Always let your imagination be your guide?
Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination by Mark Vernon (Hurst & Co., 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
William Blake is a fascinating figure in nearly every respect. He had a distinctive artistic style and many of the images he created linger on in the public imagination, even when people are unaware of the artist behind them. Yet as easy as it is to identify Blake’s work, it is much harder to categorize him as a person. He lived in the “Age of Revolutions,” yet he rarely comes up when we think about Locke or Paine or Burke. He seems worlds away from Ben Franklin. William Blake had visions, discoursed with angels, and claimed many of his creative works reflected spiritual realities. He was an artist and a mystic who walked his own path. He is just as hard for us to comprehend as he was for his peers.
Awake! is part biography and part interpretive work. Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon walks us through Blake’s life from childhood until his end. We learn about Blake’s marriage and a bit about his patrons and political views. But more of the chapters spend more time on interpretation of Blake’s work than on expansive retelling of his life story. This book goes beyond literary comprehension or mere appreciation. Vernon’s approach invites us to consider application of Blake’s ideas.
Almost anyone picking up this book will begin with roughly the same question, did Blake actually see things? Did he have visions or was he touched in some way? And, if so, what should we make of that? Was he just insightful, actually inspired, or somewhat insane? Was the terrifying ghost of a flea something he saw or something he felt or neither? Should we believe that he heard from angels? These are thorny questions for religious and secular people alike.
Throughout Awake, Vernon walks a fine line as he explores the nature of Blake’s insights and imagination. According to Vernon, some of the things we’ve heard about Blake were definitely apocryphal and he was capable of his own humor when he spoke about what he saw and knew. Still, he says, “Blake saw angels.” And Vernon addresses the big question, “if not dismissed as purely fantastical, what can be made of his communing with spirits and, sometimes, their dastardly cousins, the demons?” (27) Vernon’s answer is to consider Blake an example of “perceptual openness.” (27) Blake’s angels were real to him and might be real to us, but were also sometimes something other than what we might call angels. Blake was as weird as we have been raised to think he was, but what was abnormal about him should not move us to pity, rather envy or even emulation.
Much hinges on Vernon’s understanding of imagination, which is the overarching theme of the book. As he acknowledges, imagination is “widely treated as a means of adding value and conjuring meaning” (50). But Vernon believes Blake’s work “insists that there is a root cause of a visionary person’s abilities: imagination flows not only from them, but also floods into them” (50). Vernon suggests “the imagination is not our possession but, it might be said, possesses us: an active imagination” (59). Blake saw angels and demons and interconnectedness between all things and consciousness in the world, but not all the characters he depicted should be taken as real (134). And some of what Blake describes we can see in the science that has been done since his time and in the work on consciousness in our own time (171). We can see things, too. Vernon suggests Blake would tell us “not to treat the paranormal as abnormal. Rather, stay open to what currently is hard to envisage and new impressions will come. Blake’s recommendation is to see the world as it is, infinite, by living daily so as to have it revealed as such. The imagination can grow, the senses penetrate more deeply, in the first instance by noticing how the ordinary is marvelous” (119).
Blake offers a guide in perceptual openness in the present, but Vernon also explains how Blake’s work spoke to some of the issues of his own time. Blake’s defiant mysticism and spiritually alive universe were also in response to the cold, calculating science and materialism which was emerging and which suggested that reason would be the measure of all things. Blake’s rejection of sharp divides was spiritually sound, but also should be understood in the context of the American and French Revolutions. Blake’s ideas parallel many other Western, Christian mystics, but also reveal a direct influence by the Bhagavad Gita. Blake’s reach exceeds his context, but he had a context.
Blake’s goal in so much of his art is to awaken us. Vernon would have us listen to Blake and rise from our slumber. Blake’s perceptual openness and spiritual sense of reality is needed in our fast and furious, machine-driven and machine-learning times. Vernon argues that “a culture that can’t see beast and bird, fish and serpent, or elemental dust breathing forth its joy, is one that readily abuses these lovely things” (154). According to Vernon, Blake’s Christianity addresses many of the flaws in modern Christianity (199). Blake essentially offers us a way of being embodied that is helpful in the face of all the dehumanizing trends we are experiencing. Vernon takes from him “that mortal life is a vantage form which an unbounded, unlimited life can be perceived; progress is not only about economic and political change but knowing the limits and conditions of this life as thresholds through which the more-than-material can be enjoyed and known” (140).
What if William Blake is the guide we need, for modernity and for a richer spiritual life? What if he was out of step with his own time in just the way that the Fremen walk the dunes of Arrakis? It allows them to ride the sandworms rather than be eaten by them. This book invites reflection.
Awake! is a meaningful look at the life and work of William Blake. Though readers are not required to be Blake experts, there are times when lack of familiarity with Blake may pose a challenge for readers, especially if they have little pre-existing awareness of Blake’s oeuvre. Intended initially for a British audience, this book assumes the level of literacy and cultural awareness associated with readers there. That said, it is a book for a broad audience and goes far beyond parsing the details of Blake’s life or phrasing to questions that are directly relevant to readers. It is unsurprising that the book has received so much praise. Readers will come away from Awake! with a deeper understanding of Blake’s work and ideas and a basic foundation in his biography.
Vernon’s decision to take on the supernatural side of Blake directly is exactly what makes the book so interesting and perhaps helpful. Awake! seems to ask the question, what if we take Blake’s visions seriously, but Blake is not a guide to some other world, but our very own? Imagination may be a key that unlocks many doors. And what if, rather than our conscience as Jiminy Cricket sang, we should always let our imagination be our guide?
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
