Kathleen Raine: William Blake

The mystical world of William Blake – poet, painter, and engraver – which was largely misunderstood during his lifetime, has in succeeding generations exercised a mesmeric fascination. With the ideal of Salvation implicit throughout his art, Blake's was an intensely Christian philosophy; Kathleen Raine, however, who is well known as both a poet and a Blake scholar, believes his genius was akin to that of the Old Testament prophets, whom he so greatly admired, and that he addressed himself to the dwellers in Albion much as the prophets had addressed themselves to the Jewish people. In this study of his life, thought, and art, she explains how, for Blake, the arts were not an end in themselves, but, rather, that they expressed his vision of the spiritual drama of the English national being, as he saw it enacted in contemporary history. Blake understood that events are generated by ideologies that the "dark Satanic mills" of the industrial landscape were built in the image of the mechanistic philosophy whose product they were. But Blake's uniqueness as a prophet has tended to obscure the origins of his visual, poetic, and philosophical ideas. He was, in fact, subject to the same influences as other men of his time (for example, the Greek and Gothic revivals of the late eighteenth century), and there was no important current of contemporary thought in which he was not involved.