WILLIAM BLAKE VS. THE WORLD
By John Higgs
Just as certain religious believers favor cultivating a personal relationship with the divine, those of us with the chutzpah of calling ourselves Blakeans make the poet-artist-visionary a William Blake of ourselves. A scholar I knew speculated that the poetess, like herself, must have been high in histamines – and this could explain his extraordinary creativity. Yeats admired Blake so much that he tried to claim him for the Irish. The Blake that first incited me was the political Blake, in whom I saw affinities with other later thinkers I already admired. The statements I received during a bachelor’s seminar still sting: if I could get through my “junior Marxist training,” the teacher said, I might get to know Blake’s poems.
This is John Higgs’ second book on the poet, following the 2019 manifesto, “William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever,” from which this project sprang.† That the English author, journalist and cultural historian has previously written about Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the experimental electronic band the KLF and a whole host of strangers, old and new, gave a preview of who his Blake might be. I was prepared for the distant, whoa-dude version of Blake. Fortunately, Higgs rejects the idea that Blake was “using psychedelic drugs, and this was an explanation for his work,” but my expectations weren’t entirely wrong.
Higgs’ Blake isn’t the over-the-top proto-hippie of some views, nor is he a Blake for everyone – although, despite his book’s combative title and his scrutiny of many of the major quarrels in Blake’s life, Higgs is sometimes a suspect. conciliatory portrait of a poet who, he says, ‘accepts all sides’. A look at Blake’s notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds’ discourses shows how destructively he could reject ideas he knew were abominable; a quick reading of his scathing poem ‘London’ would also suffice. Higgs’ Blake, on the other hand, is a Blake for anyone whose sensibilities harmonize with Higgs’ interests in neuroscience and quantum mechanics, “Star Wars” analogies, and discussions of Carl Jung and Eckhart Tolle.
The book is organized along unconventional lines. Loosely chronological, it’s also often biographical (there’s a lot about Blake’s marriage). Important figures in Blake’s life and thought, such as Swedenborg, receive a lot of attention. And often Higgs turns into long philosophical and scientific slogans.
I repeatedly resorted to the Blakean framework of “Innocence” and “Experience” while reading and thinking about “William Blake vs. the World”. How others will receive the book may well depend on where they sit on the continuum from innocent to experienced. Higgs often strikes me as a bafflingly innocent reader of Blake’s, his ear out of tune with the poet’s frequencies of irony and humor and the interpretive and emotional possibilities they offer. But Higgs’ writing is always clear and confident, even when he’s wrong. Of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” he notes, “It’s interesting that he chose to write a collection of songs for children rather than for adult gatherings.” As some scholars have noted, Blake never made this explicit.
It’s not hard to see why Higgs assumed they were written for children. In the introduction to “Songs of Innocence,” Blake describes the poems that follow as “happy songs / Every child may joy to hear,” but Higgs misses the ambiguities here. Any child (but not the adult) can (but shouldn’t) enjoy the songs. Higgs writes that “Blake described a world of play and delight, imbued with the message that spiritual beings watched over all children so that they had nothing to fear” – which will be news to the many readers who have observed sinister undercurrents and indications in this verses. (George Orwell, who adapted the title of his poignant boarding school essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” from a line in “The Echoing Green,” clocked the irony.)
Higgs’ sunny take on “Songs of Innocence” will also surprise anyone who notices the wooden diction and reductive moralization at the end of the poem “The Chimney Sweeper” – †So if everyone does their duty, they don’t have to fear harm” – that something isn’t right. But Higgs writes:
The last line was in keeping with a general theme in ‘Songs of Innocence’, the idea that a loving paternal God would protect all who were good. This was both naive and untrue, as the reality of the life of sweepers showed. When Blake came to write an accompanying verse for ‘Songs of Experience’ five years later, he had clearly realized his mistake.”
Blake made no mistake; he would have been aware of the bleak reality of the young sweeps’ lives. The accompanying piece he later wrote is neither mea culpa nor a correction; the poems are written from different perspectives – or are, as Blake might put it, “opposites”.
Higgs everywhere rightly and convincingly emphasizes the primacy and power of the imagination in Blake’s work – “I do not doubt my bodily or vegetative eye any more than I question a window about a view. I look through it and not with it” – which baffling his persistent literal reading of many of Blake’s writings. His analysis of “The Proverbs of Hell” in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” reveals the same resistance to irony as in his readings of “Songs of Innocence”. Blake read Milton deeply, albeit idiosyncratically, gleaning from “Paradise Lost,” among other things, that Satan really can be a hoot. Blake “is not saying that there is no difference between heaven and hell,” Higgs tells us, nor “is he claiming that they are both as bad as each other. He writes very clearly that, ‘Good is heaven. Evil is hell. ‘” Again, the truncated diction — and blunt, declarative cheek — of those lines might lead other readers to a different conclusion.
Higgs is more convincing when he writes about Blake’s knotty and paradoxical views of the natural world, and when he underlines the essential, pervasive sexuality in Blake’s output. His own project is Blakean in at least one sense: it is the production of a busy and open mind. At times his lengthy musings on science and philosophies took me further from Blake rather than closer to him, and his plethora of pop culture pings (the Beatles, David Bowie, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, even Billy Joel all showed up) felt redundant. (“Enough! or Too Much,” reads the end of the “Proverbs of Hell.”)
At other times it was fun to watch Higgs’ cogs turn, to hear his thoughts bouncing off the walls of his internal archive of affinities, allusions, and absorptions. His tone is measured, but Higgs does not cease his mental struggle in his earnest quest to understand and explain a mind that, he writes, is perhaps “too great a mind to ever properly comprehend”. Perhaps that was why, when I got to the end of his book, I felt I had learned more about the mind of John Higgs than of William Blake.