Introduction

The aim of this book is to identify the underlying physiologies of what the British poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827), called his ‘visions.’ In doing so, I have taken the apparently novel step of assuming that when he wrote that the paintings shown in his small exhibition off Oxford Street in 1809 were derived from things ‘seen in my visions,’ he meant it (E 531). It is now possible to demonstrate that the perceptual phenomenology of his ‘visions’ are capable of being identified and assigned with a physiological basis.