William Blake, Prophet

In his second major study of William Blake, Jack Lindsay replaces the poetics focus of his earlier study (1927) with the Marxist analysis developed over the intervening fifty years. Lindsay identifies three major phases in Blake’s work: early experimental works that address specific political events or social injustices; works that analyse revolutionary situations and events; and works that explore the alienation that characterises his society. He again identifies Blake’s rejection of Abstraction because it not only reduces people to things but also devalues everything in life that is not quantifiable, including senses, emotions, spirituality. Blake’s response, Lindsay argues, is a dialectics of interconnection that includes the use of Imagination to reconstitute the interconnectedness of being (with others, nature, within the self) suppressed by bourgeois capitalism.