Happy 250th birthday William Blake

Hah, we did that poem in year 10 english.
"what's a harlot, sir?"

My favorite:

The Little Vagabond

Dear mother, dear mother, the Church is cold;
But the Alehouse is healthy, and pleasant, and warm.
Besides, I can tell where I am used well;
The poor parsons with wind like a blown bladder swell.

But, if at the Church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and we'd pray all the livelong day,
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray.

Then the Parson might preach, and drink, and sing,
And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring;
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch.

And God, like a father, rejoicing to see
His children as pleasant and happy as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.

Happy 250th birthday William Blake

for a terrifying second there i thought he might still be alive.

Then i remembered he died in poverty, totally unknown and considered an utter headcase with no talent.

Ha ha ha.

A few years ago I went to the Tate exhibition of Blake's art. I picked up the most amazing book, 'William Blake - the Complete Illuminated Books' which has got (I think) a version of each poem he ever did with one plate to each A4 sized page. It was £30 but is beautiful like you say - the plates for his longer poems are even more spectacular than the innocence and experience ones (though reading the things takes a lot of concentration!)

are you still rebelling against your gcse english teacher?

I doubt very much if you burnt that book. What are you on, mate? You're talking complete philistine bollox

tacks you really don't want to write that essay do you?
Why don't you get back to basics.and make a riot porn montage with the stuff from France.

Tacks is certainly talking total twat on this topic.

Blake at his best poetically anticipates Marx’s notion of “the emancipation of the senses”, a liberation of consciousness based not on the repression of bodily desire but on its fulfilment, as in the deservedly famous passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

“The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern”.

Terry Eagleton wrote an article about Blake in The Guardian today which I can’t fault, concluding

“The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.
Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem”.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2218251,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

The End of Days must indeed be approaching!

Tacks, pull your head out. Peter Linebaugh in "The Many Headed Hydra" has a chapter on Blake's importance to the early anti-Slavery movement. Blake was also close to Godwin, et al. You don't have to like his poetry to acknowledge the man Blake was on our side.

If i wrote 10000000 poems about how great fires are, some would call me a pyromaniac.

And if you write many more posts like the preceding ones, many will call you a clueless idiot.