All right, Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on Tonight Show. Have a very special guest. He comes to us from the UK. His name is John Higgs, and he's just published an excellent book which I finished this morning. The title of the book is William Blake Versus the World, published May twenty twenty one.
And this is not the author's first book. He also wrote back in two thousand and six published I Have America Surrounded, a biography of Timothy Leary, which I consider would be the best biography of Timothy Leery. I've read that and quoted that. He's also written the KLF Chaos, Magic, Music, Money, published twenty twelve, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, Making Sense of the Twentieth Century published twenty fifteen, Watling Street Travels through Britain and It's ever present Past, and also the
Future Starts Here, published twenty twenty. But we're going to talk about this book, William Blake Versus the World. I knew a little bit about Blake, but this really increased my understanding of him and from a variety of different perspective of a very unique, interesting individual. So we're going to talk about that. John Higgs, are you there, Yeah, Hi, William.
Good to talk to you.
Awesome, Well, thanks for bringing to the interview for people maybe who might not have heard of your background. You talk a little bit about your interest in William Blake and what led you to read write this book, William Blakes the World.
Oh, I mean it's My books often seem to be a bit of a random hodgepodge to people. I'll write a book about there's a band in the UK called the KLF in the early nineties, a rave band who are probably most notorious for burning a million pounds. And I went from that to a history of the twentieth century, and I went from that to accounter an old Roman road. And they can appear to be sort of strange little hops, where every book is an attempt to get out of the box that the last one has put you in.
But when you read them all together there does seem to be a bit of a through line. For instance, you mentioned my Timothy Leary book, which was the first thing I wrote back in two thousand and six. Timothy Leary makes quite appearance in my Look at Blake, and Blake himself has appeared in many of my other books along the Line, Along the Days, you know, And so I mean.
This book kind of starts out with this very unique character, William Blake. Can you talk about where he started up in kind of his background and his entry into kind of the art really this kind of artistic world, a variety of different types of visual and also poetry.
Yeah, sure, I mean for people who don't know. William Blake was an eighteenth century early nineteenth century poet, writer, illustrator, engraver. Perhaps more importantly, he was a visionary. He had visions throughout his entire life. When he was around the age of four, he saw God pressing in through the window
of his house in the upstairs room and screamed. And at the age of eight, he walked from the center of London where he lived in Soho, he walked out in the countryside to a place called Peckham Rai and sat down under a tree and looked at the street and there his angels on every bow and that that's
him at eight. And he had the same level of sort of visionary insight until until old age, through his entire life, and as a result, he was you know, he saw the world very differently to his contemporaries and his peers, and he was ignored really for much of his life. He was he was he was dismissed and mocked and a lot of people just saw him as a madman. But he certainly towards the end of the life, he he just he just believed that the visions that he had were so worthy and so and they made his
life so rich. You know, he was rich in every single aspect of life that you could imagine, with the exception of financially. You know that he he it sort of inspired him just to keep working and working, and he he produced these extraordinary, illuminated books that appear to have been written from a position outside of normal time and space that I say didn't make much an impact
of his time. But two hundred years later, there's just been this slow increase in people sort of coming to him and recognizing that what he was trying to tell as was important and was of a great value.
And you see, sorry, not good.
I was just going to say. He became a bit of a point of reference. In the nineteen sixties after Aldous Huxley wrote a book about mescaline called The Doors of Perception, which is one of the first sort of intellectual whether that's the right word, sort of looks at the impact of a psychedelic drug on the mind. And he took the name Doors of Perception from William Blake
because who else had been talking about those things? And then Jim Morrison comes along and calls his bands the Doors based on this book, and and and so on, so he became a bit of a counterculture icon in the nineteen sixties.
Yeah, so it's somebody who really wasn't The public was not aware of him, although he did have recognition from maybe some other people in his art community. But he didn't He didn't live, he wasn't financially, he didn't seem to be interested in commercial success. Would you agree with that?
He was very good at ruining any possibility of commercial work. I was at the British Library a few weeks ago and seeing these letters he wrote, and there's just two letters together that it just it's a it's an absolute
three act drama, the whole thing. This guy commissioned him to produce one specific piece of art, an illustration, and he'd been very specific about what he wanted, and then Blake had returned with something completely different and sort of explained that actually what the Poe I genius wanted was for him to do this work, not what you've asked for. And then we don't get Blake's response to this, so
we don't get the response to this letter. But then we get Blake's next letter, which sort of begins with, well, I'm sorry if I've made you angry, but and then he goes on to explain to this guy why he's wrong about everything and why his perspective on life is just it's just so flawed. And then at the end he sort of asked for twelve guineas for the work, and obviously he never got it. He was That seems
to encapsulate a lot about William Blake. He was stubborn, but he was driven, but he had utter belief in his visions and his work and his own.
Like a self confidence like his whole life, which is very strange without having that real public approbrium or fame until after he passed away and went eighteen twenty seven. And he's such an interesting figure. And I think you really did an excellent job in really trying to take apart this fascinating imagine it to character and how he
saw the world. Can you kind of talk to the audience maybe about how William Brake Blake perceived the outside world, which is very different than the rationalist and materialist.
View, absolutely, and at its heart, I think there is quite a simple, subtle difference to how his peers and indeed most of Western educated society saw the world, which is, for Blake, the spiritual.
World, the immaterial of God's heaven and Hell, demons and angels and things like that. We're all internal, there are internal states. As he wrote, man forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. And it's a perspective that is very sort of interesting and useful in more secular times now, in the secular twenty first century, because few people now genuinely believe that, say, Hell exists, that it's a place, a physical place that's somewhere some distance away,
that you might be sent to at some point. Not a lot of people genuinely believe that, but most people have probably met someone who at some point in their life has been living in Hell. And when you start to see hell as an internal state, that sort of raises the possibility of someone living in paradise like Blake,
said he was towards the end of his life. Certainly that suddenly becomes possible, and it very much rescues almost, you know, centuries of theology into something relevant, the idea of yourself having a soul, your sense of a soul. Many materialistically minded, sort of scientifically thinking people will just dismiss the idea outright. But the quality of your life, your one brief life as we go around this rock, however, many times, is of immense importance and immense value, and
it is something you do need to look after. So that because and this, this notion that the the immaterial is internal comes specifically from the Greeks, from from Greek philosophy, from the Pythagoreans originally, but then Plato specifically had this idea of forms, where like there was this idealized version of chair somewhere off in this idealized sort of space, and that all that was was away from you, and it was it was you couldn't reach it, you sort
of couldn't get to it. And this idea that the immaterial was away it's very different to say Indian thought of vedict philosophy. It's very different to ancient British mythology, but it was it was an aspect of Greek thought that the early Christian Church sort of ran with because it opened the way to their religion being new universal. There's a universal aspect to it, and so that became
embedded in the university system. And this this idea that the spiritual is away from you, is a distance, is external. It's so deep in the foundation of Western thought that we never really think about it, and we never really and if you can't see it, you know you can't question it, so you just accept it. And that small difference is really the key to seeing how Blake understands the world, understood the world, and why that was so so radically different.
Yeah, I mean really unique kind of looks. And even you brought up his religion, he's I mean, you say in the book he thought of himself as a Christian, but he would not I think you've been saying the book modern Christians would not recognize his outlook. Can you talk about that? How that outlook formulated in this Yeah.
Well, it's based on what his definition of suppose christ consciousness is the modern term would be, which he completely associated with creativity, with the imagination, the imagination was divine. The imagination just poured through him. It was if it was something new entering the world from elsewhere. It was, it was. It was utterly powerful. There's a conversation that
was recorded. He met a guy called Crab Robinson at a party towards the end of his life, and this guy was questioning him and asked him about the divinity of Jesus, and he said, oh, yes, Jesus, he is the only God, and so am I, and so are you. And this guy just couldn't understand what on earth he was trying to say, because it was the idea was so outside of you know, eighteenth central or nineteenth century thought that it just made no sense, and he wrote
it down in his dawn. We still have it. But it's when you get to know Blake you realize that for him, the divinity of Jesus, which he was, he was utterly important to him. You know. He loved the Bible and the the sort of an entirely inspad, creative and wonderful sort of text was U was an artistic thing, was a creative thing. He would he talked about a man who is not a painter and an architect, an artist or anything like this is not a Christian The two to to create, to channel that sort of divine
force through his mind something new for him. That was the heart of Christianity was as he sort of defined it. So, yeah, that's very different to you know, what your local church may may say.
Can you talk about one of the fascinating things. I didn't know, but I'm not surprised when I read it in your book, was the influence about Swedenborg? Like, can you touch a little bit on that?
Sure? Well for people who don't know. Emmanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic eighteenth century mystic who'd for most of his life been a very respectable, very wealthy, a sort of proto engineer. I guess he was. He was in charge of Swedish minds, and he wrote lots of books
about mineralogy and and and and things like that. He was very materially minded up and past his middle age, at which point he started to have his dreams just started to get richer and richer and richer, until they suddenly overwhelmed him and overwhelmed his life, and he found himself, you know, as a visionary sort of traveling to heaven and hell and alien worlds and meeting angels and things like that, and he wrote all these these books about
what happened to him, Heaven and Hell being the most most well known, I think. And you know, there's lots of great stories about about Swedenburg being asked question. I mean, there was the Queen of Sweden. Her brother had died, and so she said to him, you know, could you ask my brother on the other side about this letter
I sent to him? And he came back the next day and he said, yes, I spoke to your brother and he and then Swedenborg whispered something into the Queen's ear, and no one knows what it was, but all the courtiers around heard it, and she was going, No one but God knows the secret. There's all these sort of lovely, little sort of spiritualist tales associated with Swedenborg. And there was an attempt to build what they called the New Church, a religion based on his books in Blake's time, and
he was very interested in it. And because it was there were both vision reason there's a lot of overlap. But as he as he read deep in deeper into Swedenburgh's work, he began to see a lot of things that he disagreed with, and so he wrote this extraordinary illuminated book called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in contrast to Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, which is really a little bit of a literary spat. This was him explaining
why Swedenburg was wrong. And it's it's so brilliant that he did, because it's one of the clearest statements of how Blake saw the world and and how and what Blake's metaphysics and theology was. Yeah, so's It was definitely a massive influence, but one that the the the younger pupil as it were, turned against and and and surpassed, I think.
And I mean it shows also how complex like he You right, there's a theme in your book of this uniting of kind of differences. So oppositions are important in Blake's worldview. But can you talk about how it's very how complex Blake and unique he was, and he would use these kind of personages us in lows or to encapsulate concepts for sure.
I mean, he very quickly as a writer moved away from I guess the established mythologies that most writers used at the time, which was Biblical or Greek myths, those sort of figures that we used a lot, and he basically created is in his own system. I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man is another man's is what he wrote. Uh. And he came up with all these weird and wonderful sort of mythological characters, all of which are aspects of us, the aspects of
our mind. And he called them. There was four in particular that he called the zoas the Forzo was just the title of one of his unfinished works.
Uh.
And they represented the rational side of our mind, the creative, the physical, the emotional, and a lot of what his writings were about were putting these figures in different combinations and seeing how they clashed, and seeing the dynamics and the the energies and and the grief that they caused from being placed in different sort of positions. And we can from now we sort of see that as all this sort of proto psychology. He's he's sort of trying to grasp how the mind works. And it was it
was really quite useful and profound. If you look at when he's writing about revolution, you know, he has this character called Orc, who's the Who's the spirit? Of revolution. But he he understands this character on a far sort of richer and deeper level than a lot of specifically the Romantic writers and Romantic poets at the time, they were all sort of you know, William Wordsworth was at the early days of the French Revolution, and it was blicited to be alive and to be young is very heaven.
They just saw it was this wonderful thing. And when when the reign of Terror came afterwards, and you know, blood was washing through the streets of Paris, they couldn't really it didn't fit in their will toy, They couldn't
really grasp it. Blake's understanding of a revolution, revolution, of the desire of revolution, the spirit of revolution was so much more richer that that that it just, you know, it fitted that what was happening in Paris far far better and gave him a far clearer understanding of of of human imagination.
And he, I mean, for somebody who wasn't really well known in his life, he was aware of different ideas the revolution Newton, so he was kind of had a but he didn't totally agree. Can you talk about kind of his relationship with Newtonian his a Towny and so he's kind of was like a critic.
Yeah, definitely. I Mean the thing with Blake was he wasn't sent to school as a child. He was just sort of free to sort of play and explore and wonder. But as an adult guard he read everything he was you know, he from from the evidence of his works, he was clearly very very well read and deeply informed on,
you know, on certain subjects. And this was the Age of Enlightenment really, and the general gist of the Age of Enlightenment was people saying, you know, previously in the medieval world, you know, faith was primary, that was the that was the thing faith, and the Age of Enlightenment was saying, well, hang on, maybe maybe it's not faith. Maybe it's reason. Maybe reasons the thing. Maybe that's the
the the primary focus. And for Blake, you know, he had no problems with this sort of questioning of faith. But for him, reason was just such a small part art of what the mind was capable of that to focus on that was to miss the point. And there this character called Eurzone, which is one of the Zoo's I was talking about it was our rational side. He's kind of blind to the fact that he's sort of creating his own reality tunnel, to use a Timothy Leary phrase,
and he sort of believes it to be reality. He believes the model of reality that he's constructing in his mind is the universe, and can't see outside of of this particular, this particular model. And and you see, you see a lot of Blake's art work, there will be a figure with compasses that make, you know, focusing on on a piece of paper rationally making a measured sort of circle, but around them will just be this this, this glorious formless void, or this giant red sun, or
or this sort of ange world. And who's so focused on his rationality is just blind to it. He just cannot see it. And it's this this, it's the important this blind spot that our rationale mind has. We you know, we often insist to ourselves that we're rational, even when we're just rationalizing. It's it's something you really, it really.
It comes into a lot of my books, again mentioned in Timothy Leary, whose whose concept of reality channels was something picked up by Robert Anton Wilson, and he talks brilliantly about them in all all his books. And Robert Anton Wilson is a figure who's in my k Left book and various other things. It's all about trying to see your blind spot, trying to not believe your own bs, not believe your own belief systems. As as Wilson would would put it, this is all central to this eighteenth century,
you know, romantic poet. It's all all there in the work of Blake.
No it's really remarkable, and I think that it was interesting you in your book you talk about the statue of Newton in front of the British Library holding the compass. But maybe some people may not perceive that that was actually a critique by Blake, not a inconium or some kind of something where he's really admiring Newton as much.
Definitely, but I mean in the same painting he's painted Newton like it was this idealized physique of a Greek god with blonde hair and this naked body. So he's not just mocking Newton. He's not just you know, he's he's accepting that Newton was this great important figure in world history. It's you mentioned the countries earlier, the the
importance of opposites. This is central. This is absolutely central to Blake the that without countries there is there is no progression, the idea that you know, he he would write about innocence, but he would also write about experience, and he wouldn't claim that one was better one was important. You know his book that I mentioned earlier, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Uh, he's having he wants heaven
and he wants hell. And this is very much how our mind constructs it's sense of the world as a baby. We've got this completely blank slate of a mind and everything. Then there's just this cozy, chaotic sort of blur outside and we slowly sort of divide up. Oh, actually there's darkness and there's light, okay, and there's there's warm and there's cold, and there's you know, there's mummy and not mummy. And he so used these these opposites to define uh
and uh and and understand and understand the world. And this is what if you look at the book of Genesis, Uh, this, this is what God's doing at the at the very start, He's there's this terrible void and he divides the you know, the water from the land and the light from the dark. And over the over seven days, uh and it's always as he entered, as he's creating the world. The idea is here is God absolutely creating the world. If you look at carefully what he's doing, everything is out there.
He's just labeling it. He's just forming a mental schema to understand it all. He's just dividing things up in a a in a way that he can grasp. So. Yeah, so the the the use of opposites is utterly integral to Blake's thinking because you simply can't have hot without cold, or you know, one side of the coin at the other. We sort of need all those and a tendency to go, well, that's a good thing. I'll just look at the good
thing and ignore the bad thing. Uh, is not a trap he fell into, I guess right.
And I mean his his his poetry was with people. I mean, think you made an interesting point in your book you're talking about bloom Is his biography. Who's like this is at the time, like we're still trying to unpack full meanings from what he was writing.
Certainly the later stuff, yeah, absolutely, the latest stuff. I mean, there's his longest work, which he himself considered his masterpiece, is a thing called Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, and it's it's it feels like it's written from the perspective of outside of being outside time and space and looking in you know, things happen in the in the plot. It's very simple plot, but you know, things what happens sort of has already happened, and he's going to happen
and is happening now. It's it's very psychedelic, definitely, you know, and and reading it is quite a shock. He's very it's like he's trying to express what his higher states of consciousness, as higher visions were, and you know, it's baffled many many poetry student or English language major in the past couple of centuries. But his earlier stuff, the songs of Innocence and I've Experience, you know, are particularly well known, and poems like Tiger Tiger they're you know,
very famous. And here in England there isn't actually an official English national anthem, but everyone in England knows that the Him Jerusalem is on national anthem. You know, it's just it's just been decided by the people. It's amazing, yeah, which is his words from the preface to a poem called Milton.
But that also goes back to Albion, and you're, like his concept of the early isles of Britain and things like that. So it's very profound in his understanding even at that time supposedly like who walked these shores? Who is this person? So even Albion is a symbol of that, right sure.
And in many ways he's like he's like Adam, He's like he's the first man, but he's also Jesus in that he has the light inside him, the spiritual light, the divine imagination, which, in Blake's view, we lost when we started, like you know, the Druids started measuring the stars and erecting the stone circles and building their altars and basically projecting a mental system out onto the universe to categorize it and rationalize it and to understand it.
This he saw as the rise of this rational part of our mind. People often refer to it as left brain. That can be a useful way to talk to it, even though we know that both parts of the brain
are responsible for all sorts of things. But what they mean when they talked about le brain is the sort of the rational modeling part of our mind that sort of predicts how people will act and worries about the future and frets about the past, and takes us away from the moment, the experience of existing in the present moments in the physical sort of sense, that of this is all more right, brain sort of sort of stuff.
The joy of you know, I don't know, surfing, or the joy of dancing, or the joy of just being you know.
And he I mean, he spent all of his time in London. There was one brief Properia where he went south. I can't remember what city that was, but he was also I didn't know that he was accused of sedition. Can you talk kind of about his how he took interest from the land and kind of his movements in his life.
Yeah, sure. I mean he moved down in the year eighteen hundred to the village of Felpham, which is next to a place called Bogner on the Sussex coast, and
it started. I mean, his letters from the early years were just just blissful and away from the you know, the dirt and fog of central London, he felt as he was more spiritually aware and it was it was, it was a beautiful thing, but it turned he partly because he had a beef with his patron, partly because his wife's health wasn't liking the damp and things like that. But there was an incident where there was a soldier
in his garden. This was around the time then Napoleonic Wars, and England was paranoid that it was going to be invaded by revolutionary France, and so soldiers were sort of in camps all along the south coast of England and elsewhere, and you know, he sort of asked this soldier to leave, and the soldier gave him some grief, and Blake, who was a short man, just all got the arm of the soldier behind his back and forced him out of his garden and up the road and to the pub,
the Fox in where he was billeted and in full view of everyone. Ah, and this soldier, a guy called Schofield, he claimed that Blake has hed been doing this, had been damning the king and all the king's soldiers and saying if Napoleon invades, then you know he will win the newer all run a newer. This was this was classed as seditious speak at the time. It was very sort of paranoid age because there being the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the powers that be in England
was scared. They were really scared at that sort of that sort of point that it was a revolution, you know, a republican revolution would happen there. So he was he was tried for sedition, which could have led to the death penalty. So he had this huge weight over him for a year or so as these things went through the court. Fortunately all the all the villagers in felp them, they all gave evidence going, no, he didn't hear anything. No,
I don't think he said that at all. No, that's I'm sure that the soldiers just making all that up and and he was acquitted. But what the soldier quoted him of saying is pretty much the sort of thing he would have said. It did fit very neatly with his thoughts. So it sort of seems likely that the local villagers liked Blake. They didn't like the soldiers, so you know, they they were there for him when they when they need when he he was needed. Yeah, but
it was it was a period. It was around this sort of period that he went through a time of of of bad mental health. We'd say now, and there was there was there was paranoia, and there.
Was he or something melancholy.
Yeah, there was, there had been before, there had been depression before he moved to phelp them. That does seem to be a slightly sort of manic than melancholy, sort of bipolar sort of switching. And he would fall out with a lot of contemporaries over matters that which the which the surviving evidence suggests that he was in the wrong and it was all in his head, you know, he was. He had he had a bad, bad sort
of period. But fortunately he sort of came through that after writing things like Jerusalem, and the last years of his life he was a much you know, happiest sort of person. But yeah, you know, trial for s edition. Can you know.
Anybody? It is fascinating to think that only four copies of Milton and five copies of Jerusalem were printed in his lifetime. And then Jerusalem was put to music right sometime in the twentieth century, and that's was that what made it more popular?
Yeah, just to confuse as the Jerusalem that the music is too is not from the his work Jerusalem of the that's that's that's just a confused matters, but it was. It was in the First World War. It was. It was put to music by Hubert Parry. H And I don't know how familiar American, if most of your listens are American, how they would be to the him Jerusalem. But it's great, it's it's it's it's a really beautiful, stirring piece of work. Uh. And he gave the Hubert Parry,
he gave the copyright to the women's suffrage movement. So it's always had this slightly sort of radical progressive feel to it. But at the same time that's become the unofficial English national anthem. It talk. It talks of the the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution, and it talks of the green and pleasant land of England. And it's. Yes, it's an amazing piece of work.
I think that I've seen it when in Canterbury, people seeing it in church, you know, so I think some of this, so I'm somewhat annoying with that. But he died in a pauper's grave, and yeah, I think you show that. Like even to this moment, they had some showing where two hundred and fifty thousand tickets were sold to some showing up. So the modern is almost just like huge, hugely famous and influential.
This was an exhibition at the Tate in London just just before it was just before the lockdown, and it was astonishing. It was astounding. They had room after room after room of so many pieces of his work had been collected and collated. This was looking at him as as a painter rather than as a poet or a writer. It was focused on his visual stuff. But still it was just overwhelming the amount of work that he did
in his lifetime. It was just extraordinary. And to go from you know this, this pauper's burial in in bun Hill Fields, which is a dissenter's burial ground, which was then on the outskirts of London sort of. Bun Hill comes from bone Hill. It was where they unwanted dead were. But two. Being celebrated to the extent he is in modern British culture is just extraordinary. But it's still the case that there's a feeling that people are drawn to Blake,
but they find him, they don't understand him. A friend of mine said to me recently, She goes, I don't understand Blake, but I know he's my boy. I know he's he's on my team. We're drawn to him, but getting getting grips with what he's trying to say can seem off putting to a lot of people. They may start to sort of google a few things and then fall into sort of an academic rabbit hole and not really have a framework to understand where these arguments sort
of fit in. Or it's like it's like the it's like Blake is this big, glorious castle and they can't kind of find a way in there. And I've heard this again and again for various different reasons, which is what this book was really written for. You know, It's it's not it's not intended for people for academics who
are roundly knowledgeable about Blake. It's for people who who maybe heard a poem or seeing an image and recognize that it's something, uh, something connects with them and they want to know more, but they don't know how to sort of get into his into his world and understand his mind view. This is it's like a ramp. It's a ramp into the giant castle of Blake.
I mean, I felt like, oh, well, I commend you from writing it because I felt like, I got a much better understanding of this very imaginative, complex person after finishing the book.
So, h well, I hope you also got. Sorry, sorry, well, I hope you also got was a different understanding of imagination itself, of your own mind and how your own mind works, and how imagination differs from from person to person and can be this overwhelming thing that sort of takes takes people over, because that's I think that's important for understanding Blake. But it's it's not just Blake, It's about all of us. It's about all.
Of our minds, and it just kind of felt like you it was a mind expanding and understanding of the capacity of a human mind. Somebody is talented as Blake and had it definitely had a genius, but also a mystic. So really a fascinating this.
This is the thing with I mean, people have been having visionary experiences throughout all of history and in all of culture, and frustrating things about them is they're just ineffable nature. These people come back and they just can't explain to other people what they've experienced. But you get Blake, who's so talented as a writer and so talented as an artist, his work. When you see it, you do go, oh, okay, that's okay. It's real, isn't it. It is real. The
experiences that he's talking about, these have definitely happened. His work is just utterly convincing. You know, there's there's there's no there's no sense that it's wish fulfillment or he's just making it up or something like that. He's seen those things, you know, he's he's his mind has been in that's expansive. And yeah, I think that's why he's very important so well.
And there's so much of that visuals that are interspersed through our culture even in the States. The Great Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun is in films, and we've seen pieces of Blake still to this day's and then the poem's Tiger and Jerusalem is pretty incredible what what he.
Achieved, and many little phrases such as the mind for Germanicals that sort of creep out of his poems and into sort of general acceptance and general sort of knowledge. Yeah, he's I mean, I would recommend to anyone you know, just that if you get into Blake, your life will be richer and you will have a better quality of life from having from having Blake in there, and there really is sort of like no time like the present.
You know, the longer you sort of put it off, you're just you'll just be frustrated that you didn't do it earlier, because it's his work is so rewarding on just a very human level, on on what it says about human the way the way it sort of elevates humanity. You know, it's the when I was saying earlier about the notion that the gods and everything were internal. A lot of people might think, well that the values them,
but reading Blake, that's really not what you get. What it does is just really elevates, you know, the human potential and what humanity can be and can experience.
Agreed, well, excellent book. I highly recommend this book. Where can people find it? It's on amazons. Did you have a website or is there a way people can reach out to?
Sure, my website is John Higgs dot com. But yes they can. They can find it on Amazon. William Blake Versus the World. I mean, it's only published in the UK certainly at the moment. Hopefully we'll find it American publisher one day. Or sooner, sooner rather than later, but you can. You can certainly get the UK version from Amazon or your your bookshop of choice.
Did you have an audio version? Are you intending to do an audio version?
Yes, there is an audio version, but because of the way these things work, if you're not in the UK, I don't think it allows you to buy it.
Well, well there's if you have a VPN you might have some success. And that's not a bad idea anyway, great book, great conversation, Thanks so much for joining me again. The title of the book is William Blake Blake Verse the World, published May twenty one by author John Higgs. Thanks so much. Thanks William, still there.