This talk is about adopting the tactics that Blake employed in his ‘mental fight’. His modus operandi was to enquire into the nature of his own mind, and to personify the psychic entities that he found there, as characters in his poetic drama. However, he soon realised that what he discovered through this method would have significance far beyond the personal, and that it opened up questions about the deeply polarised society of which he was part.

I have used those same tactics in order to think about the nature of the personal psyche. Similarly, I have also found that these tactics act like a corrosive, stripping away apparent surfaces to reveal broader states of mind operating in society at this moment in history.

Blake’s Zoas are the four characters or characteristics that contest the spaces of his psyche. He also observed them at play in the great international events of his age. The Zoas can be thought of as being the Personality Psychology of his day. I have discovered that the Personality sciences of our own times can offer startling insights into our own polarised historical moment, and I will talk about this aspect of his method, as it translates into modern times. 

Blake named the character of tyrannical Reason ‘Urizen’. I will talk about the moment in the 1790s when Blake began to ‘own’ Urizen; in other words, when he admitted to himself that he too had a Urizenic component to his personality. With this realisation, he ‘depolarised’ internally, and he began to emphasise forgiveness and tolerance, exemplified in the person of Jesus, the Imagination, as the main drive of his spiritual mission. We surely need this today.

Detail of ‘Hold Me Like a Child’, 2025, oil on canvas, 72 x 167 ins

Christopher Bucklow first wrote about Blake for Don Cupitt’s Sea of Faith magazine in the 1990s. His essay ‘This is Personal: Blake and Mental Fight’ was published by the University of Cork in 2006. His most recent writings are on Francis Bacon, published in Bacon and the Mind: Art, Neuroscience and Psychology (Thames & Hudson, 2019).

Bucklow’s artwork can be seen in many museum collections around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, both in New York, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. He has received residences at the British Museum, the Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada and the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere.  His work is the subject of two video documentaries by Christopher Thomas. Both are available on YouTube.