William Blake is best known to many through 'Songs of Innocence And Of Experience', his collection of poems taught in schools. In these poems, Blake contrasts two states of human existence: innocence, or the state of childhood, in which one sees the world with open eyes and an open mind, and experience, in which one's perception has been shaped and restricted by social forces and one's own inhibitions. The two states do not exist independently of each other and most of the poems in one book have a counterpart in the other, reflecting how innocence must grow to survive in the world of experience, and how only through experience do the best parts of innocence become valued.
These themes reflect concerns which echo throughout Blake's wider body of work in various forms. Blake was enraptured by interdependent dualisms, particularly the Biblical mythology which captured the imagination with stories of man's fall and rise, and organised religion's manipulation of those stories to maintain power and subjugate the masses both spiritually and sexually. Though sadly little known these days, Blake authored a prophetic mythology of his own, one of the great unrecognised works of the English literary canon, imagining how man could rise out of the subjugation of religion, education and rationalism and enter a state of pure imagination
There are a number of key recurring figures. Albion represents primeval man and both the creator and spiritual embodiment of England. Albion's fall, which in this case represents a retreat from the realm of imagination and into the realm of structure and selfishness, sees his division into four Zoas: Tharmas, representing physical sensation; Luvah, representing passion in all its forms; Urizen, who maps and orders the universe; and Urthona, who represents inspiration and the imagination, and has a human form, Los, a prophet and blacksmith who builds a City of Imagination called Golgonooza, representing everything from Blake's idealised vision of a city, to the unity between the human body and mind and the merging of the sexes.
Each male figure, including Albion, has a female Emanation, just as how in Biblical mythology, Eve was created from Adam. These Emanations are figures of love and creation, but also conflict, representing division from a unified self. As if it weren't already clear how complex Blake's mythology can be, Albion's Emanation, Jerusalem, is at once a woman, a symbolic representation of the eponymous city and its holy associations, as well as concepts of liberty and divine vision. (She does not, however, have anything to do with Blake's famous poem, 'And Did Those Feet In Ancient Times', adapted by Sir Hubert Parry into the hymn, Jerusalem.) Urthona's Emanation, Enitharmon, derives from his human form, Los, and represents beauty and inspiration, but also the feminine domination and the power of sex in restraining the artist's imagination.
Describing these figures emphasizes not only the incredible complexity of Blake's work, but how none of them are intended to be taken as characters in the literal sense, instead as a tapestry of symbols and ideas. The way we commonly think about stories and storytelling structure applies only loosely. The 'characters' and their actions exist only insofar as they represent something else, usually multiple things at once. A key concept in understanding how Blake intended for his work to be interpreted is 'four-fold vision', which he described thusly in a letter to his friend and patron, Thomas Butts:
Now I a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulahs night
And twofold Always. May God uskeep
From Single vision and Newtons sleep!
If fourfold vision is the state of perfect sight, threefold vision is the step below where one learns to accept contradiction and poetic inspiration in a dreamlike, loving state of comfort ('Beulah', as Blake called it) which is nevertheless an incomplete and unsustainable utopia. Twofold vision is the prior stage, representing the ability to understand context and emotion on top of that which is literally seen. Singlefold vision, represented by the Zoa, Urizen, is the dissociative rationalism of seeing the world as nothing more than how it literally presents. For Blake and his fellow Romantics, this was how the likes of Sir Isaac Newton interpreted the world, as a collection of facts devoid of spirituality or emotion. While this analytical way of thinking undeniably had its uses, Blake saw it as a profoundly limited view of what made life worthwhile.
It is important to note that whereas the imagination is today thought of as something which happens within us, it was originally thought of as images received, in varying forms of completeness, from without: the latin root word, imaginari, literally means 'picture to oneself'. Plato's famous cave allegory describes how limited knowledge and experience restricts one's ability to discern shadows from reality. Blake's concept of the imagination operates on a similar principle: those seeing with singlefold vision only see shadows of reality. Those with fourfold vision see reality in its true form.
For Blake, the structures and politics with which man had surrounded himself was akin to a retreat from reality into the world of shadows, a willing distancing of oneself from the beauty and meaning of the natural world. The church was an institution which used the pretence of divine authority to oppress the masses and control every aspect of people's lives, from their spirits to their sexuality, particularly in the case of women: Blake was an ardent supporter of women's rights and a great friend of Mary Wollestonecraft, illustrating one of her books. The Industrial Revolution had mechanised life to the point where human existence amounted to nothing more than the sum of its productivity, even forcing children into labour. Having been downcast at seeing the revolution in France turn to bloodshed, Blake looked to America as his great hope for the redemptive power of revolution to enable man to regain his physical and spiritual autonomy, aspiring for Britain (Albion) to eventually do the same.
If history has proven Blake's belief in revolution as a force for humanity's liberation as sadly misguided, his dedication to opening one's mind beyond the restrictions of social and political structures has an enduring appeal for anyone seeking a better world and a better life, regardless of the shape one believes it should take.
The depth and complexity of Blake's mythology is at once key to its power and beauty, but also what has prevented it from attaining the cultural status it deserves. It is the richest, most ambitious works of original mythopoeia ever produced in Great Britain, functioning not only as a paean to the role of imagination in the human experience, but as a historical snapshot of a visionary's anxiety as industrialisation upended the world around him. It is not unfair to say Blake's mythology can be borderline incomprehensible, but in doing so it serves as a reminder that life is experienced as much in the feeling as the understanding.
