Mark Vernon's Reading List

"So, this book was published in two movements by Blake. First, the Songs of Innocence , which included poems like ‘The Lamb,’ which have a certain innocence. But even in that first collection, that charm is never quite so neat and tidy. There is a world of carefree, playful safety, but also, say in ‘Infant joy,’ an edge that makes you think about the fullness of what it is to care for a baby. So when he subsequently published the Songs of Experience , the coupling of many of the poems, the resonances set up with that first volume, completely made sense. It’s not a jarring shift, as if Blake suddenly grew up and realised that life wasn’t so good. It feels more like the completion of the earlier project. There’s even a sense of what you might call ‘triangulation’—because, for example, ‘The Lamb’ is clearly linked to ‘The Tyger’. The latter poem describes the big cat’s “fearful symmetry,” but also asks the question: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? So our minds are stretched by having to embrace not only our identification with the lamb of ‘The Lamb,’ where he writes: I a child & thou a lamb, We are called by his name. Which is beautiful and consoling. But by asking how the divine creator made both the lamb and the tiger—which of course would slay the lamb. That adds what you might call sublime experience to the beauty of the earlier book. Blake says they describe “The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” and lead to a sense of a wider horizon, that we human beings are somehow connected to as well. Yes, Blake is one of these people who really has one idea that he tries to express in multiple ways, which is the presence of eternity in our lives amidst the minute particulars. Because of the events of his time—the very terrible Napoleonic Wars in Europe—he has to reach for different methods of communicating that divine presence, maybe because it becomes less obvious as the violence increases. But you still get a sense of that divine presence from the earliest work, particularly The Songs of Innocence and Experience . So it is genuinely a good introduction to Blake, and once you tune into his way of seeing, you can carry that perception through the later, more complex images and poems."

"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."

"I enjoyed that book because it was one of the first that I read that took Blake seriously, as a great intellectual who can be questioned and probed, and who we can learn from as well as learn about. The title ‘English Blake’ also situates him on the island of Albion. In these days of Christian nationalism, social disputes about identity, many recent writers have distanced themselves from that. But I felt that in English Blake there is a love of country, of land. It’s maybe from more innocent times—in the pejorative sense—but it’s quite refreshing to read. It’s also very clearly written, a model of prose. I don’t think it is accurate at all. He certainly loved work that was out of fashion; he collected prints of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo , who were not in favour at the time. He critiqued, or really criticized, the dominant modes of art. Of Joshua Reynolds, he wrote: “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” And he also knew great artists of the day—John Flaxman in particular. Both Blake and Flaxman illustrated The Divine Comedy . He went to a progressive drawing school, where he learned the great art of etching, which was a lucrative business at the time. Books were booming, and books needed plates and images. His work was very distinctive—you can instantly spot a Blake image—but he was also drawing on the great caricature traditions of the time. This was the golden age of cartoons, and you can feel that in Blake’s art as well. You know, he finds his voice. And I think, in most cases, distinctive voices are found because they are thoroughly immersed in the other voices around them."

"Raine was a poet, and—for me—a transformative Blake scholar. I remember going to Tate Britain at one point when they had new acquisitions of Blake work and being very dissatisfied with the descriptions of these new works. It was almost as if the curator didn’t quite know what they had bought. That made me turn to Kathleen Raine’s books on Blake, because she offers a complicated but nonetheless clear explanation of where Blake’s images are coming from and where he can be situated in the Neo-Platonic tradition. You don’t have to buy that wholeheartedly to be glad that Kathleen Raine has opened up the deep meaning of these images and allowed you to question that, and to appreciate Blake seriously, not just as some strange, whimsical genius in a world of his own. So I’ve always been glad of Raine’s work, and this book of lectures of hers is fascinating. It’s as if she, too, is speaking from another world. There’s something of the spirit of Blake in her that is deeply attractive; you’re receiving from Blake at multiple levels when you read Kathleen Raine. Yes, she wrote three or four books, gave talks, and founded the Temenos Academy too, a group that reads not just Blake’s texts but others like The Divine Comedy, the Bhagavad Gita, other Upanishads texts as well. She felt that Blake was part of this tradition, which she has described as a river flowing underground, constantly throwing up springs. The living water is felt in the work of figures like Blake. So, yes, Blake drew her not just academically, but because she thought that in him could be felt this timeless tradition that needs to be renewed in every generation."

"Barfield is another figure who has been very influential to me. I did a PhD on Plato , and while I got the PhD I felt I hadn’t really got to grips with what Plato was saying. Then I read one of Barfield’s other books, in which he said A modern European can read Plato and Aristotle through from end to end, he can even write books expounding their philosophy, and all without understanding a single sentence. Barfield’s point is that the same words carry very, very different resonances and meaning over centuries of change. A ‘theory’ now means a proposition that you put to the test, whereas theory for Plato meant a horizon that you approach and contemplate, in order to receive something from over the horizon. This book by Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair , frequently mentions Blake. In fact, in the denouement of the book, one of the characters is offered a kind of prescription that involves reading William Blake. So it’s always intrigued me quite what Barfield saw in Blake. Apart from these references, I wasn’t clear on what Barfield loved about Blake until recently, when another Barfield scholar sent me an as-yet-unpublished paper by Barfield, explicitly on Blake and what Barfield felt in Blake’s work—a bringing back of an older consciousness into the present. Blake is not nostalgic. He’s definitely modern. But he does carry an enchantment, that we feel the modern world has otherwise taken from us. So I think that combination of energies is what Barfield sensed in Blake, and this novel wrestles with how we can receive that vitality once again. Hence it is on the list. Yes. Blake in his lyricism inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge when they wrote the lyrical ballads—that appeal of a freer verse that uses simple, transparent words and so communicates without the sense of being performative or mannered. Blake can be very hard to read, because he was, I think, deeply in touch with what we normal human beings can easily overlook, which is that our minds are constantly shifting and changing and picking up different reflections and resonances. Reading Blake can be a bit like entering a dream, perhaps because it is only in dreams that full vitality comes back to many people, because of the bright light of modern rationalism, and the way our egos are required to be in control and getting on with things and delivering and so on—as the modern world demands. Blake will say: I heard The Word, the voice of the Divine speaking this mild song to me. He never holds back from wanting to write inspired work, by which he means not just startling or lovely, but breathing in, inspiring, the spirit of God. Hence this theme of eternity."