Blake and Tolkien's Mythmaking
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Release Date: 03/09/2024
Imagination and the pregnant mind in William Blake’s cosmogony
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
In his early prophetic works, William Blake presents his own creation myth, which reinterprets Genesis and critically examines contemporary medical discourse on generation and birth.In this talk Annalise Volpone explores a specific trope that emerges from Blake’s depiction of imagination and (artistic) creation: partus mentis, the parturition of the mind. Annalisa Volpone is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Perugia. She specializes on modernism and romanticism; her research includes the intersections between literature and medicine in the Romantic...
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A Guide to William Blake's The Four Zoas
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Begun some time around 1797, Vala or The Four Zoas is William Blake's great unfinished masterpiece, an attempt to provide a complete mythology of Blake's universe of characters, Urizen, Los, Orc, Vala and many more. The poem has fascinated and perplexed readers ever since and, in this episode of Visionary, Professor Jason Whittaker is joined by Dr Annise Rogers who has worked in detail on Blake's epic. They discuss the conditions in which the poem was written, as well as provide some explanation as to its characters and significance.
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Mirror Writing and Designing in William Blake’s Illuminated Books
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
In 1789, Blake developed the relief etching technique which he described as “a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet,” allowing him to simultaneously write and design on copper plates for his illuminated books. This process required Blake to write and design in reverse, leading him to develop his command of retrography. Consequently, what appears “forwards” on the printed page is the product of a “backwards” preparatory process. In this talk, Dr Camille Adnot analyses the workings of these reversed words on the printed page, examining the dynamics of reading...
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William Blake and New Age Music
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Blake famously begins Milton: A Poem with the call to "Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age!" That phrase has been connected to the "New Age" movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and Blake has long been recognized as an important influence on the poets and visual artists of that time, but it could be argued however, that it was a cohort of musicians that best manifested his vision for art during this era. Jacob Smith outlines a series of resonances between Blake and the first wave of New Age musicians, which includes Iasos, Suzanne Doucet, Stephen Halpern, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Constance...
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William Blake, Gregory Bateson and David Lynch: Audiovisual Approaches to Blake Scholarship
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Jacob Smith discusses parts of his book, Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind. Bateson began his academic career as an anthropologist in the 1930s, collaborated with Margaret Mead on groundbreaking anthropological research utilizing photography and motion pictures, and participated in the founding conferences on cybernetics. After parting ways with Mead, Bateson embarked upon a series of research inquiries that moved across academic disciplines, culminating in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), a book that brought him a new level of public recognition and...
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Bob Dylan and William Blake
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Blakean song titles such as ‘Gates of Eden’ (1965) and ‘Every Grain of Sand’ (1981) have ensured that Blake’s influence on Dylan has long been taken for granted by fans, music writers and literary scholars - but how much Blake did Dylan actually know? In this podcast, Luke Walker that Dylan does indeed owe a deep and complex debt of influence to Blake, although it is a subject on which Dylan himself has often been evasive and contradictory, not only in public interviews but significantly also in private conversations with fellow Blakean poet-musicians Allen Ginsberg and Michael...
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Yeats, Blake and Mysticism
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
In this episode of Visionary, Jason Whittaker is joined by the scholar Jodie Marley, whose work includes a study of W. B. Yeats's reception of Blake in mystical circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this wide-ranging discussion, they look at how Blake was adopted as a mystic and occultist, as well as the important work done by Yeats and his colleague Edwin John Ellis to edit the first collected works of William Blake.
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Barry Miles on Allen Ginsberg's Blake Recordings
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
Biographer of the Beats and co-founder of the counter-culture newspaper, International Times, Barry Miles joins Camila Oliveira in conversation about how, through Zapple Records which he set up with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he came to record Allen Ginsberg's settings of the poetry of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this fascinating discussion, he also reminisces as to how - with Ginsberg and filmmaker Barbara Rubin - he was instrumental in helping to bring about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.
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Blakean Spirituals: William Blake, Bob Dylan, and Race
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
James Keery and Steve Clark begin with a discussion of the ‘song’ performed by ‘Tambourine Man’, which is often regarded as an invitation to Blakean ‘immortal moments’. If ‘the Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity’, in Dylan these have become ‘foggy ruins of time’, trading posts on a ‘windy beach’, where black captives may be ‘silhouetted by the sea’. It is also performed within the ‘love and theft’ tradition of blackface minstrelsy: Mr Tambo as a ‘ragged clown’, casting a ‘dancing spell’ upon ‘circus sands’. Race has become a hyper-sensitive...
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William Blake and the Surrealists
Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World
With its exploration of the unconscious via the dreamscapes of artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali, and a rejection of the kind of excessive rationalism that had boxed European countries into the horrors of the First World War, it would seem that Surrealism and William Blake were a match made in heaven - or a marriage made in hell. In this episode, Jason Whittaker explores some of the ways in which the Surrealists invoked Blake and explored his ideas and his status as a "complete artist" in their own work.
info_outlineIn their various ways, William Blake and J. R. R. Tolkien are two of the most important creators of imaginary worlds in literary history, having inspired generations of writers and artists to devise their own myths and legends.
In this podcast, Jason Whittaker is joined by Sharon Choe, William Sherwood and Annise Rogers to discuss the ways in which Blake and Tolkien shared a fascination with the mythology of Britain, and how Nordic, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon tales shaped their tales. As well as the similarities between these two writers, it explores their differences and how their legacy continues to this day.