Child Blake seeing angels in a tree on Peckham Rye. Naked Blake reciting Paradise Lost in a leafy Lambeth bower. Blake the engraver, in old age, walking to Hampstead. Blake singing on his deathbed in Fountain's Court. Blake, lying with his wife Catherine, in Bunhill Fields. Blake the prophet. Blake the psychogeographer. Blake the red-cap revolutionary, watching Newgate burn. Blake the happy-clappy revivalist of Glad Day, banging a tambourine with Michael Horowitz. Blake, at the last night of the proms, burning in the mad eyes of sentimental imperialists.
We force the poet on to a Procrustean bed, squeezing and shaping him to fit our fantasies. We insist on seeing him as a London figure, coeval with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Henry VIII. Blake declines into a heritage token, an emblem to be bolted on to the bonnet of any old banger.
What we should go back to, and what can serve us still, is the work; the great, complex freewheeling derangements of the prophetic books, the savage wisdom of the parables, the unnerving directness of the lyrics.
There is no reason on earth why Blake, his poetry or his art, should be of any use. It was never his business to be useful. Shovels are useful. Paper clips are useful. Blake astounds, terrifies, delights. He gives us a richer sense of ourselves and of our city. His presence animates certain dusty corners. The incantatory rhythms of his poems drum in our heads and fire our blood. He doesn't grant entrance to a lost garden of time. He challenges us to risk everything, the kind of possession he himself underwent when he rewrote Milton, became Milton, revised his errors. Blake is there and the rest is up to us.
Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate
Blake is no less a writer than our other 'national poets', but in certain respects a more difficult one - if we look at poems other than the Songs of Innocence and Experience, that is. Living at a sharp angle to life, he often told the truth by telling it slant. This is what makes his work so admirable in all respects: he is always his own man, yet always concerned with the common experience. His greatness is incontestable - at once highly original, and utterly humane.
Tom Paulin, poet and critic
Blake was important to me when I was growing up in Belfast in the 1960s, as he was to Van Morrison, another Blakean. He subsequently went rather out of fashion, perhaps because there was a lot of literary criticism by people like Northrop Frye which was full of Jungian archetypes, and Jung was a Nazi sympathiser. There was also the lack of a historical version of Blake; David Erdman's book, Prophet Against Empire, showed that Tyger is about the French and American revolutions. At the time that Enoch Powell made his 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968, the Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, said that if Christ had come back, as Blake mentions in Jerusalem, he would have been turned back by the immigration officers. Powell replied that the poem was blasphemous. Jerusalem is an affirmation of English or British freedom. It's done in a way that is not ethically exclusive - and you think of Blake's sympathy with black slaves. Blake is a great, radical, dissenting, one-nation English poet.
Billy Bragg, singer
People often see belligerence and justification for militarism in Jerusalem's line, 'nor shall my sword sleep in my hand' - partly because Hubert Parry wrote the music for Jerusalem during the First World War, and gave it a rousing atmosphere - but Blake is talking of a 'mental fight', about the force of conscience. He's arming himself with his spiritual beliefs against the industrial revolution, when people who were living at the pace of nature were being forced to live at the pace of capital. For me, the song is asking what would Jesus Christ have said if he had returned then, how could Christian values exist in industrialism?
My song 'Upfield' was inspired partly by Blake; I borrowed events from his life for the song's narrator, such as putting him on Primrose Hill seeing angels. It's about moving from an ideological argument for a better society to a more humanitarian vision; a socialism of the heart, the kind of compassion I find in Blake.
Sir John Tavener, composer
Blake's use of tradition, his 'liquid' poetic theology, and the fact that he believed that all traditions and 'sacred codes' have placed man under a divine order - this is what has most deeply inspired me about Blake. For instance, in The Lamb, he describes the eternal world of Light and in The Tyger, he is concerned with 'Hell, or energy', and 'the terrors of the Abyss'. But above all, in all his work, he refers to Jesus as the 'Imagination'. The western world understands nothing of this.
He is relevant, precisely because the world today knows nothing of these things. Our world is a smouldering junkyard which believes that innovation and 'mental things are alone real'. This is its tragedy and its abyss. 'Let him who appears wise in this world become a fool, that he may become wise.' This is what Blake did, and all of us should follow him.
Today, we live in a culture in ruins. We, with our pathetic ego-centred imaginations can conceive of neither source nor symbol. 'For everything that lives is holy,' wrote Blake; but we continue to commit mass genocide and to systematically destroy 'everything that is holy'. 'Awake! Awake O sleeper of the land of shadows. Wake! Expand!'
We would indeed be poverty-stricken without Blake. After all, he lived in a secular and flippant humanistic age, and he alone in that age understood that 'the artist is an inhabitant of that happy country' - in other words, the artist of paradise.
Find out more at [io.newi.ac.uk/rdover/blake/Life.htm]