Blake Our Contemporary

Aspects of poetry have recently been busting out around sundry mass media, and at least a few viewers and listeners hitherto more or less unversed in it will hopefully conceive some appetite for more. But will the press or radio, let alone TV, persist with ever more intensive poetry communications, as distinct from the nouveau-punk doggerel, caterwaul and gladiatorial banalities of so-called Poetry Slams at their lowest common denominational worst? Mercifully plenty of books, recordings and authentic poetry, song and music gigs keep on keeping on.                                        

The overlap between literary and other art media is particularly well served by various publications celebrating William Blake and replenishing his legacy. Though born more than 250 years ago, and for the most part reviled when not ignored in his lifetime, he is at last getting due recognition as one of our least dispensable contemporaries, celebrated and related to as a contemporary.

His engraved and hand-coloured books prefigured today’s offset photolithography, and his drawings and paintings remain almost alone among those by British artists in emulating the epic dimensions of Michelangelo and Raphael. His later writings are unique in their blend of prophetic and entirely practical insights — notably in their articulation of the necessity of internationalism if the human race is to survive.

In the gospel according to Father William, ‘Art is religion, religion is politics, and politics is brotherhood’.         

Rock poet-singer-songwriter Patti Smith has selected and introduced a fellow mystic’s edition of Blake’s Poems (Vintage Classics, £6.99) which includes all the Songs of Innocence & Experience along with excerpts from each of his other major works, a batch of delightfully idiosyncratic letters, and facsimile reproduction of the complete illustrated ‘Gates of Paradise’, which closes ‘. . . weeping over the Web of Life . . . in weary Night’s decline/the lost Traveller’s Dream under the Hill’. As Patti puts it: ‘The celestial source stayed bright within him, the casts of heaven moving freely in his sightline, offering songs of social injustice, the sexual potency of nature, and the blessedness of the lamb’.                              

200 years ago Blake presented the only substantial exhibition of his own works that took place in his lifetime, in the upstairs rooms of his brother’s hosiery shop in Golden Square, Soho. Seen in My Visions: A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (Tate Publishing, £12.99) is edited by Martin Myrone, curator of the display of what remains of the original exhibition shown at Tate Britain in summer and autumn of 2009. The twenty colour reproductions, the artist’s extensive comments on them, and Myrone’s detailed notes all provide a poignant reminder of the degree to which Blake remained a mountain too high to be seen by most of his peers.

The only review of Blake’s original show and its catalogue dismissed them as ‘a farrago of nonsense . . . the wild effusions of a distempered brain’. But neither the strong-lined and brilliantly coloured lucidities of paintings such as ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and the depiction of Chaucer and his twenty-nine Canterbury pilgrims, nor the vigorous aperçus and unblinking challenges of the Catalogue, could be more masterfully controlled yet revelatory.                                                                      

The William Blake Birthday Book (Bow of Burning Gold, £40/£25 — www.williamblakecongregation.co.uk) is a beautiful limited edition artists’ book put together by Felicity Bowers, Helen Elwes and Stephen Micalef, who commissioned compositions in word and coloured image in the formats of Blake’s illuminated books from 65 living Blakeans. Two of its most inspired contributors — John Michell and Adrian Mitchell — have recently left this mortal coil to join Mr Blake in Elysium. This is a printed party its dedicatee will surely smile to see, demonstrating as it exquisitely does his constant conviction that ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time’.

In his opening to Book 2 of ‘Jerusalem’, William Blake wrote:

In my Exchanges every land
Shall walk; and Mine in every land,
Mutual shall build Jerusalem,
Both heart in heart, and hand in hand.

By ‘Exchanges’ Blake meant not mere money-making, but places sanctioned by and for fraternal and international commerce of the imagination. John Michell’s life and work were consistently devoted to enabling and promoting the selfsame Exchanges.

The opening paragraphs of Michell’s succinct polemic, ‘William Blake and Immigration’ (The Oldie, September 2009), provide a cogent reminder of just how up-to-date and down-to-earth Blake’s visions remain:

‘It really is possible for affairs between nations to be conducted in the spirit of love’. Years ago in Russia I heard Mr Gorbachev, then in power, saying that on the radio. And he was not just saying it, he proposed to implement a policy of love all round as the basis of international relations. He had spoken about it to Mrs Thatcher and other western leaders and, so he claimed, they all agreed with him. I wonder what they actually said when Gorby blurted this out. Probably something kind like "Yes, dear", and that was it. Soon afterwards Gorbachev was voted out of office, and I was not surprised. Noble saints and prophets never seem to win elections.

Love between nations. That sounds nice, but is it really on the cards? It is easy enough in mellow moments to extend benevolence to everyone, everywhere, just as you can love your distant relatives, distantly. But when they all turn up at once and settle down beside you it can be a bit of a strain. A problem of that sort is the mass migration into northern Europe of tribes and races from all over the world. These islands turn out to be the most popular destination for migrants. They are already here, say the media, in uncountable millions, and fast out-breeding the natives.

So, here and now is the moment of truth, the moment when William Blake’s prophecies are put to the test. To the shores of Albion, declared our national oracle, shall come the faithful of all nations, and together we shall join hearts and hands to achieve the state of peace and happiness, justice and piety which in Blake’s symbolic language is called Jerusalem, the heavenly city brought to earth. Also being tested is Gorbachev’s belief that all peoples can live together under love. This is not just a theoretical experiment but a matter of actual, present reality. If the test fails, and the various peoples of Britain cannot rise to something like the state that Blake and Gorby envisaged, the alternative is dissolution and civil war.’

After the Beat and Protest Poetry Internationale that levitated the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, Ted Hughes wrote something similar: ‘The idea of global unity is not new, but the absolute necessity of it has only just arrived, like a sudden radical alteration of the sun, and we shall have to adapt or disappear’.

Adrian Mitchell’s characteristically entertaining but challenging final collection, ‘Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005-2008’ (Bloodaxe Books, £10.95) includes this Blakean vision, ‘Enjoy the Light’:

‘In my dream, all the wisest people in the world had come together at an observatory on a hill to decide if the stars were trying to communicate with us, or whether they were meaningless. After some years of trying to decode celestial movements, they were about to give up when some excited children pulled them outside and pointed up to the night sky, where the stars were spelling out, in enormous shining star-letters, the words: ENJOY THE LIGHT. I woke up with those words branded on my memory. It seemed like very good advice and I have tried to follow it.’

Adrian famously prefaced his first book of verse (Poems, Cape 1964) with the observation that ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. That this situation has been almost entirely reversed around Britain is largely due to Mitchell’s own spadework in this department, which was of course also pioneered by Blake.

Adrian again spoke for many when, in his ‘Lullaby for William Blake’, he wrote:

‘Blakehead, babyhead,
Your head is full of light.
You sucked the sun like a gobstopper.
Blakehead, babyhead,
High as a satellite on sunflower seeds,
First man-powered man to fly the Atlantic,
Inventor of the poem which kills itself,
The poem which gives birth to itself,
The human form, jazz, Jerusalem
And other luminous, luminous galaxies.
You out-spat your enemies.
You irradiated your friends.
Always naked, you shaven, shaking tyger-lamb,
Moon-man, moon-clown, moon-singer, moon-drinker,
You never killed anyone.
Blakehead, babyhead,
Accept this mug of crude red wine
— I love you.’  

And so dear reader, I urge you to befriend all these books, relish such Blake originals as are still on view at Tate Britain, and delight in the enlightenments bestowed by his writings as by his art-works. If spiritual succour you crave, seek deep in the heart of Blakeland, and you will find. As his Descriptive Catalogue has it:

‘If the Spectator could enter into these Images in his Imagination, approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought, if he could enter into Noah’s Rainbow or into his bosom, or could make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder, which always intreats him to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he arise from his Grave, then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy.’