{"id":1128,"date":"2007-12-03T08:14:37","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T08:14:37","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1128"},"modified":"2007-12-03T08:14:37","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T08:14:37","slug":"talking_of_poets_and_sparks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/03\/talking_of_poets_and_sparks\/","title":{"rendered":"talking of poets and sparkles"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘The cast of mind which searches, which questions, which dissents, has a great history. Each society has given it its own form: religious, literary. scientific. Much of the strength of Blake derives from the twofold form which dissent took in his time: rational and inspired… The history of dissent is not yet ended; it does not end. Men die, and societies die. They are not more lasting for being without dissent, they are more brittle: for they are purposeless, because they deny themselves a future.’
\nSo writes Charles Bronowski in his book on William Blake, A Man Without a Mask, quoted by Shirley Dent of the Institute of Ideas in an article on the anniversary of Blake’s birth 250 years ago<\/a>.
\nBrilliant, belligerent, barmy Blake has been claimed as a figurehead by all kinds of hippies and politicoes over the years, and was recently cited as ‘The Godfather of Psychogeography<\/a>‘ by Ian Sinclair for, among other things, seeing angels in the trees of Peckham Rye and the new Jerusalem in leafy north London:
\n“The fields from Islington to Maylebone,
\nTo Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood:
\nWere builded over with pillars of gold,
\nAre there Jerusalems pillars stood.”
\n(This quote from Jerusalem features in Merlin Coverley’s excellent guide to Psychogeography which includes city strollers from Defoe and Poe to Debord and Will Self).
\nWilliam Blake, the man who wandered through the charter’d streets of London finding in the face of every passerby ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’, who engraved and painted his own books of poems, selling his songs on subscription (or failing to sell them), would have made one hell of a blogger too. I imagine him mashing up maps of Hampstead with his personal mythology, forging a new kind of book on the anvil of his laptop, engaging his community of readers in fervent debate, plying them with animations of innocence and experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘The cast of mind which searches, which questions, which dissents, has a great history. Each society has given it its own form: religious, literary. scientific. Much of the strength of Blake derives from the twofold form which dissent took in his time: rational and inspired… The history of dissent is not yet ended; it does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1472,1537],"tags":[2796],"class_list":["post-1128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-psychogeography","tag-poetry-psychogeography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}