Did you see trees full of angels today? Did Moses sit next to you while painting? Did a Flea whisper to you that fleas everywhere are the souls of bloodthirsty men?
There’s really no other way to imagine being William Blake, one of the world’s great poets, than to step inside his fully realized visions. Considered absolutely insane in his era — Songs of Innocence and Experience sold only 30 copies — Blake created a whole personal mythology and wrote epics intended to be a new scripture of his universalist ideas. Trained as an engraver, printer, and artist, Blake’s poetry is literally inseparable from his art — he engraved, colored, wrote, and printed each volume in his own home.
When you come up to SCUA (4th Floor of Parks Library, M-Th 9-5), you can look at old renditions of Blake’s works as they were meant to be seen. Take out Jerusalem, Blake’s self-acknowledged masterpiece and see the unbelievable art together with his own personal Book of Revelation. Or look at the source of many famous proverbs in English (“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with bodies floating in fire around you. Rather than the dry black and white print of most Blake books, seeing them as they originally were is like having your face shoved in a rainbow.
Maybe you’ll walk away seeing angels.
Cardinal Tales 