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Article: Humanism in literature: William Blake.
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- September 1, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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I once found a volume, The Theology of William Blake, in an obscure corner of a library. At the time, I was reading Mark Schorer's William Blake: The Politics of Vision, which treats the poet as a secular artist who used biblical and esoteric literature for his engravings and poems. I appreciated Schorer's position, which dispelled for me the notion that Blake was a mystic. And so it was jarring for me to suppose that he might have had a theology, and I returned The Theology of William Blake unopened to the shelf. Since then, I have come to see that theologians may be atheistic. Theology in itself presupposes no necessary beliefs and can be simply issue, oriented. Today, ...