The New York Times Book Review published a review by Michael Wood of a new biography of Gnostic Catholic Church Saint (and namesake of the OTO Lodge in Baltimore, MD), William Blake, Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake.
“‘Eternity’s Sunrise’ has a biographical shape, but as Damrosch says, ‘it is not a systematic biography.’ It describes Blake’s early life, maps out his London and the intellectual and artistic culture of his time, tells us about his marriage, his friendships, his death. But the heart of the book is in its evocation of the complexities of the early poems, and the “kaleidoscopic dreams” of the vast later works, where Blake sought to display the secret history of creation and of humanity’s submission to an alien, authoritarian God. The result was that some of his distinguished Romantic contemporaries thought he was mad, but then Blake himself sometimes regarded madness as a form of necessary dissent.”
One of the more intriguing points the reviewer notes is brought out in the book is the amount of irony Blake indulged in in his written work and that those around him, his wife Catherine for instance, employed when discussing the poet himself! Read the review here:
