Many years ago, while studying the Romantic poets at uni, I was introduced to William Blake in this way. My lecturer, the incomparable Roger Sworder, stood at the head of the class in his tweed blazer, eyes wide over his goatee and declared, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a poem that has sent people mad.’
From that moment, I was hooked—and not just because Roger knew how to sell his subjects. Blake is like a diamond: the more one peers at him and turns him about, the more facets one finds—and the more awesome his beauty. He is not only exceptional as a poet, but also as a visual artist, in painting and printmaking. And yet, for me, it’s the story of his life and his insights on art and spirituality that resonate and inspire.
Living in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England as an engraver, Blake toiled in near poverty, scraping his bread from one commission to the next. Self-educated and virtually unknown during his lifetime, he nevertheless remained true to his creative vocation, authoring then producing his illuminated poetry books by hand, alongside Catherine, his wife. Blake etched the printing plates, then he and Catherine ran them through the press, hand coloured the works, sewed them into books, published them—and all this while under continual financial stress.
At the heart of Blake’s fortitude was his faith in what he called the Imagination. Yet Blake did not define imagination as most do: as the capacity to fancy up something novel, yet unreal. To him, Imagination is the supreme human faculty. It is ‘spiritual sensation’: our innate ability to perceive the essence of things, behind—and beyond—their appearances. Blake believed Imagination to be the only faculty through which the truths of nature can be known. For, if we perceive nature using only our reasoning, the world is nothing more than a series of finite material processes.
Blake’s way of seeing immediately resonated with me. I had grown up surrounded by nature, as an imaginative child; it was natural for me to engage with the world through my imagination. The great boulders on our property’s surrounding hills had been more than just masses of granite to my eight-year-old mind: they were ancient beings, sleeping yet sentient. The wind was more than a mere current of air—it was a spirit, bearing the secrets of tree and grassland, the essence of the storm. To stare into an animal’s, or a stranger’s, eyes was to encounter a new and mysterious world.
Only imaginative vision can perceive ‘the infinite in everything’. And, in this moment of recognition, we discover our ability to commune with the very power that shapes and sustains the world. In Blake’s view, the divine nature is imaginative. This is why Imagination is a mediating power; he believed that in action and through faith, it could bridge the great void between man and God.
The highest end of art, according to Blake, is to record the truths revealed to us through this encounter. Art was not a secular pursuit to him—it was a spiritual vocation. His great calling was to share his illumination with the world:
'To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.'[1]
Blake’s artistic ambition may appear far-fetched, irreconcilable with the secular, relativistic values of our own time. Yet it seems to me that as we become even more estranged from nature, as our reliance on technology further alienates us from our imaginative faculties, Blake’s work—at the very least—compels us to consider our place in the universe and to question what it is that defines us as human. At his full power—if he does not send us mad—Blake offers us the assurance that, if we would only ‘cleanse our doors of perception’, we might return to the beauteous vision that awed us in childhood.
[1] Blake, William, Jerusalem, Chapter 1, Plate 5
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Sally Nansen (Sunday, 29 June 2025 20:57)
This is so inspiring and beautifully written. A pearl of Blake's vision along with your own...Treasure for the heart to read. Thank you for writing it.
Beck Sutton (Monday, 30 June 2025 03:11)
Thank you so much for sharing, Sally. I'm happy to hear Blake's vision resonates with your own. Wishing you all the very best in your creative endeavours!