WILLIAM BLAKE is one of my favorite poets and one whose poetry has often resisted my understanding. I've tried a couple of interpreters of Blake, E.P. Thompson was the last one I tried, and, while I've found some persuasive things in them, none of them has ever really convinced me they really got him. I did come to the conclusion that you probably couldn't get to him unless you shared at least some of his belief in God and Jesus which even such devotedly sympathetic secularists reject. It would be like someone studying modern physics without believing in electrons or current biology without believing in the things that Barbara McClintock discovered (which, clearly, many of the big names in the popular understanding of science, today, don't).
I will note that in the last several months of reading Scripture, especially the New Testament, I have come to the startling conclusion that love is a central force in existence, both our only hope of the survival of death - and I mean literally that, continued conscious existence after bodily death, not some remembered existence or other transient metaphor - but also as the reason any of us or the universe exists at all. I haven't developed any great Scriptural or reasoned arguments to support that, so huge is it that I would guess you'd have to say it in Blakean language and that might not have the force it needs without Blakean pictures in color, as well. Blake is also one of my favorite artists.
I hadn't thought of Blake in my thinking about this until listening to this new short essay "Enemies of the Human Race" William Blake on the disaster of atheism, by Mark Vernon - which has an announcement of his upcoming book Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination which, alas, won't be published here in the States until September and who knows if any of us will have enough money to buy it by then.
I may go into some of what Mark Vernon says when I have time to work out a better copy of the machine transcription (AI is a so-so stenographer as well as being essentially stupid) and I'd have to re-read the two long and difficult poems he discusses. What he says about Blake's condemnation of what amounts to modernism and, in my thinking, the inadequacy of republicanism and secular, non-egalitarian democracy and the impossibility of that when there is enormous disparity in the actual having of physical, material wealth. I think Blake got it right when he said, "One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression". The pretenses of our law that pretends that there is "Equal Justice Under Law" when there never has been and the Lockean framers of the Constitution and the judges and "justices" have made it even more so have certainly come to its real reality in the criminal triumph of Trump and Republican-fascism. I might note that you could state it more clearly by replacing "lies" for "Lion" and Truth for "Ox," only one such substitution of terms to prove the validity of the relationship - if you wanted to try to do it mathematically.
Update: Don't know why it didn't occur to me that you might be able to read the essay at Mark Vernon's Substack. You can but it requires a subscription, you can get a free one with a link through his website. I will be reading through what he said on the video and might have some comments on it later.
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