William Blake

Blake and the Book of Job, by Andrew Solomon

Posted on by Golgonooza

Re-Writing The God Program

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As a work of art, William Blake’s famous set of engravings illustrating the Book of Job is undoubtedly one of his finest achievements. But he made it very clear that his art was never an end in itself. Its purpose was to communicate his visionary perceptions for the benefit of mankind:  “To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes/Of man inwards into the Worlds of Thought”.  Similarly, I shall keep throughout to a psychological rather than a theological interpretation.

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The End of Nature:  Blake and Pantheism, by Rod Tweedy

Posted on by Golgonooza

Babylon, Nature-worship, and the Sleep of Albion 

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‘Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!’

As Kathleen Raine has noted, “the sleep of Albion is in a word the materialist mentality of the modern West.” However, this “materialist mentality”, for Blake, denotes not only the belief in the Newtonian universe of orthodox Science, which many are now questioning, but also the belief in “Nature” itself. For Blake, the “Creation” – the emergence of an apparently objective, natural, and material world – and Albion’s fall into “Sleep” were one and the same event.

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