Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World

Mar 08 2025 26 ep. 31 mins 5

Visionary: How William Blake Changed the World Podcast artwork

A series of podcasts on the life, work, and reception of William Blake, exploring his impact on literature, the visual arts, music and more.

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Mirror Writing and Designing in William Blake’s Illuminated Books

Mar 08 2025 26 mins

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 “forward

William Blake and New Age Music

Feb 15 2025 19 mins

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

William Blake, Gregory Bateson and David Lynch: Audiovisual Approaches to Blake Scholarship

Feb 08 2025 21 mins

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

Bob Dylan and William Blake

Jan 29 2025 23 mins

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 su

Yeats, Blake and Mysticism

Jan 10 2025 50 mins

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

Barry Miles on Allen Ginsberg's Blake Recordings

Nov 19 2024 40 mins

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 als

Blakean Spirituals: William Blake, Bob Dylan, and Race

Nov 05 2024 28 mins

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’

William Blake and the Surrealists

Oct 30 2024 18 mins

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 Whitta

William Blake's Visionary Physics

Oct 18 2024 38 mins

Roger Whitson explores the ways in which Donald Ault and Bruno Latour can provide us with insights into Blake's experiments in visionary physics. This podcast explores the relations between science, art and aesthetics, not only the representation of science in art and photography, but also what the philosopher Latour calls the presentation or arrangement of facts.

William Blake's Visions

Sep 28 2024 30 mins

Blake scholar David Worrall discusses his latest book, William Blake's Visions, which explores the ways in which what Blake referred to as his visions can be attributed to verifiable perceptual phenomena including visual hallucinations (some probably derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. None of Blake's condi