Imagination and Reality: Blake's Vision

In my book, I want to draw out two facets of William Blake, which I think get routinely sidelined now. My conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou enabled us to explore these dimensions.

One is that Blake was a very sharp thinker. He had a very accurate and clear critique of the ideas that were beginning to bed down in his time and have really shaped our times in the modern Christian West. 

A second is that he is a religious figure, which gets sidelined in two ways. He lived daily with perceptions of angels and other entities: the divine, the dead. I don't explain that away by pathologising Blake. 

He is also a clear Christian mystic, a very important voice in Western Christianity since the Reformation - connecting us back to a mystical core, which again is very often sidelined.

For more about my book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

For more about Beshara Magazine see - https://besharamagazine.org

A transcript is online here - https://besharamagazine.org/podcast/mark-vernon-awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-imagination/

0:00 Introductions
1:57 Blake as thinker and mystic
5:20 The power of the imagination
14:40 Blake and science
21:12 The interconnection of music and poetry
26:04 Innocence and wisdom
32:29 Blake's Christianity
39:57 Blake the philosopher