Talk:William Blake

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

This stanza from "Auguries of Innocence" and several Blake lines about pursuing folly to wisdom and excess to the same goal have stuck with me all my life. The Dalai Lama's book "The Universe in a Single Atom" and Mary Coelho's "Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood" are modern extenstions of Blake's call to use our Zoom capacity. As we Zoom from very small to very large to everyday size and time, we can see the fact of all being related to all and contained in all.

Urizen: Know Your Blake

This image depicts the "Ancient of Days," a Urizenic figure. Like image below of Urizen himself, there is an erroneous implication that these figures are viewed by Blake as deserving of reverence. In fact, Urizen is a relatively negative figure in Blake's pantheon. According to Joseph Hogan [1], Urizen

"is reason, the rational faculty of the individual....His function is to limit and give outline to the creative energy of the individual....[H]e tries to stop the creative activity of the Eternals and to fix the world in one state. As a result he creates the fallen material universe...In his pursuit of single rule, he is also the archetypal King, the political oppressor" [2]

Thus he has more in common with the traditional view of Satan (perpetrated by John Milton) than the caption suggests.

Irrelevant images

I think the 3 images under the "Auguries of Innocence" section are not relevant since they are works of other people.

Inappropriate modernization of language?

It seems that some quotations from Blake use needlessly modernized language. For example, "Does the wingèd life destroy" rather than "Doth the wingèd life destroy," which appears to be the original (e.g., HERE). A quick glance at WQ:MOS offers no guidance on whether and when such modernization may be acceptable. How about if we switch "Does" to "Doth"? -- Presearch (talk) 00:47, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

It is not acceptable to change the words – quotation should always be verbatim. It is sometimes appropriate to note a commonly misquoted variant if it will help search engines find the correct quote. ~ Ningauble (talk) 14:37, 30 April 2012 (UTC)

I am going to that country which I have all my life wished to see

• What about this one?. These are claimed to be the last words of William Blake, as quoted in some books. The oldest I've found so far is this one.

Unsourced

• He had a devil, and its name was faith.
  • Swinburne.