Jonathan Agin writes:

Comparing the poet, painter, and master engraver William Blake to his contemporary William Wordsworth in a 1991 London Review of Books article, Jonathan Bate wrote that “Blake’s wildness was what shaggy men like Ginsberg needed a generation ago, but Wordsworth’s sobriety and steady eye can do more for us now.”

A generation further on, it’s time we get back to Blake, who was indeed “wild” in his radically anti-imperialist, counter-enlightenment spirit. Though some of his contemporaries would seek to brand him a reclusive madman, he was in fact an engaged, critical contributor to a larger eruption of anti-rationalist mysticism in London during this time, and not even particularly eccentric within those circles. Blake was clear-eyed about the poisonous effects that rapidly expanding commerce, industry, and empire would have on human creativity, recognizing decades before Marx’s birth how capitalist social relations alienated man from his species.

Marx and his followers would later develop a rationalist critique of capitalism underpinned by the observation that history is primarily driven by societies’ systems of production. Before this argument fully bloomed in the second half of the nineteenth century, there had been numerous radical movements seeking to overcome the existing class order, including Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Muggletonians, and, later, the utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. Though Blake was not formally a utopian socialist, his work similarly condemns the forces of commodification, cold calculation, religious dogmatism, and hyper-accelerated worker exploitation brought on by the raging Industrial Revolution — his “dark Satanic mills.” [Continue reading…]