Blake: A Biography

"This is quite old now. It was published in the late 1990s. But I think it still stands as the best biography to read, because not only is it meticulous and clearly written to set a standard for any subsequent attempt at a biography. But I love Ackroyd’s biography because he’s not afraid of the supernatural side of Blake. It’s full of detail about where he lived and how he was immersed in the Georgian period, but doesn’t shy away from Blake’s life with angels and his communications with the dead. He explores the spiritual and religious milieu of the times of which Blake was a part and that is quite distinctive from subsequent books on the whole. Other books about Blake are inclined to sideline that part of Blake, or to pathologise it. That’s one of the things I explicitly resist doing in my book, because I think Blake wants to shake our current worldview in order for us to perceive eternity afresh, to know the world in a different way. If you go to Blake already having decided you are going to exclude that, you really miss the main point of reading him. Of course, there is aesthetic pleasure, a critical appreciation of his genius, but as he says, quite explicitly: I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall If you cut the golden string and follow your own path, I think you will do a major disservice to Blake. Sure, stay critical, stay discerning, ask how much you can follow Blake. But Blake wants to draw that active engagement with him, this too is part of his wider vision. There were four elements I wanted to weave together in my appreciation of Blake, which is structured biographically but uses moments in his life to explore facets of what he shows us in his work. One is that imagination is not a private possession that you or I may have, or an artist may have in greater degree. But rather, as Blake said, it is the imagination that has us. We are already moving through great flows of imagination, and that is why the world is alive to him. Our engagement with that is about aligning, co-creating, collaborating with that wider flow. “Ackroyd is not afraid of the supernatural side of Blake—his life with angels and his communications with the dead” I want to stress that the world is alive. I want also to think of Blake as a philosopher, because we know that he engaged very deliberately with the great minds of his day. He was friends with Thomas Paine. He illustrated the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Some of the books he owned survive, along with his annotations. He was not just an isolated visionary, a lost artist in a garret, but quite able to skewer and critique the philosophy of the time. Then the third element was the supernatural. Blake, like many figures in the past— Socrates , Newton —said they engaged with angelic beings, daemons, the intangible ecologies of the living cosmos. Let’s take Blake at his word, then, and not just do the easy thing and say he was a bit crazy. Where does that take us? And fourthly, there’s his religious character, which is Christian—and also open to the other faiths present in Georgian London, via the translation of the Bhagavad Gita and the Quran. I situate Blake in that context because that is the rich metaphysical world that illuminates Blake’s own work. And so, rather than feeling amazed but bemused in front of Blake, we might feel amazed and drawn in. We allow that mystical side, that visionary side, to speak more directly."