I’ve notice a tendency to downplay the divine element in accounts of William Blake, and to reduce his understanding of the imagination to a human artefact, from its true status as a supernatural capacity that he knew.
In this talk I consider 5 ways in which this can be resisted:
– Blake’s insistence that “there is no natural religion”.
– Blake’s affirmation that “God becomes as we are that we may become as he is”.
– His understanding that, “The desire of man is infinite”, and without it, we consume the natural world.
– His realisation that even Eternal Death is transformed by Eternal Life.
– And his engagement with The Bhagavad Gita, which arguably not only inspired some of his own mythology but his clear absolute idealism and philosophy.