![]() The poem “London” is now carved for tourists into the pavement on the south side of Westminster Bridge. ![]() Looking down at the ornate Pisan Baptistery, we quoted Blake to one another:Īll this seems a long time ago. We had a brief and totally unexpected meeting of minds-and hearts-that I have never forgotten. They were on European leave, but expecting to fly back to Vietnam. The following year I found myself discussing it with two young GIs, as we stood together on the top platform of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The second seemed like a piece of furious, contemporary street protest. In those days we didn’t tackle Milton itself, which seemed a strange production, one of the so-called Prophetic Books, very long and labyrinthine, and apparently requiring beforehand a total immersion in Fearful Symmetry (1947), Northrop Frye’s equally labyrinthine study of Blake’s symbolism.īut we did find and celebrate Blake’s two great explosive revolutionary chants from the Songs of Experience (1794), “The Tyger” and “London.” The first seemed an invocation of pure energy (with unsettling hints of the atom bomb): ![]() “Allen Ginsberg began hypnotically chanting Blake at huge public readings” Allen Ginsberg began hypnotically chanting Blake at huge public readings, sometimes accompanied by what appeared to me (at the London Festival Hall, at any rate) to be a small, droning, portable harmonium. Penguin produced a popular anthology inspired by Blake: Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). Later this passage was used to set the theme and temper of Theodore Roszac’s influential book The Making of a Counter-Culture (1969). Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. This contains the great radical hymn, now known as “Jerusalem,” with which we identified although in England, paradoxically, it was also sung at the patriotic last night of the London Proms concert amid much flag-waving, and still is:īut we also found at the start of the preface a thrilling exhortation that seemed to speak to us with extraordinary force and immediacy: ![]() Very quickly we all seemed to be reading Blake’s preface to Milton. This of course was the time of radical disturbances on university campuses across Europe, as well as the Vietnam War and civil rights protests in America. According to the Times it signified that “Radical Agitation Among Scholars Grows,” and it led to several arrests. It turns out that, according to The New York Times of December 28, 1968, exactly the same line from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” appeared on big posters at the conference of the Modern Language Association in New York. Cat Stevens photographed by the William Blake graffiti on the corner of Lancaster Road and Basing Street in London, 1970. ![]()
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