Awake!

William Blake and the Power of the Imagination

The nineteenth-century poet and artist William Blake lived with demons and a wearing sense of anxiety, but also a direct experience of the Kingdom of Heaven that can be known on Earth. Joy and woe had become familiar contraries to him, often intertwined, though the light rarely left him for long. As his wife Catherine told one confused admirer who paid them attention after they returned from Felpham: “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.” So what did Blake find there? What convictions restored his equanimity and, moreover, inspired him to keep speaking with unfailing tenacity to an indifferent public, sure that his work might yet redeem the times? This was his Christianity.