I finally faced my fears, or began facing them, and opened up the first of the two volumes I have of William Blake. I didn’t make it past his engravings. I was sucked in by them without getting to the poetry. It’s popular for teenagers to read “Tyger Tyger” and say how much they love Blake, but that’s just the tip of his work. Blake, like Yeats and Milton, was an epic poet, and like Yeats and other British authors of the last two centuries, his poetry embodied a complex mixture of philosophy and spirituality that evolved from a mixture of Christianity, British mythology, Greek though, and Judaism.
Like the Jewish Kabbalah, Blake’s work, and Yeats’s comes out of a dream. It is told with eyes half closed and heard in a half waking state. Blake’s illustations and poems are visceral, sometimes frightening. When he creates from what he has read in the Bible, he does it like a Kabbalist. Scripture is an untold treasure house of poems and myths, lust dreams and nightmares. What he produces is neither didactic nor comforting. There is no propaganda. To him the Bible was not handbook, but soulbook, and what he had heard and read from it is etched on his soul. So the art he produces is real.
There is a lesson here—all about the bringing forth of story. My worst work is “TV show work” reading a myth or an article, hearing someone tell me something, and knocking it off, doctoring it up and pasting it together to manufacture a cheap story. But real story, and it’s inherent visions, heavens and nightmares “come up” they come forth like Lazarus from the grave or oil up out of the earth. They come up from the insides after you have consented to let yourself be opened.