Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World

Biographer of the Beats and co-founder of the counter-culture newspaper, International Times, Barry Miles joins Camila Oliveira in conversation about how, through Zapple Records which he set up with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he came to record Allen Ginsberg's settings of the poetry of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this fascinating discussion, he also reminisces as to how - with Ginsberg and filmmaker Barbara Rubin - he was instrumental in helping to bring about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.

James Keery and Steve Clark begin with a discussion of the ‘song’ performed by ‘Tambourine Man’, which is often regarded as an invitation to Blakean ‘immortal moments’. If ‘the Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity’, in Dylan these have become ‘foggy ruins of time’, trading posts on a ‘windy beach’, where black captives may be ‘silhouetted by the sea’. It is also performed within the ‘love and theft’ tradition of blackface minstrelsy: Mr Tambo as a ‘ragged clown’, casting a ‘dancing spell’ upon ‘circus sands’. Race has become a hyper-sensitive issue in recent Blake studies. If Black lives matter, is any representation by a white artist necessarily exploitative; if so, what about Black voices? This talk examines the mid-18th century convergence of British evangelical hymnody with African musical forms, to the extent that one might speak of the negro appropriation of Watts and Wesley. It explores what Blake may have known of this tradition and its influence throughout his work, chart its genealogy through 19th-century blackface minstrelsy, and explore its subsequent exfoliation across 20th century culture. It will conclude by arguing that Blake's prominence in recent popular music (including but not limited to Dylan), usually attributed to celebration of enhanced states of consciousness, is inseparable from his positive ‘Responsing’ to this inheritance.

With its exploration of the unconscious via the dreamscapes of artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, and a rejection of the kind of excessive rationalism that had boxed European countries into the horrors of the First World War, it would seem that Surrealism and William Blake were a match made in heaven - or a marriage made in hell. In this episode, Jason Whittaker explores some of the ways in which the Surrealists invoked Blake and explored his ideas and his status as a "complete artist" in their own work.

Roger Whitson explores the ways in which Donald Ault and Bruno Latour can provide us with insights into Blake's experiments in visionary physics. This podcast explores the relations between science, art and aesthetics, not only the representation of science in art and photography, but also what the philosopher Latour calls the presentation or arrangement of facts.

Blake scholar David Worrall discusses his latest book, William Blake's Visions, which explores the ways in which what Blake referred to as his visions can be attributed to verifiable perceptual phenomena including visual hallucinations (some probably derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. None of Blake's conditions were pathological, all of them have a degree of prevalence in modern populations. Blake has been celebrated as a ‘visionary,’ yet his ‘visions’ have been ignored for too long.