Issue 5 of VALA, the journal of The Blake Society, is published on Thursday 28 November 2024 as a free download from our website. There will be an online launch that evening at 7.30 PM, to which all are welcome. Here, Editor of VALA and Chair of The Blake Society, Sibylle Erle, introduces our new issue, with the not inconsiderable theme of ‘God’.

Thou art a Man God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore
(The Everlasting Gospel, ll. 71-72, E520) …

Nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and Sadler’s Wells Associate artist Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance and theatre company Teaċ Daṁsa — a must-see for Blake lovers. Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, talked to Michael about the production.

The night before I met Michael Keegan-Dolan, who has created the Blake-inspired performance Nobodaddy, at Sadler’s Wells from 27th to the 30th of November, I watched, with fascination, the film of the making of his previous production Mám. The gentle, nurturing manner with which Michael conjured incredible moves from his dancers, created a tsunami of the spirit, expressed through and with the human body. I asked Michael how he first encountered Blake…

After the recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Chair of the Blake Society, Dr Sibylle Erle, explores the poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of William Blake.

In his Guardian review of ‘William Blake’s Universe’ (23 February 2024), the Blake exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jonathan Jones calls Blake a ‘one off’ artist and ‘one of the greatest poets in the English language’. The recognition of Blake’s talents and artistic ambitions are beautifully captured in the title of an exhibition which projects Blake’s mythmaking and refers to European ideas, philosophical traditions and contexts of revolution in equal parts. But Jones, who admires Blake, cannot but be frustrated with an exhibition in which, he claims, Blake is ‘outdone’ by other artists…

As part of St James’s Piccadilly’s Changing Our Minds initiative, Diane Pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and William Blake.

He is such a familiar figure. That ancient, white-bearded male stretching out his controlling rod. That joyless but prurient despot who in the guise of the Angel of the Divine Presence seems to fondle Adam and Eve with his huge hands even as he clothes their bodies. A North American or Australian First Nations person might look at Blake’s coercive patriarch and say that this is exactly the white god that colonisers have imposed on indigenous cultures.

Trustee of the Blake Society John Riordan writes  about his experience printing with the replica Blake  press at Rice University, Houston. Earlier this month I had the great privilege of heading to Houston (my first time in Texas) and spending two days printing on the replica Blake press at the Fondren Library, Rice University. The printing press is a modern replica of the 18th century rolling press that Blake would have used, originally created by the Blake scholar and master printer Michael Phillips for his 2014 Blake exhibition at the Ashmolean. The press lived in Oxford for a few years but by a somewhat strange series of events has ended up in Houston, where, by an even stranger quirk of fate (and generosity) I was allowed not only to ogle it but to use it to print replica Blake...

Trustees and friends of The Blake Society pay tribute to the late, great Morris Eaves. Morris Eaves was one of the most influential Blake scholars in the post-war period, both in terms of his original contributions to knowledge, but also through his editorial work which was incredibly farsighted. He was probably known to most readers through his comprehensive revision of A Blake Dictionary, which offered a golden thread through the complexities of Blake’s often esoteric philosophy and mythology, while his editorship of The Cambridge Companion to William Blake brought together many of the most important scholars of the day to illuminate all aspects of Blake. As an art historian, he transformed our thinking regarding Blake’s works, first by examining Blake’s own ideas more thoroughly in...

An open letter to The Guardian in response to Jonathan Jones' review of William Blake's Universe at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Dear Editor,  We at The Blake Society are inspired by William Blake but we don’t live in the past. Through our monthly events and publications, we attempt to apply that inspiration to the complex messiness in our time. What we share is a distaste of doctrine and ideas that flatten humanity into two dimensional stereotypes. We believe it is worth thinking about what Blake was trying to achieve; he represents every person’s creative effort to see and live past their own lifetime. For us, Blake is for everybody. We recognise it is not easy to explain Blake’s founding concepts in one article, such as Jonathan Jones’ review (23 February 2024) of William...

For as long as I have been enamored with Blake’s work, I have held the view that Catherine was far more involved in the creative process than was generally known. Over the many decades that I taught Blake’s illuminated poetry to college students at Long Island University, I presented this idea, based on what I knew about the wives of artists. Those who don’t compete as creative artists, like Lee Krasner with Jackson Pollock, or Georgia O’Keefe with Alfred Stieglitz, often remain in the shadows as silent partners, financial supporters, and emotional stabilizers. Blake had a name for such female personae—emanations. Fortunately he believed that the separation of male figures from their emanations brought ruin, resulting in a fallen world! This is probably because in religious terms the...

Impressions of the exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, by Hugo Larman. Now on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 14 January 2024, William Blake: Visionary brings together a wealth of Blake’s prints and paintings from Tate Britain in London with works from American collections. Roughly sixty percent of the exhibits are from the Tate and forty percent from American collections. Works on loan from the Tate include selections from the large colour prints of 1795 and illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Tempera and watercolour paintings include The Ghost of a Flea and Meditations among the Tombs. Much of the rest is drawn from three major American collections. The Getty Museum itself exhibits Blake’s large colour print Satan Exulting over Eve (which has been used to...

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of The Blake Society will be held on Zoom on 17 January 2024 at 7.30 PM (UK time). The Annual General Meeting is an opportunity for us to update members and followers about the key events and work of the year. We will also report on accounts and the new ideas and campaigns that we will be taking forward into 2024. This is the meeting at which the Trustees of The Blake Society are formally appointed to serve for the year, so we thought it might be a good time to explain what we do and to reintroduce the current Trustees. We’re a dedicated group of Trustees, who work together well and effectively; between us we have a wide range of knowledge, experience and interests and can pool all that expertise for the benefit of the Society. As Trustees, we have a...

Issue 5 of VALA, the journal of The Blake Society, is published on Thursday 28 November 2024 as a free download from our website. There will be an online launch that evening at 7.30 PM, to which all are welcome. Here, Editor of VALA and Chair of The Blake Society, Sibylle Erle, introduces our new issue, with the not inconsiderable theme of ‘God’.

Thou art a Man God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore
(The Everlasting Gospel, ll. 71-72, E520) …

Nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and Sadler’s Wells Associate artist Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance and theatre company Teaċ Daṁsa — a must-see for Blake lovers. Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, talked to Michael about the production.

The night before I met Michael Keegan-Dolan, who has created the Blake-inspired performance Nobodaddy, at Sadler’s Wells from 27th to the 30th of November, I watched, with fascination, the film of the making of his previous production Mám. The gentle, nurturing manner with which Michael conjured incredible moves from his dancers, created a tsunami of the spirit, expressed through and with the human body. I asked Michael how he first encountered Blake…

After the recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Chair of the Blake Society, Dr Sibylle Erle, explores the poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of William Blake.

In his Guardian review of ‘William Blake’s Universe’ (23 February 2024), the Blake exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jonathan Jones calls Blake a ‘one off’ artist and ‘one of the greatest poets in the English language’. The recognition of Blake’s talents and artistic ambitions are beautifully captured in the title of an exhibition which projects Blake’s mythmaking and refers to European ideas, philosophical traditions and contexts of revolution in equal parts. But Jones, who admires Blake, cannot but be frustrated with an exhibition in which, he claims, Blake is ‘outdone’ by other artists…

As part of St James’s Piccadilly’s Changing Our Minds initiative, Diane Pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and William Blake.

He is such a familiar figure. That ancient, white-bearded male stretching out his controlling rod. That joyless but prurient despot who in the guise of the Angel of the Divine Presence seems to fondle Adam and Eve with his huge hands even as he clothes their bodies. A North American or Australian First Nations person might look at Blake’s coercive patriarch and say that this is exactly the white god that colonisers have imposed on indigenous cultures.

Trustee of the Blake Society John Riordan writes  about his experience printing with the replica Blake  press at Rice University, Houston. Earlier this month I had the great privilege of heading to Houston (my first time in Texas) and spending two days printing on the replica Blake press at the Fondren Library, Rice University. The printing press is a modern replica of the 18th century rolling...

Trustees and friends of The Blake Society pay tribute to the late, great Morris Eaves. Morris Eaves was one of the most influential Blake scholars in the post-war period, both in terms of his original contributions to knowledge, but also through his editorial work which was incredibly farsighted. He was probably known to most readers through his comprehensive revision of A Blake Dictionary,...

An open letter to The Guardian in response to Jonathan Jones' review of William Blake's Universe at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Dear Editor,  We at The Blake Society are inspired by William Blake but we don’t live in the past. Through our monthly events and publications, we attempt to apply that inspiration to the complex messiness in our time. What we share is a distaste of doctrine and...

For as long as I have been enamored with Blake’s work, I have held the view that Catherine was far more involved in the creative process than was generally known. Over the many decades that I taught Blake’s illuminated poetry to college students at Long Island University, I presented this idea, based on what I knew about the wives of artists. Those who don’t compete as creative artists, like Lee...

Impressions of the exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, by Hugo Larman. Now on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 14 January 2024, William Blake: Visionary brings together a wealth of Blake’s prints and paintings from Tate Britain in London with works from American collections. Roughly sixty percent of the exhibits are from the Tate and forty percent from American...

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of The Blake Society will be held on Zoom on 17 January 2024 at 7.30 PM (UK time). The Annual General Meeting is an opportunity for us to update members and followers about the key events and work of the year. We will also report on accounts and the new ideas and campaigns that we will be taking forward into 2024. This is the meeting at which the Trustees of The...

Issue 5 of VALA, the journal of The Blake Society, is published on Thursday 28 November 2024 as a free download from our website. There will be an online launch that evening at 7.30 PM, to which all are welcome. Here, Editor of VALA and Chair of The Blake Society, Sibylle Erle, introduces our new issue, with the not inconsiderable theme of ‘God’.

Thou art a Man God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore
(The Everlasting Gospel, ll. 71-72, E520) …

Nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and Sadler’s Wells Associate artist Michael Keegan-Dolan and his dance and theatre company Teaċ Daṁsa — a must-see for Blake lovers. Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, talked to Michael about the production.

The night before I met Michael Keegan-Dolan, who has created the Blake-inspired performance Nobodaddy, at Sadler’s Wells from 27th to the 30th of November, I watched, with fascination, the film of the making of his previous production Mám. The gentle, nurturing manner with which Michael conjured incredible moves from his dancers, created a tsunami of the spirit, expressed through and with the human body. I asked Michael how he first encountered Blake…

After the recent exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Chair of the Blake Society, Dr Sibylle Erle, explores the poem ‘The Little Black Boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of William Blake.

In his Guardian review of ‘William Blake’s Universe’ (23 February 2024), the Blake exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Jonathan Jones calls Blake a ‘one off’ artist and ‘one of the greatest poets in the English language’. The recognition of Blake’s talents and artistic ambitions are beautifully captured in the title of an exhibition which projects Blake’s mythmaking and refers to European ideas, philosophical traditions and contexts of revolution in equal parts. But Jones, who admires Blake, cannot but be frustrated with an exhibition in which, he claims, Blake is ‘outdone’ by other artists…

As part of St James’s Piccadilly’s Changing Our Minds initiative, Diane Pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and William Blake.

He is such a familiar figure. That ancient, white-bearded male stretching out his controlling rod. That joyless but prurient despot who in the guise of the Angel of the Divine Presence seems to fondle Adam and Eve with his huge hands even as he clothes their bodies. A North American or Australian First Nations person might look at Blake’s coercive patriarch and say that this is exactly the white god that colonisers have imposed on indigenous cultures.

Trustee of the Blake Society John Riordan writes  about his experience printing with the replica Blake  press at Rice University, Houston. Earlier this month I had the great privilege of heading to Houston (my first time in Texas) and spending two...

Trustees and friends of The Blake Society pay tribute to the late, great Morris Eaves. Morris Eaves was one of the most influential Blake scholars in the post-war period, both in terms of his original contributions to knowledge, but also through...

An open letter to The Guardian in response to Jonathan Jones' review of William Blake's Universe at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Dear Editor,  We at The Blake Society are inspired by William Blake but we don’t live in the past. Through our...

For as long as I have been enamored with Blake’s work, I have held the view that Catherine was far more involved in the creative process than was generally known. Over the many decades that I taught Blake’s illuminated poetry to college students at...

Impressions of the exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, by Hugo Larman. Now on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 14 January 2024, William Blake: Visionary brings together a wealth of Blake’s prints and paintings from Tate...

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of The Blake Society will be held on Zoom on 17 January 2024 at 7.30 PM (UK time). The Annual General Meeting is an opportunity for us to update members and followers about the key events and work of the year. We...