7 - Blake's politics in history

Summary

Blake has been called Britain's greatest revolutionary artist. He is also routinely described as a visionary or mystic, a man more concerned with spiritual than political matters. Many critics subscribe to the intermediate position that Blake's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution transformed itself into a Romantic concern with the creative power of the imagination or a version of John Milton's “paradise within thee, happier far.” This chapter suggests, on the contrary, that Blake was always a deeply political writer, even if he was one who viewed the distinction between spiritual and political matters as the product of a fallen human consciousness, but whether he is understood as a political radical, a mystical genius, or a disillusioned fellow traveler, the judgment is complicated by a paucity of biographical information. Unlike the annotations he made on various books he owned, which regularly refer to political matters, the few Blake letters that survive rarely mention politics.