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 ...