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Article: Sketching God ... from life. (poet William Blake)
- Article from:
- Insight on the News
- Article date:
- June 3, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 News World Communications, Inc. 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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How does one come to terms with William Blake, surely one of the most remarkable prodigies of all time - and one of the most perplexing? Forced to live a life of commercial subservience and drudgery, he nonetheless left us a legacy of provocative poetry and art that still shines with dreamlike brilliance, invoking a magical realm that no other artist has managed to inhabit.
His contemporaries simply could not accommodate his genius or his eccentricities. They consequently abused him, scoffed at him, thought him mad. Indeed, Blake is the classic case of the still-unanswered question: Where does genius end and madness begin? Peter Ackroyd has undertaken to illuminate ...