"William Blake puts his arms around us, one of the greatest artists our islands ever produced. He invented a way to put words and images on a page to express his poetry and art in a manner only replicated 200 years later by the internet. He created colour prints that develop before your eyes like Polaroids, then become scenes under the deep ocean or in the starry heavens above. Even at the time his followers didn’t know what to say.
He is pure energy, said his young admirer, Samuel Palmer.
When Blake wrote Jerusalem, it wasn’t as an alternative national anthem as it has now become. It was a plea for a world without slavery and oppression, a world where people would not be defined or constrained by their colour, their sexuality, their gender, their beliefs or their dreams. Blake’s heavenly bodies are our real selves, soaring beyond time and space. His art is a time machine. We can climb aboard and be taken to the stars. Blake accepted no limits to the human spirit. When someone tried to explain to him that the moon was thousands of miles away, he said that was nonsense.
I can go outside and touch it with my stick, he said."
Hardback.
