Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, Mark Vernon, Hurst Publishers, £27.50

When Willliam Blake (1757-1827) was about eight years old, he saw a tree full of angels in Peckham Rye. There were dozens of them – so many, in fact, that the branches seemed to be ablaze with heavenly wings. Blake could hardly contain his excitement. He scampered home to tell his parents. But if he expected them to share his wonderment, he was quickly disabused. His father was furious. It was only thanks to his mother’s pleas that he escaped being thrashed for lying.

Except he wasn’t lying. Although he didn’t dare say as much, he had been having visions for almost as long as he could remember. Years later, his wife would often tell the story about how God had poked His head through the bedroom window and made the infant Blake cry. He would go on seeing things for the rest of his life. It usually happened quite unexpectedly. Once, while he was drawing the funerary statues in Westminster Abbey, he looked up to see a procession of medieval monks filing past him, heads bent in prayer. It could be a nuisance, too. Explaining why he was always late fulfilling commissions, he told a friend that his ‘Abstract follies’ often carried him ‘away over Mountains and Valleys… in[to] a Land of Abstractions where Spectres of the Dead wander’ – until he had completely forgotten what he was supposed to be doing.

It’s perhaps tempting to write Blake’s visions off as mere flights of fancy – the vivid, but insubstantial, by-products of a peculiarly mystical imagination. But for Blake, they were the key to everything. They inspired his art and poetry (especially works such as Songs of Innocence and Experience and The First Book of Urizen). They underpinned his strange religious beliefs. They were why he and his wife liked to scandalise their neighbours by reading Paradise Lost naked in the garden. They were, in short, the foundation of his whole worldview.

As Blake saw it, the physical world was a shadow. Beyond it lay a deeper reality, in which everything was united – past and present, heaven and earth, God and man. There, you really could ‘see a world in a grain of sand’, and ‘hold infinity in the palm of your hand’. The only problem was that modernity had blinded humankind to the truth. Science, industry, technology, commerce all forced people to focus on the material. They eroded faith, not just in God, but in the mystical unity of all creation – and, as a consequence, mired humanity in grim ignorance.

Blake’s visions afforded him a rare glimpse of this world beyond. When they came upon him, it was as if the veil before his eyes was suddenly rent, and the light – long hidden – shone out from behind, as clear as day. But he also thought that it was possible to access wider reality more directly. The key was to free the imagination – to strip it of its preconceptions, liberate it from modernity, return it, in short, to its former innocence. Once it was returned to its pristine condition, all of creation would be opened to it.

And not just that. Following this essentially Neoplatonic argument further, Blake eventually came to believe that the reason why imagination could see everything was that it contained everything within itself. As he put it in his Milton: ‘The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.’ Unlock it, and you are quite literally born again.

This is precisely why Mark Vernon believes Blake has something to teach us today. In many ways, we find ourselves faced with the same sort of world he did: a ‘tumultuous era of war, discontent, technological change, and human estrangement from nature’. Even though ‘dark satanic mills’ have been replaced with shining data centres, we are arguably more short-sighted, secular, and socially alienated than ever before. And we are much the worse for it, too.

Blake offers us a solution. By retracing his life and reconstructing his concept of the imagination, Vernon sets out to show how he can help us to inoculate ourselves against modernity – and revolutionise our lives.

Vernon’s enthusiasm for his subject is palpable. He relishes Blake’s poetry and makes no secret of the enjoyment works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell have afforded him. His background as psychotherapist and former Anglican priest also makes him unusually sympathetic to what Blake was trying to do. He takes Blake on his own terms – and is ready to reach across to unexpected fields, far beyond the biographer’s usual remit, in pursuit of his quest.

This all makes for a refreshing, if occasionally rather preachy, read. But as a work of biography this book falls rather flat. It’s pretty obvious that, if you want to know what ‘imagination’ meant to Blake, you need to understand where he got his ideas from. Now, admittedly, this isn’t all that easy. Like most autodidacts, Blake was notoriously unsystematic. He would pick up bits and pieces of philosophy all over the place, and use them as the fancy took him – with little regard for consistency or detail. He could also be bewilderingly fickle. After years of infatuation with the Neoplatonic philosopher Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), for example, Blake abruptly turned his back on them when he came across the writings of Paracelsus (c.1493-1541) and Jakob Böhme (1575-1624). But however difficult it may be, you clearly need to unravel Blake’s relationship with his sources – at least to some degree.

Vernon is curiously unwilling to do this, though. Taylor is barely mentioned, except as a gossipy friend who occasionally taught Blake a bit of maths. Swedenborg, whose works Blake annotated feverishly in 1787, appears only once. Böhme gets a quick name check, but nothing more. And Paracelsus, whom Blake regarded as something akin to a prophet, isn’t mentioned at all. By contrast, Vernon finds plenty of time to discuss quantum theory, social media, polyamory, and Zen Buddhism – none of which, as far as I can tell, had that much effect on Blake’s thinking.

This is no small omission. Glossing over Blake’s influences is like trying to make sense of Plato without talking about his relationship with Socrates. Or Engels without Marx. You might be able to say something, but it’ll be superficial and incomplete at best.

It’s not hard to see where this has come from, either. Of the 120 or so works cited in the bibliography, I could only find about 43 with any direct connection to Blake. The rest are mostly self-help guides, new age literature, and popular science books, upon whose authors Vernon lavishes praise at every available opportunity. These are no doubt all very interesting in their own way, but it doesn’t take a genius to spot why prioritising Pippa Evans’ Improv Your Life: An Improvisor’s Guide to Embracing Whatever Life Throws at You (2021) over the latest Blake scholarship might lead one into muddy waters.

Now, to give Vernon his credit, you could argue that this book is more of a personal reading than a biography per se. Its point is not to offer a scholarly analysis, but to show how Blake can help us to transform our lives – in other words, to recast him as a kind of Eckhart Tolle avant la lettre. But I’m not sure it really works as therapy either. According to Vernon, Blake teaches us that we should step ‘into the infinity of each moment’; that ‘everything in time is timeless, finite beings springing from a shared divine source’:

For the cosmos is an outpouring of the imagination that fills us, a celebration of creativity with which we can join. We will be transformed from within, as beings and things becoming translucent to each other and God.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against this in principle. I’m all in favour of ‘stepping into the infinity of each moment’ and wondering at the world. I tell my children that sort of thing all the time when we’re mucking around in the garden. But I’m not sure you really need a psychobabble-y version of Blake to tell you that – especially if you aren’t going to learn anything new about Blake in the process.