William Blake

Authors

  • Daniela Picón Universidad de Chile

Abstract

Considering the ‘divine force’ as a human power that allows humans to transcend from the mere sensory visualization and perception of the fi nite and earthly world to the true and eternal realm of imagination, William Blake, the english poet, artist and visionary (1757-1827) identified god with this human faculty. In his struggle against the ‘religion of reason’, under which humans had been reduced to an ‘empty’ outward perception, Blake wants to recover the ‘religion of imagination’. From this perspective, I expect to elucidate the ways in which the material aspects of writing (Roger Chartier) and the visionary use of a specific method of writing –different from the methods available to Blake in his own time– affect the visionary circuit of communication. This complete transformation is directly connected with the purpose of Blake’s illuminated prophetic poems: he intends to awake in his readers that visionary (and real) capacity, which, in his view, ‘resides in the human breast’.

Keywords:

William Blake, visionary literature, imagination, writing, reading