William Blake's Mythology
The prophetic books of the English poet and artist William Blake contain a rich invented mythology (mythopoeia), in which Blake worked to encode his revolutionary spiritual and political ideas into a prophecy for a new age. This desire to recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology. His myths often described the struggle between enlightenment and free love on the one hand, and restrictive education and morals on the other.
Read more about William Blake's Mythology: Sources, The Fall of Albion, The Mythology and The Prophetic Books
Famous quotes containing the words william blake, blake and/or mythology:
“In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)