Note to The Voice of the Devil

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

The Voice of the Devil

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

The Voice of the Devil

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

A Memorable Fancy

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

A Memorable Fancy

Opposition is true Friendship.

A Memorable Fancy

The worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.

A Memorable Fancy

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Proverbs of Hell

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

Proverbs of Hell

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

Proverbs of Hell

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

Proverbs of Hell

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Proverbs of Hell

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

Proverbs of Hell

The hours of folly are measured by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can measure.

Proverbs of Hell

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

Proverbs of Hell

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Proverbs of Hell

Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.

Proverbs of Hell

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

Proverbs of Hell

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

Proverbs of Hell

One thought. fills immensity.

Proverbs of Hell

Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.

Proverbs of Hell

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Proverbs of Hell

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.

Proverbs of Hell

The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

Proverbs of Hell

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Proverbs of Hell

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

Proverbs of Hell

When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius; lift up thy head!

Proverbs of Hell

Exuberance is Beauty.

Proverbs of Hell

Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

Proverbs of Hell

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.

Proverbs of Hell

The ancient poets animated all objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

Proverbs of Hell

Poetical Sketches (1783)

Thou with dewy locks, who lookest down

Thro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn

Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,

Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

To Spring

O Thou who passest thro’ our valleys in

Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat

That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,

Oft pitchedst here thy golden tent, and oft

Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld

With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

To Summer

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain’d

With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit

Beneath my shady roof, there thou mayest rest,

And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,

And all the daughters of the year shall dance!

Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

To Autumn

O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:

The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark

Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs

Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.

He hears me not, but o’er the yawning deep

Rides heavy; his storms are unchain’d, sheathed

In ribbed steel; I dare not lift mine eyes;

For he hath rear’d his sceptre o’er the world.

To Winter

O Holy virgin! clad in purest white,

Unlock heaven’s golden gates and issue forth;

Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light

Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring

The honey’d dew that cometh on waking day.

O radiant morning, salute the sun,

Roused like a huntsman to the chase, and with

Thy buskin’d feet appear upon our hills.

To Morning

How sweet I roamed from field to field,

And tasted all the summer’s pride,

Till I the prince of love beheld,

Who in the sunny beams did glide!

How Sweet I Roamed

He loves to sit and hear me sing,

Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;

Then stretches out my golden wing,

And mocks my loss of liberty.

How Sweet I Roamed

My silks and fine array,

My smiles and languished air,

By love are driv’n away;

And mournful lean Despair

Brings me yew to deck my grave:

Such end true lovers have.

My Silks and Fine Arrays

Like a fiend in a cloud,

With howling woe,

After night I do crowd,

And with night will go;

I turn my back to the east,

From whence comforts have increased;

For light doth seize my brain

With frantic pain.

Mad Song

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoyed in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forced, the notes are few!

To the Muses

Songs of Experience (1794)

Hear the voice of the Bard,

Who present, past, and future, sees;

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees.

introduction, Songs of Experience

Turn away no more;

Why wilt thou turn away?

The starry floor,

The watery shore,

Is given thee till the break of day.

introduction, Songs of Experience

Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.

The Clod and the Pebble

Love seeketh only Self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another’s loss of ease,

And builds a hell in heaven’s despite.

The Clod and the Pebble

O rose, thou art sick!

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night,

In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy,

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

The Sick Rose

Little Fly,

Thy summer’s play

My thoughtless hand

Has brushed away.

Am not I

A fly like thee?

Or art not thou

A man like me?

For I dance,

And drink, and sing,

Till some blind hand

Shall brush my wing.

The Fly

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

The humble sheep a threat’ning horn:

While the Lily white shall in love delight,

Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

The Lily

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

London

But most, thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot’s curse

Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

London

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody Poor;

And Mercy no more could be

If all were as happy as we.

The Human Abstract

My mother groan’d! my father wept.

Into the dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Infant Sorrow

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

A Poison Tree

Children of the future Age

Reading this indignant page,

Know that in a former time

Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.

A Little Girl Lost

Cruelty has a human heart,

And Jealousy a human face;

Terror the human form divine,

And Secrecy the human dress.

A Divine Image

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

in the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Tyger

Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

«Pipe a song about a Lamb.»

So I piped with merry cheer;

«Piper, pipe that song again.»

So I piped; he wept to hear.

introduction, Songs of Innocence

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

introduction, Songs of Innocence

Sing louder around

To the bells’ cheerful sound,

While our sports shall be seen

On the ecchoing green.

The Ecchoing Green

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Gave thee life and bid thee feed

By the stream and o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing, woolly bright.

The Lamb

My mother bore me in the southern wild,

And I am black, but O! my soul is white;

White as an angel is the English child,

But I am black as if bereaved of light.

The Little Black Boy

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love,

And these black bodies and this sunburnt face

Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

The Little Black Boy

I’ll shade him from the heat till he can bear

To lean in joy upon our Father’s knee;

And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him and he will then love me.

The Little Black Boy

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!’weep!

So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

The Chimney Sweeper

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

All pray in their distress;

And to these virtues of delight

Return their thankfulness.

The Divine Image

For Mercy has a human heart,

Pity, a human face,

And Love, the human form divine,

And Peace, the human dress.

The Divine Image

The moon like a flower

In heaven’s high bower,

With silent delight,

Sits and smiles on the night.

Night

And there the lion’s ruddy eyes

Shall flow with tears of gold,

And pitying the tender cries,

And walking round the fold,

Saying: «Wrath by his meekness,

And by his health, sickness,

Is driven away

From our immortal day.»

Night

«For washed in life’s river,

My bright mane forever

Shall shine like the gold

As Iguard o’er the fold.»

Night

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And laughing is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast

And everything else is still.

Nurse’s Song

Can I see another’s woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another’s grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

On Another’s Sorrow

http://www.literary-quotations.com/b/william_blake.html

WILLIAM BLAKE QUOTES

William Blake (1757-1827)

English poet, painter, and mystic

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Songs of Experience

Death is terrible, tho’ borne on angels’ wings!

WILLIAM BLAKE, King Edward the Third

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Auguries of Innocence

Abstinence sows sand all over

The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,

But Desire gratified

Plants fruits of life and beauty there.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Gnomic Verses

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Father, O father! what do we here

In this land of unbelief and fear?

The Land of Dreams is better far,

Above the light of the morning star.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Land of Dreams

Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

What is now proved was once only imagined.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels, but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.

WILLIAM BLAKE, A Vision of the Last Judgment

Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves

The feet of angels bright;

Unseen they pour blessing,

And joy without ceasing,

On each bud and blossom,

And each sleeping bosom.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Night

Art can never exist without Naked beauty display’d.

WILLIAM BLAKE, on his etching of the Laocoön

What is it men in women to require?

The lineaments of gratified desire.

What is it women do in men require?

The lineaments of gratified desire.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Gnomic Verses

Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

WILLIAM BLAKE, Songs of Experience

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

WILLIAM BLAKE, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

http://www.notable-quotes.com/b/blake_william.html

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism.  1922.

Blake

I IF one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul. And this honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment. The question about Blake the man is the question of the circumstances that concurred to permit this honesty in his work, and what circumstances define its limitations. The favouring conditions probably include these two: that, being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than that he wanted it; and that, being a humble engraver, he had no journalistic-social career open to him.	1
There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him from his interests or to corrupt these interests: neither the ambitions of parents or wife, nor the standards of society, nor the temptations of success; nor was he exposed to imitation of himself or of anyone else. These circumstances—not his supposed inspired and untaught spontaneity—are what make him innocent. His early poems show what the poems of a boy of genius ought to show, immense power of assimilation. Such early poems are not, as usually supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond the boy’s capacity; they are, in the case of a boy of real promise, more likely to be quite mature and successful attempts to do something small. So with Blake, his early poems are technically admirable, and their originality is in an occasional rhythm. The verse of Edward III deserves study. But his affection for certain Elizabethans is not so surprising as his affinity with the very best work of his own century. He is very like Collins, he is very eighteenth century. The poem Whether on Ida’s shady brow is eighteenth-century work; the movement, the weight of it, the syntax, the choice of words— The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc’d, the notes are few! this is contemporary with Gray and Collins, it is the poetry of a language which has undergone the discipline of prose. Blake up to twenty is decidedly a traditional.	2
Blake’s beginnings as a poet, then, are as normal as the beginnings of Shakespeare. His method of composition, in his mature work, is exactly like that of other poets. He has an idea (a feeling, an image), he develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his verse often, and hesitates often over the final choice. 1 The idea, of course, simply comes, but upon arrival it is subjected to prolonged manipulation. In the first phase Blake is concerned with verbal beauty; in the second he becomes the apparent naïf, really the mature intelligence. It is only when the ideas become more automatic, come more freely and are less manipulated, that we begin to suspect their origin, to suspect that they spring from a shallower source.	3
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.	4
It is important that the artist should be highly educated in his own art; but his education is one that is hindered rather than helped by the ordinary processes of society which constitute education for the ordinary man. For these processes consist largely in the acquisition of impersonal ideas which obscure what we really are and feel, what we really want, and what really excites our interest. It is of course not the actual information acquired, but the conformity which the accumulation of knowledge is apt to impose, that is harmful. Tennyson is a very fair example of a poet almost wholly encrusted with parasitic opinion, almost wholly merged into his environment. Blake, on the other hand, knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying.	5
II But if there was nothing to distract him from sincerity there were, on the other hand, the dangers to which the naked man is exposed. His philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own. And accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it than an artist should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him inclined to formlessness. But most through midnight streets I hear How the youthful harlot’s curse Blasts the new-born infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the marriage hearse, is the naked vision; Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite, is the naked observation; and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is naked philosophy, presented. But Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and philosophy are not so felicitous. He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars…. One feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy of Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their form less. Blake did not have that more Mediterranean gift of form which knows how to borrow as Dante borrowed his theory of the soul; he must needs create a philosophy as well as a poetry. A similar formlessness attacks his draughtsmanship. The fault is most evident, of course, in the longer poems—or rather, the poems in which structure is important. You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas.	6
We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy (and perhaps for that of Samuel Butler) that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house. England has produced a fair number of these resourceful Robinson Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of culture if we wish them.	7
We may speculate, for amusement, whether it would not have been beneficial to the north of Europe generally, and to Britain in particular, to have had a more continuous religious history. The local divinities of Italy were not wholly exterminated by Christianity, and they were not reduced to the dwarfish fate which fell upon our trolls and pixies. The latter, with the major Saxon deities, were perhaps no great loss in themselves, but they left an empty place; and perhaps our mythology was further impoverished by the divorce from Rome. Milton’s celestial and infernal regions are large but insufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation; and one remarks about the Puritan mythology an historical thinness. And about Blake’s supernatural territories, as about the supposed ideas that dwell there, we cannot help commenting on a certain meanness of culture. They illustrate the crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside of the Latin traditions, and which such a critic as Arnold should certainly have rebuked. And they are not essential to Blake’s inspiration.	8
Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find in such a work as Also Sprach Zarathustra; it is eminently not a Latin virtue. The concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic, and Blake only a poet of genius. The fault is perhaps not with Blake himself, but with the environment which failed to provide what such a poet needed; perhaps the circumstances compelled him to fabricate, perhaps the poet required the philosopher and mythologist; although the conscious Blake may have been quite unconscious of the motives.	9

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Note 1

I do not know why M. Berger should say, without qualification, in his William Blake: mysticisme et poésie, that «son respect pour l’esprit qui soufflait en lui et qui dictait ses paroles l’empêchait de les corriger jamais.» Dr. Sampson, in his Oxford Edition of Blake, gives us to understand that Blake believed much of his writing to be automatic, but observes that Blake’s «meticulous care in composition is everywhere apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft … alteration on alteration, rearrangement after rearrangement, deletions, additions, and inversions….»

http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw13.html 07 Noviembre 2010

BLAKE’S WORKS AND LIFE

– Blake’s engravings. An extremely reliable web site with absolutely all Blake’s picturical works with an easy access to any picture.

– William Blake.org. One of the most complete and reliable biography.

– The William Blake Archive. A complete hypermedia archive of Blake’s life and work in digital format.

– The Rossete Archive. A collection of William Blake’s works, in digital forma, including transcriptions of manuscripts, poems and engravings.

– Wikipedia

– Tate online

CONCLUSION

That Blake had visions I have not the slightest doubt; because, those visions are being corroborated by modern science. The problem was that Blake itself did not know exactly what they meant.

We mustn’t forget that Blake’s background drank both of religious and esoteric fountains, so we must understand that he channelled his visions creating a parallel universe of his own where he could give life to the entities dwelling in his mind, which, on the other hand, quantum physics says that dwell in the mind of us all.

There always have been men like Blake, called Prophets. Men that could see what others could not see. Men who talked about things that the rest could not understand. Men that suffer humiliation, torture and even death, just for expressing themselves. And I am not talking about expressing anything supernatural, I am talking of men such as Giordano Bruno, who was a proponent of the infinity of the universe, and Galileo Galilei, who paradoxically were men of science, judged, the former even executed, for discovering and spreading universal truths.

William Blake was an aerial that connected with other worlds, other dimensions that are there for the human race to discover. These men came to the world and are still coming to prepare our minds for what was or is yet to come.

That is the connection I found between William Blake and quantum physics. The fact is that centuries after the poet’s legacy the world still talks about him and you can less but wonder at the similarities and accuracies of his words with the most recent discoveries in Physics.

For, what do we know about us, What the Bleep do We Know? We are just a grain of sand or even less in the infinite vastness of our universe. And… according to scientists there is an infinite number of universes…

William Blake, nicknamed ‘the Mad’ was born on November the 28^th, 1757, on an age characterised by its intolerance and its scientific scepticism, known as the Enlightenment.

At the age of eight, Blake had his first contact with Prophet Ezequiel, who appears to him on top of a tree in the family garden. Bearing in mind that in this Age of Reason the slightest sign of imagination was considered almost a crime, it is hardly surprising that his father, a puritan and conventional man, judged Blake’s visions as unforgettable lies. Nevertheless, during his childhood, Blake continues having visions of angels and archangels in his lonely walks in the country.

So, in an age that does not want to know anything about mysticism, celestial visions or intuition, where the only interest is towards Science and Reason, it takes Blake a great deal of self-confidence and above all faith to keep up with his beliefs. It is precisely this pair of apparently opposites, Science vs. Religion, what interests me most to develop my paper.

Since the religious hegemony began to take part on the scientific world causing the break apart of these two disciplines, which in old times where complementary, the human being has been walking a ‘no way out’ path: Science and Religion fight each other to prove that one is right and the other is wrong.

After centuries of persecutions, finally in this age scientists have found the freedom to develop their theories openly, and what is most important: they are able ‘to spread their news around the world’.

So, the science world took it as a ‘personal’ challenge to prove that God does not exist. And, by those paradoxes of life it has ended up proving that there is an invisible force, which Blake and many, many more call Love, which operates at the very core of physical life making it possible to exist. Without that ‘something’ life in the physical plane would simply be impossible. In other words we would not be here.

But, what’s the name of that essence of life? Could it be God?

That is exactly what William Blake was trying to tell their contemporaries, who without all the advances and discoveries of modern science, did not understand a single word of what he said and considered him a ‘poor mad man’, which is perfectly understandable.

But, as it is said that time puts everything into its right place, this is the age for Blake’s right place. The age of the Many-Worlds,  of the particle accelerators, of quarks and of Relativity, this is the age when Blake’s words acquire significance on the light of the quantum mechanics.

So, I will develop this paper by beginning to talk about the poet’s presence in Romantic literature. I also will show how the poet was considered by his contemporaries. And, to establish the link between Blake and quantum physics I will talk about his liking on reading.

Finally I will take the quantum leap from the fragment I choose as a starting point to nowadays, to draw my conclusion on the issue.

If  the  doors of  perception were cleansed

every thing would appear to man as it is: in-

finite.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, copy I, object 14 (Bentley 14, Erdman 14, Keynes 14). 07 November 2010 <http://www.blakearchive.org/>