Civilisational erasure was a nagging concern for William Blake. “Albion is sick,” he lamented, “sunk down in sick pallid languor.” The divine intelligences, also called the angels, who guard England’s wisdom are “smitten”, he observed, “Abstract Philosophy warring in Enmity against Imagination,” he added.
Blake noted that much as King Lear’s rejection of Cordelia, for refusing to quantify her love, brought disaster to the state, so too “certainty and demonstrative truth” made “Man be separate from Man.” And so Albion repeatedly cries, ”Hope is banish’d from me,” in the long poem in which Blake explores these matters: Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion.
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