William Blake's Conversations by G.E. Bentley Jr.

Penguin produced a popular anthology inspired by Blake: Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). Later this passage was used to set the theme and temper of Theodore Roszac’s influential book The Making of a Counter-Culture (1969). Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. This contains the great radical hymn, now known as “Jerusalem,” with which we identified although in England, paradoxically, it was also sung at the patriotic last night of the London Proms concert amid much flag-waving, and still is:īut we also found at the start of the preface a thrilling exhortation that seemed to speak to us with extraordinary force and immediacy: Very quickly we all seemed to be reading Blake’s preface to Milton. This of course was the time of radical disturbances on university campuses across Europe, as well as Vietnam War and civil rights protests in America. According to the Times it signified that “Radical Agitation Among Scholars Grows,” and it led to several arrests. It turns out that, according to The New York Times of December 28, 1968, exactly the same line from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” appeared on big posters at the conference of the Modern Language Association in New York.

It was not poetry, but prose: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” It sent a strange shiver down my spine, as it did for thousands of other university students in England and America that year. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated) along a brick wall in Silver Street, Cambridge, England, in 1968. There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s.

For the December issue of the New York Review of Books, Richard Holmes writes about Leo Damrosch’s new biography on William Blake, Eternity’s Sunrise, which takes a new look at the idiosyncratic poet and printmaker’s relationship to sex and women.

William Blake's Conversations by G.E. Bentley Jr.