Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World

In his early prophetic works, William Blake presents his own creation myth, which reinterprets Genesis and critically examines contemporary medical discourse on generation and birth.In this talk Annalise Volpone explores a specific trope that emerges from Blake's depiction of imagination and (artistic) creation: partus mentis, the parturition of the mind.  Annalisa Volpone is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Perugia. She specializes on modernism and romanticism; her research includes the intersections between literature and medicine in the Romantic period. She is currently working on a monograph on birth metaphors and imagination in William Blake.

Begun some time around 1797, Vala or The Four Zoas is William Blake's great unfinished masterpiece, an attempt to provide a complete mythology of Blake's universe of characters, Urizen, Los, Orc, Vala and many more. The poem has fascinated and perplexed readers ever since and, in this episode of Visionary, Professor Jason Whittaker is joined by Dr Annise Rogers who has worked in detail on Blake's epic. They discuss the conditions in which the poem was written, as well as provide some explanation as to its characters and significance.

In 1789, Blake developed the relief etching technique which he described as "a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet," allowing him to simultaneously write and design on copper plates for his illuminated books. This process required Blake to write and design in reverse, leading him to develop his command of retrography. Consequently, what appears "forwards" on the printed page is the product of a "backwards" preparatory process. In this talk, Dr Camille Adnot analyses the workings of these reversed words on the printed page, examining the dynamics of reading text backwards, and the function that these words serve within the illuminated book. This investigation into mirror writing and its implications extends to Blake's practice of mirror designing, which, though less obviously subversive and challenging for the reader, still operates a reversal of important proportions, providing some of the dynamics behind Blake's fearful symmetries.

Blake famously begins Milton: A Poem with the call to "Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age!" That phrase has been connected to the "New Age" movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and Blake has long been recognized as an important influence on the poets and visual artists of that time, but it could be argued however, that it was a cohort of musicians that best manifested his vision for art during this era. Jacob Smith outlines a series of resonances between Blake and the first wave of New Age musicians, which includes Iasos, Suzanne Doucet, Stephen Halpern, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Constance Demby, and Laraaji. Crucially, both Blake and this school of New Age musicians are legible as visionary artists. Blake has long been offered as a paradigmatic example of the visionary artist, and New Age musicians of this period are notable for the way in which they brought a similar approach to the realm of recorded music.

Jacob Smith discusses parts of his book, Bateson's Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson's Ecology of Mind. Bateson began his academic career as an anthropologist in the 1930s, collaborated with Margaret Mead on groundbreaking anthropological research utilizing photography and motion pictures, and participated in the founding conferences on cybernetics. After parting ways with Mead, Bateson embarked upon a series of research inquiries that moved across academic disciplines, culminating in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), a book that brought him a new level of public recognition and influence. Bateson was deeply influenced by the work of William Blake, and the talk will present his thoughts on Blake. This talk also explores an audio visual adaptation of Blake with reference to the soundscapes of David Lynch, which Jacob has used to create an audiovisual essay on William Blake's The Sea of Time and Space.

Blakean song titles such as 'Gates of Eden' (1965) and 'Every Grain of Sand' (1981) have ensured that Blake's influence on Dylan has long been taken for granted by fans, music writers and literary scholars - but how much Blake did Dylan actually know? In this podcast, Luke Walker that Dylan does indeed owe a deep and complex debt of influence to Blake, although it is a subject on which Dylan himself has often been evasive and contradictory, not only in public interviews but significantly also in private conversations with fellow Blakean poet-musicians Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.

In this episode of Visionary, Jason Whittaker is joined by the scholar Jodie Marley, whose work includes a study of W. B. Yeats's reception of Blake in mystical circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this wide-ranging discussion, they look at how Blake was adopted as a mystic and occultist, as well as the important work done by Yeats and his colleague Edwin John Ellis to edit the first collected works of William Blake.

Biographer of the Beats and co-founder of the counter-culture newspaper, International Times, Barry Miles joins Camila Oliveira in conversation about how, through Zapple Records which he set up with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he came to record Allen Ginsberg's settings of the poetry of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this fascinating discussion, he also reminisces as to how - with Ginsberg and filmmaker Barbara Rubin - he was instrumental in helping to bring about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.

James Keery and Steve Clark begin with a discussion of the 'song' performed by 'Tambourine Man', which is often regarded as an invitation to Blakean 'immortal moments'. If 'the Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity', in Dylan these have become 'foggy ruins of time', trading posts on a 'windy beach', where black captives may be 'silhouetted by the sea'. It is also performed within the 'love and theft' tradition of blackface minstrelsy: Mr Tambo as a 'ragged clown', casting a 'dancing spell' upon 'circus sands'. Race has become a hyper-sensitive issue in recent Blake studies. If Black lives matter, is any representation by a white artist necessarily exploitative; if so, what about Black voices? This talk examines the mid-18th century convergence of British evangelical hymnody with African musical forms, to the extent that one might speak of the negro appropriation of Watts and Wesley. It explores what Blake may have known of this tradition and its influence throughout his work, chart its genealogy through 19th-century blackface minstrelsy, and explore its subsequent exfoliation across 20th century culture. It will conclude by arguing that Blake's prominence in recent popular music (including but not limited to Dylan), usually attributed to celebration of enhanced states of consciousness, is inseparable from his positive 'Responsing' to this inheritance.

With its exploration of the unconscious via the dreamscapes of artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, and a rejection of the kind of excessive rationalism that had boxed European countries into the horrors of the First World War, it would seem that Surrealism and William Blake were a match made in heaven - or a marriage made in hell. In this episode, Jason Whittaker explores some of the ways in which the Surrealists invoked Blake and explored his ideas and his status as a "complete artist" in their own work.