This was both naïve and untrue, as the reality of child sweeps’ lives demonstrated. “The last line was in keeping with a general theme in ‘Songs of Innocence,’ the idea that a loving paternal God would protect all who were good. Higgs’s sunny take on “Songs of Innocence” will also surprise anyone who detects from the wooden diction and reductive moralizing at the end of the poem “The Chimney Sweeper” - “So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm” - that something isn’t right. (George Orwell, who adapted the title of his harrowing boarding-school essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” from a line in “The Echoing Green,” clocked the irony.) Higgs writes that “Blake described a world of play and delight, infused with the message that spiritual beings were watching over all children, so they had nothing to fear” - which will be news to the many readers who have perceived sinister undercurrents and intimations in these verses. Every child (but not adult) may (but also may not) get joy from the songs.

In the introduction to “Songs of Innocence,” Blake describes the poems that follow as “happy songs / Every child may joy to hear,” but Higgs misses the ambiguities here.

It’s not hard to see why Higgs assumed that they were written for children. Of Blake’s “Songs of Innocence,” he notes, “It is interesting that he chose to write a collection of songs for children rather than for adult gatherings.” As some scholars have noted, Blake never made this explicit. But Higgs’s writing is consistently clear and confident, even when he is wrong. To me, Higgs often comes across as a bewilderingly innocent reader of Blake, his ear untuned to the poet’s frequencies of irony and humor and to the interpretive and emotional possibilities they extend. the World.” How others will receive the book may well depend on where they sit on the innocent-to-experienced continuum. I repeatedly made recourse to the Blakean framework of “Innocence” and “Experience” while reading and thinking about “William Blake vs. Higgs’s Blake is, instead, a Blake for anyone whose sensibilities harmonize with Higgs’s interests in neuroscience and quantum mechanics, “Star Wars” analogies, and discussions of Carl Jung and Eckhart Tolle. Higgs’s Blake is not the tripped-out proto-hippie of some renderings, nor is he a Blake for everyone - although Higgs, despite his book’s pugilistic title and his close examination of many of the major quarrels in Blake’s life, sometimes presents a suspiciously conciliatory portrait of a poet who, he says, “accepts all sides.” A glance at Blake’s annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s discourses shows how scathingly he could reject ideas he knew to be appalling a quick reading of his damning poem “London” would do the job, too. Fortunately, Higgs dismisses the idea that Blake “took psychedelic drugs, and this was an explanation for his work,” but my expectations were not entirely misdirected. I was prepared for the far-out, whoa-dude version of Blake. That the English author, journalist and cultural historian has previously written about Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, the experimental, electronic band the KLF and a whole host of both old- and newfangled strangeness supplied some advance notion of who his Blake might be. This is John Higgs’s second book about the poet, following 2019’s manifesto, “William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever,” from which this project was spawned. The telling-off I got in an undergraduate seminar still stings: If I could get over my “junior Marxist training,” the teacher said, I might actually come to know Blake’s poems. The Blake who first fired me up was the political Blake, in whom I saw a kinship with other, later thinkers I already admired. Yeats admired Blake so much that he tried to claim him for the Irish. One scholar I knew speculated that, like herself, the poet must have had high histamine levels - and this might help to explain his extraordinary creativity. Just as certain religious believers privilege the cultivation of a personal relationship with the divine, those of us with the chutzpah to call ourselves Blakeans often make of the poet-artist-visionary a William Blake of our own.

Call of duty 3 songs