Quote:William Blake saw angels and ghosts and the Hallelujah sunrise, even on the darkest day. We need to foster his state of mind
Quote:Blake was driven to enable others to apprehend such sights. In one of his epic poems, ‘Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion’ (1804-20), he declared:
Quote:… I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of man …
At the time, there were few with the eyes to see and ears to hear him. The industrial age was booming, manifesting the insights of the scientific revolution. It was a tangibly, visibly changing society, fostering an almost irresistible focus on the physical aspects of reality. The narrowing of outlook is captured in one of Blake’s best-known images, entitled ‘Newton’ (1795-1805). It depicts the natural philosopher on the seabed, leaning over a scroll, compass in hand. He draws a circle. It’s an imaginative act. Only, it’s imagination rapt in the material world alone, devoted to studying what’s measurable. For Blake, Isaac Newton represents a mentality trapped within epicycles of thought. While claiming to study reality, it isolates itself from reality, and so induces, as he wrote in a letter to his patron Thomas Butts, ‘Single vision and Newton’s sleep’.
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