In 2019 the writer John Higgs published a pamphlet, William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever, which argued for Blake’s continued relevance. When it was announced that he would follow it up with a longer study of Blake, I was excited at the prospect of a book that, given Higgs’s background, might help reconnect Blake and the counterculture.
The thing about actual Beulah--and it's called America--is that when you live there it's MENACING. Slave owners and slaves commingled and it feels like screaming at people in a dream, trying to persuade them. This is not happy land... embodied Beulah would, as Slavoj would say of realized dreams, be a nightmare.
Wow...reading on. This is much worse than I had feared. The exoticism and general zoo-going, Bedlam-visiting vibe is really hard to take. It's what scholars did with Sylvia Plath until feminism demanded it to stop.
Very very often people in Romantic period scholarship called me mad, at first. It was tough, and ironic, because I was truly upset and my brother had just gone crazy etc...what they might have meant was "unique" and that might have upset them.
But the interesting thing is, Blake wasn't so unique as we know--part of a Rasta-like radical underground...only looking unique from the official pov...
The thing about actual Beulah--and it's called America--is that when you live there it's MENACING. Slave owners and slaves commingled and it feels like screaming at people in a dream, trying to persuade them. This is not happy land... embodied Beulah would, as Slavoj would say of realized dreams, be a nightmare.
this is such a great point...
Thank you friend
Wow...reading on. This is much worse than I had feared. The exoticism and general zoo-going, Bedlam-visiting vibe is really hard to take. It's what scholars did with Sylvia Plath until feminism demanded it to stop.
..."manic depressive" is the pits: cheap, nasty, lurid...
Very very often people in Romantic period scholarship called me mad, at first. It was tough, and ironic, because I was truly upset and my brother had just gone crazy etc...what they might have meant was "unique" and that might have upset them.
But the interesting thing is, Blake wasn't so unique as we know--part of a Rasta-like radical underground...only looking unique from the official pov...