Discussion and Conclusion

Throughout this book, an attempt has been made to analyse Blake’s ‘visions’ as visual and auditory neurophysiological conditions whose phenomenology is capable of recovery and explanation. The aim throughout has been no more complicated than to restore the ‘visions’ to an artist who declared himself to be a ‘visionary.’ Blake’s hallucinatory conditions, all of which can be broadly accommodated within Dominic H. ffytche’s hodological model of brain interconnectedness, have measurable prevalence within the general population. Blake’s conditions occur only in a small minority of the population, but they are not rare and do not evidence dysfunction. Although this study has not had a particularly polemical agenda, its thesis should do something to displace continuing assertions alleging degrees of psychosis. The allegation of madness has never quite left Blake. The legacy of Robert Hunt’s aspersion, made in the only known review of the 1809 exhibition, referring to ‘WILLIAM BLAKE, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement,’ has endured. Writing the ‘Afterword’ for the 2019 Tate Britain William Blake exhibition catalogue, the writer and self-described magician, Alan Moore, alluded to the artist as ‘the Lambeth angel-whisperer,’ a clever nod-and-a-wink whose levity does not quite conceal its generic ancestry in Hunt’s review.