“Awake!” takes the British poet and painter, William Blake, at his word. He is well known for some of his sayings, such as

“To see a World in a grain of sand, / And a Heaven in a wild flower”.

His poetry is anthologised, which is why pupils at school might well read,

“Tyger Tyger burning bright / In the forest of the night.”

Some of his paintings have become icons, such as “The Ancient of Days” or “Newton”; they are widely recognised and celebrated for their unique designs.“The Ancient of Days” is widely available on the internet and can be found at the Yale Centre for British Art, explicitly not in copyright - https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:3878However, there is a profound purpose in Blake’s work, nothing short of a perceptual revival. He tells us:

“I give you the end of a golden string, / Only wind it into a ball. / It will lead you in at Heaven’s Gate, / Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

So what is that golden string? Where is heaven’s gate? How do we track the path? That is what my book seeks to discover.Blake was born in the 18th century and lived through what is now, in the West, called the Georgian period – the era of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. During these years, many of the assumptions about liberty and democracy that people now take for granted developed. But these decades were also hugely turbulent. For instance, the Napoleonic Wars that followed the French Revolution led to millions killed across Europe.Blake engaged with these events not only ethically –asking whether violence is a legitimate or even practical way of trying to achieve change and peace –but also spiritually. He felt that underneath the struggle for freedom lay an existential crisis: human beings were becoming uncoupled from the living vitality of the natural world around them and they were also losing contact with the wellspring of life itself – namely God. In response, people were turning to moral diktats and high ideals which, whilst intending well, were turning people against one another. Law was replacing spirit, the exercise of power was eroding the place of love, trust in evidence and reason were undermining trust in the imagination.So I want to read Blake not only as a great creative, which he is, and not only as a socially aware poet, which he is too. But as a person who strove to re-awaken the imaginations of his readers in order that a wider world, eclipsed by modern materialism, might be known again. Without that, Blake believed, human beings are living half-lives, with a denuded sense of who we are, for all the good things that modern life also brings.