William Blake, Visionary

This chapter identifies concepts in Jack Lindsay’s early non-political study of Blake that will go on to play a major role in the development of his Marxist analysis. They include the notion of unity that for Lindsay includes the unity of the artist and of the artwork; the unity of (embodied) being; and the unity of the universe that includes human beings. This is an early expression of the notion of interconnectedness that would become fundamental to his Marxist aesthetics. He aligns this with Blake’s rejection of abstraction as the means by which individual beings are de-humanised and subjected to the demands of industrial capitalism. For Lindsay, as for Blake, this de-humanisation occurs when context is lost, when the connectedness of human beings with each other and with the world is denied so that the mind (and its abstractions) dominate individual being.