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

IT’S striking how, in describing a William Blake image entitled Infant Sorrow, a writer would note how its figures inhabit an indoor setting and state how this choice “must be Blake’s way of indicating that weeping and yelling confine and darken the mind.”

Would the figures likely dwell atop an ice floe or cartload of cabbages I pondered, while leafing on, in search of rationale.

The author of Awake! is Mark Vernon, a former priest turned psychotherapist. He has developed his way of researching a sequence of key figures. Given his skillset, commitment and precedent (his previous published topics include Dante, Plato and Christianity) somebody somewhere now feels there is a readership for his well-argued analysis of the life and work of William Blake.

The writer’s tagline “William Blake and the Power of The Imagination” is well met. The location of Blake’s work amid socio-political power and circumstance is vibrantly presented.

Meanwhile, Vernon’s identity is not cardinal. He eschews reference to telling experience — lightbulb moments, personal crises — that might have impelled him toward Blake’s work. Deprived of the foothold of anecdote or confessional a reader may stumble.

Blake the man is carefully and honestly rendered but his flair as a working artist is not currency. It would be urbane to consider Blake (Soho-raised son of a prosperous hosier) as delighting in crafted output, feeling nourished and impelled by marks of his own making, riding waves of newly popular media, liking at times to identify allies and lampoon rivals.

Vernon speaks instead as if Blake were a philosopher first, who thereafter communicated his argument through selected word and image. Our hero is also positioned as a conscious translator of the global upheavals of his time, somewhat as if this were his mission.

The premise serves a writer’s rigour in particular ways — this isn’t about how the given texts and images are somehow just jaw-dropping.

Vernon has fully involved himself in making sense of a visionary canon that comprises outrageous statements and cosmic fidgets. This is empowering exercise. Where I could ready myself to engage, I found my outlook properly stimulated and replenished. I would emerge from a grapple with a chapter like By Came an Angel, or Sympathy Came Forth, with awareness re-aligned and morale standing 10 feet tall.

Herein the eternal Blakean formulae such as “exuberance is beauty,” “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and exposition of the untamed creativity that spawns “drive your plough over the bones of the dead,” and so forth. Blake’s winning allegories of Orc, Urizen and Oothoon are generously expanded on.

The reader is made additionally receptive by Vernon’s deployment of knowledge about how minds actually work — what makes us tick.

Awake! is beautifully laid out, with images and texts given in full, couched in analytical thought. We can, for example, delight in how Blake’s “To see a World in a grain of Sand/And Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm-of your hand/And Eternity in an hour” is shown to breathe new life in terms of the concepts of astro-physicists.

Multiple conversations with friends are researched here, including one with his mathematician friend Thomas Taylor, where Taylor’s embarkation on explanation of Euclid’s Elements was curtailed by Blake’s “ah never mind that — what’s the use of going to prove it, why I see that it is so, and do not require any proof to make it clearer.”

This is a brave thing to publish amid reams of scrupulously evidenced material. We may feel encouraged to ditch proof, shelve this book and grab one of Blake’s own. Bravo Mark Vernon for embracing such a risk. In this, he demonstrates real wit and awareness.