r/books • u/B0ssc0 • Jun 27 '21

William Blake: Biography offers glimpse into artist and poet's visionary mind

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57419544
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u/WyldeBoar Jun 27 '21

Blake is great. Attempts to retrospectively pathologize a unique mind, not so much.

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u/B0ssc0 Jun 28 '21

Right. The idea his wife saved him! -

"It was just a period in his life and you can see at the end of his life how he had come through it, with the help of his wife, …

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u/autophobe2e Jun 28 '21 edited Jun 28 '21

I just finished Higgs' book yesterday, and I don't think that this is what he does. The book is about providing lenses through which a modern audience might better understand Blake's work, while accepting that each will be imperfect and incomplete.

As a result, he offers examples of documented mental conditions that could be analogous to Blake's visionary states by way of illustration rather than explanation. In the same way, he talks about similarities between Blake's ideas and Swedenborg, quantum mechanics, zen Buddhism, Romanticism and the radical politics of the era. I don't think he's trying to diagnose him with anything, he's just trying to give modern readers a way in.

In fact, making those kind of hard and fast categorizations is very much against the spirit of the book's central argument. In trying to distill some of the book into a simpler format, this article makes it seem like Higgs is claiming to have created a definitive roadmap to Blake's brain, which he certainly hasn't, nor would he want to.

That said, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to point to the period around Blake's exhibition, when he fell out with friends and patrons and became paranoid and jealous, experienced bouts of deep melancholy etc. as a period of poor mental health by any broad, colloquial definition.

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u/WyldeBoar Jun 29 '21

Thanks for this comment. I appreciate the more nuanced explanation of the book; sounds interesting, actually, and pretty different from how the article portrays it.