![]() That the English author, journalist and cultural historian has previously written about Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the experimental, electronic band the KLF and a whole host of both old- and newfangled strangeness supplied some advance notion of who his Blake might be. ![]() This is John Higgs’s second book about the poet, following 2019’s manifesto, “William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever,” from which this project was spawned. The telling-off I got in an undergraduate seminar still stings: If I could get over my “junior Marxist training,” the teacher said, I might actually come to know Blake’s poems. The Blake who first fired me up was the political Blake, in whom I saw a kinship with other, later thinkers I already admired. Yeats admired Blake so much that he tried to claim him for the Irish. One scholar I knew speculated that, like herself, the poet must have had high histamine levels - and this might help to explain his extraordinary creativity. Just as certain religious believers privilege the cultivation of a personal relationship with the divine, those of us with the chutzpah to call ourselves Blakeans often make of the poet-artist-visionary a William Blake of our own. ![]()
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