Blake at Tate Britain

South Bank

On Wednesday I travelled up to London to see the major William Blake exhibition currently at Tate Britain. It's quite a blockbuster: I don't know for sure, but I'd guess a good proportion of everything that survives of Blake's visual and printed work is there, well over 300 works. If you have any interest at all, and are within travelling distance of London, you should make the effort to see it before it closes in February. After all, it seems everybody else is: if I could identify a day and time when the visitors might have thinned out a bit, I'd probably go again. But I hate sharing galleries with blockbuster-style crowds. Not least when every room (and there are many) contains at least one arrogant fool, bloviating to a companion about Blake. As we like to say around here, "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees", and although we acknowledge that "Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth", and that "If others had not been foolish, we should have been so", nonetheless "The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow", and vice versa, matey, sez the crow (The Proverbs of Hell).

It is a visual feast, though. In the main, Blake's more sustained writing projects are a baffling, involuted effusion of his own obscure personal mythology, something that in later times would probably be regarded as evidence of serious mental imbalance. Frankly, he was a bit of a nutter, I suppose, although in a good way. He was also not the best draughtsman ever to pass through the Royal Academy, or to wield an engraving tool. His portrayal of humanoids is mannered in the extreme, and without much regard to personality or, indeed, anatomy. To me, they all look like they're doing an extreme form of yoga in some weightless realm, which is not entirely inappropriate, when you consider the mythic register in which he is working. But, blimey, what an imagination! And what a talent for painstaking design, layout, and colouration. The so-called "illuminated books" are some of the most desirable material objects in the world, as far as I'm concerned. I spent an age bent over each one, as the flow of visitors passed by, like an annoying rock in a stream. I may yet have to plan the Heist of the Century.

Anyway, Blake is no longer the obscure outlier he once was. Even Coleridge in 1818, having been sent a copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience (hardly the most challenging item in Blake's oeuvre) responded, "You may smile at my calling another Poet a Mystic, but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common sense compared with Mr Blake". Heh... I'd love to have heard the reaction of Coleridge (another, um, flawed man whose work I revere) to, say, The Book of Urizen. "Frankly, sir, Mr. Blake is in urgent need of professional assistance, although in a good way, and the illustrative material is no whit short of sublime". But if you like and admire Blake, you don't need me to tell you why. And if you don't, I have no interest in persuading you otherwise. "He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you", innit?

Millbank