August 8, 2025

I have been talking about the work of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake lately in the Expanding Eyes podcast, which brings me back to my beginnings many years ago when I read Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s great book on Blake, at the age of 19. I am not the only one for whom that book was a life-changing experience, and the reason has to do with its central premise—which is also its central difficulty. Blake began from the assumption that reality is not “given,” not an objective world independent of us but is mentally created, not of course by the ego but by a deeper part of the mind, the imagination. This possibility excites some people, but in a larger number of people it arouses great resistance, and it is worth delving into the reasons for that resistance. Blake probed it himself. In fact his later poetry could be described as an attempt to understand why people reject the imagination and cling tenaciously to the idea of a reality that is stubbornly unalterable, so that any attempt to transform it is wish-fulfilment.

The Blakean faith that there is a latent power that could change both our selves and our world was tremendously exciting to me in 1970, when I was a young hippie and the idea of change was for a short period alive in the world. It was a period with resemblances to that of Blake’s own period of first maturity as a writer, in the 1790’s when the French Revolution had not yet failed and with it the hope that it could lead to a general revolution of European society. “Bliss was it in that time to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth looking back. But in both cases the attempt at transformation collapsed. Blake never gave up his faith in a transformative imagination, but his later work had to grapple with the question of why its power is denied and resisted.

The first chapter of Fearful Symmetry is titled “The Case Against Locke,” for it is from the epistemology of Locke that we derive the idea that an external reality exists independent of our perception of it. According to Locke, we know of such an external reality from the data of the senses imprinting upon a mind that is a passive recipient, the famous tabula rasa or blank slate. The mind does not create reality but only records impressions of a reality independent of it. Many people would say that that is just a fancy philosophical version of common sense, so that Blake’s vehement denial of it at first appears outrageous:

Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy, & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? (22)

Appearances of things may be changeable, but Locke maintains that beneath the “secondary qualities” there is a common substance, a word that means standing below. Blake calls that nonsense. Reality exists only as it is perceived, and that means that we do not all live in the same reality: “the fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees” (28). Lockean reality is a reduction to the level of an average passive imagination. Such a reduction is not inevitable, only habitual. Some of Blake’s most famous aphorisms convey the exhilaration born of the possibility of “expanding eyes,” for “If the Doors of Perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite.” Imagination is not some kind of fantasy which we may use for temporary relief before returning to hard, independent reality. What the active imagination perceives is more real than Lockean perception, which is a kind of minimal default setting. Its seeming inevitability derives from its passivity. It is, in truth, a kind of bad habit in which we have persisted so long that it seems unchangeable. But Blake refuses to be limited by it:

“What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? O no, no. I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” (28)

Anyone who knows Blake’s art can visualize the picture he might have made of such a heavenly host exploding like a nova into light, song, and “the human form divine.” And the purpose of his art was to show us that we could see that way too.

Quoting this passage, Frye comments,

The Hallelujah-Chorus perception of the sun makes it a far more real sun than the guinea-sun, because more imagination has gone into perceiving it. Why, then, should intelligent men reject its reality? Because they hope that in the guinea-sun they will find their least common denominator and arrive at a common agreement which will point the way to a reality about the sun independent of their perception of it. (28)

Blake has no patience with the kind of anti-intellectualism that attacks anything but the least common denominator view as snobbish elitism. Los, the embodiment of the imagination in Blake’s mythology, shouts at one point, “I care not whether a man is good or evil; all that I care / Is whether he is a wise man or a fool. Go! Put off holiness, / And put on intellect” (Jerusalem, chapter 4, plate 91). By “wise man” Blake means what he sometimes calls the “poetic genius.” By intellect he does not mean abstract reason but the insightfulness born of intense imagination. But make no mistake: Blake is not “egalitarian” if that means exaltation of herd animal mentality. However, if he is “elitist,” it is not for the usual reasons of social class. He demands an active imaginative and intellectual response precisely because he understands how strong is the temptation to passivity.

Indeed, Blake’s account of the Fall psychologizes it: the Fall was not moral but epistemological. It was a fall into a passive state in which reality became external to the mind, a fall into illusion, into what Blake called the “cloven fiction” of a subject staring at a world of objects. In part this is a laziness or inertia of the kind that Freud called the death instinct or drive. The unconscious is driven by the pleasure principle, but the greatest pleasure would be a state of complete relaxation and cessation of striving. Such a state is reached only in death, so that there is an impulse “beyond the pleasure principle.” We are all what Keats said he was, “half in love with easeful death.” He says in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” And behind Keats stands Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy expressing the yearning “To die, to sleep.” In Blake’s mythology, the fall was of the cosmic figure Albion, a universal being who comprehended all that is, divine, human, and natural. Albion spends the duration of Blake’s long Prophecies lying on the Stone of Night, dreaming, despairing, near death. The task is to awaken him, a daunting task because we are Albion. In his fallen state, he is the deathwish in all of us, the urge to passive perception, to spiraling down. At the same time, we are Los, the yet-unfallen portion of Albion’s imagination, so that we are trying to awaken ourselves. No wonder Blake insists upon active striving—but striving of the imagination, not of the will.

But there is another reason that people cling to the idea of a reality that is “given” and not imagined: not just inertia, but also fear, fear that is ultimately a fear of madness. “Sanity” is when I am in accord with a reality that is outside me, a standard by which I can measure truth and illusion. I need to know that I am in contact with something solid, that I am not lost in my own fantasies. Take that external yardstick away and I feel lost. I need to feel that I am in accord with other people who are measuring themselves according to that same external standard, that there is one real world and we are all in it together. Without that, I am in free fall. If reality is imagined, then anything can be true. I might wake up some morning and find that I have turned into a gigantic insect, like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Ordinary reality is sometimes called “consensus reality,” and part of me feels an anxious need for that consensus. About the matter of the guinea-sun, Frye speaks with a dry wit about the creation of a consensus reality out of the need for a certain kind of reassurance:

In Blake the criterion or standard of reality is the genius; in Locke it is the mediocrity. If Locke can get a majority vote on the sun, a consensus of normal minds based on the lower limit of normality, he can eliminate the idiot who goes below this and the visionary who rises above it as equally irrelevant. This leaves him with a communal perception of the sun in which the individual units are identical, all reassuring one another that they see the same thing, that their minds and uniform and their eyes interchangeable. (29)

When imagination turns from passive to active, the result is a release of energy that is both exhilarating and illuminating. Blake’s early hero of imaginative energy was named Orc, and the early Prophecies (as Blake called his narrative poems) speak of the “thought-creating fires” of Orc. The prose satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell declares that “Energy is Eternal delight” and “Exuberance is beauty.” The delight and exuberance are contagious, and a reader caught up in them is apt to feel, “Who would not vote for this?” But the dominant cultural figures of Blake’s own time, the late 18^th century or Age of Reason, rejected the claims of so-called “enthusiasm” in religion and of inspiration in poetry, to which we may add the ecstasy of romantic love in order to get the complete list of Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus speaks of “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” as those who live according to the imagination.

By lunatic, he makes clear that he means religious fanatic, one who “sees more devils than vast hell can hold,” a negative view of religious vision as nothing but barbarous superstition. In the 17^th century, a Christianity based on ritual and institutional obedience was challenged by those who were not content with blind faith but hungered for actual spiritual experience. The Inner Light movement of the Protestant left wing spoke of God not as a transcendent external being but as an inward experience. This movement spearheaded the Puritan revolution culminating in the English Civil war, temporarily overthrowing the monarchy, aristocracy, and the state religion of the Anglican Church. For a brief time, much as in the 1960’s, an anarchistic energy got loose, resulting in the chaos described by a famous book about it, Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Milton emerged from this movement—but so did any number of religious factions with wild names—the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levelers, the Fifth Monarchy Men—whose members ranged from the inspired to the crazed. The final Parliament before the revolution’s collapse was the Barebones Parliament, named after its leading member, Praise God Barebones. After this anarchistic uprising, shuddering, the poets and critics of the Restoration and Enlightenment repudiated what was called “enthusiasm” in religion.

We are trying to understand as sympathetically and fairly as possible the case against the imagination, and it is quite true that once you say something like “Mental Things alone are Real,” you give license for the delusions of any number of loons. For a whole society to give such license is indeed a calculated risk. Creative anarchism is always going to keep mixed company with neurotic anarchism. The 60’s gave us Allan Ginsberg and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, both deeply influenced by Blake. It gave us Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, along with the whole psychedelic movement. Blake might have regarded LSD as a crutch, but I am not as sure as some critics that he would have entirely repudiated it as a kind of beginner’s way to jump start the imagination. Aldous Huxley was not frivolous when he titled the book describing his psychedelic experiments The Doors of Perception. However, it also gave us Charles Manson, the Weathermen, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In between the inspired and the psychotic were a lot of us experimenting with what would later be called “difference,” in looks, music, and sexuality. I hung out with people who were like me, people who were more brilliant and creative than me, and people who were odd and eccentric but who found a place to belong in the crowd of what were called “freaks” as often as hippies.

I tended to enjoy the odd and eccentric, as I still do, and I don’t mean making fun of them, but the reactions of “normal” people ranged from the nervous to the horrified—as they still do. There is a kind of visceral hatred based on fear that drives the anti-LBGTQ+ factions. They see the extravagance of pride festivals and drag shows and, no pun intended, freak out. They are, moreover, afraid it’s contagious—hence their fear of “grooming.” No one is grooming—but, yes, it might be contagious, as people are, consciously or unconsciously, eager to be released from the constriction of the “normal.” Normal doesn’t exist, and no one is normal. Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (1999) got this right a generation ago. A society whose conventions are more relaxed is a happier, healthier society, but it also provides a place for genius, for those whose vision leaps beyond the “normal,” and a place as well for the many people in whom genius and neurosis are mixed. Blake understood this with his usual humor:

I then asked Ezekiel. why he eat dung. & lay so long on his right & left side? he answerd. the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. this the North American tribes practice. & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present ease or gratification? (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 13)

We are speaking here of a social norm, but the point is that a social norm of uniformity and conformity is based on a Lockean-style epistemological norm, or at least claims to be.

The Age of Reason was also, again like Theseus, hostile to imagination in the arts. Theseus may seem to paint the inspired poetic imagination in impressive terms:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

But this is a glamorous description of what he thinks is really a fraud. Theseus goes on to describe the imagination’s “tricks,” in which “How easy is a bush supposed a bear.” Theseus description of imagination’s fraud is itself a fraud, for he is perfectly aware that only very naive people like the rude mechanicals will worry that one of their actors in a lion costume might be mistaken by the court ladies for a real lion. There is very real magic in the woods that surround his court, and he will remain comfortably oblivious to it.

As for love, everyone knows that romantic love is delusional. In the Augustan Age, emotion itself was considered delusional, or at least in constant danger of becoming so. Sensitivity and emotionality, known as “sensibility,” needed to be restrained and subordinated to “sense.” That is the ostensible theme of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, with the two traits personified in a well-grounded sensible woman and a flighty emotional one. Women have often been told that they are the emotional sex, and yet that they cannot afford sensibility, which means they are ineligible for the mad abandon of romantic love. In the 18^th century they could not afford it because they were property—they had to “marry well,” which meant profitably. Society was set up so that marriage was an economic affair. But when Frye once addressed an association of psychiatrists, his essay, significantly called “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” began by defining “sense” as “I should think, the attitude that psychiatry would take as the standard of the ‘normal,’ the condition of mental health from which mental illness deviates” (151). What is that attitude? Such sanity consists in assenting to the Lockean paradigm of a subject “adjusting” to an outside world. Speaking of “man,” he says,

There is the world he sees and the world he constructs, the world he lives in and the world he wants to live in. In relation to the world he sees, or the environment, the essential attitude of his mind is that of recognition, the ability to see things as they are, the clear understanding of what is, as distinct from what we should like it to be. (151)

In contrast, he says,

The other attitude is usually described as “creative,” a somewhat hazy metaphor of religious origin, or as imaginative. This is the vision, not of what is, but of what otherwise might be done with a given situation. Along with the given world, there is or may be present an invisible model of something non-existent but possible and desirable. Imagination exists in all areas of human activity, but in three of particular importance, the arts, love, and religion. (151)

Due to the cultural trauma of a 17^th century riven by religious wars and revolutions inspired by religion, the 18^th century was characterized by a privileging of “sense” as something anticipating what a post-Freudian world would call the “reality principle” and a backlash against imagination as not only delusional but dangerous. It was the imagination that had turned the world upside down politically, but there was a pervasive fear throughout the Enlightenment that imagination might turn the world upside down psychologically. In other words, the imagination might drive one mad. The price that the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment paid for its Lockean normality was very great, for repression psychologically is like slavery socially: there is always the lurking fear of a revolt from below. Of the major figures representing the attitude of “sense,” Swift went mad and Samuel Johnson suffered from lifelong depression and a fear of going mad. In Johnson’s satire Rasselas, one of the characters acts as a spokesman for Johnson’s view that imagination is in fact the bane of human existence and the root cause of human misery:

“Disorders of intellect,” answered Imlac, “happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and to at his command. No man will be found whose airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity: but while this power is such as such as we can control and repress, it is not visible to others...” (1432-33)

Earlier, musing upon the building of the pyramids, Imlac mused,

“But for the pyramids, no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labor of the work....It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment.” (1429)

The moral of Rasselas is that the imagination is the chief cause of human unhappiness by making us unhappy with the limited lot of humanity, and therefore always restless, always striving, only to be disillusioned with whatever it achieves.

Given such an attitude, Frye’s characterization of Augustan values is not unfair or exaggerated:

It follows that the repression of creative power is one of the fundamental principles of art. As all that man really wants to see tears the physical world to pieces, from the Augustan point of view the full power of genius can never find expression: most of it will invariably go to waste in attempting higher flights, and therefore the technique of a perfect expression is largely a technique of achieving a tactful and communicable mediocrity. (165)

When the greatest Augustan poet, Alexander Pope, wanted to write an epic, he was reduced to writing a mock-epic, not on the rape of Helen that launched a thousand ships but on the “rape” of a lock of a society woman’s hair. In his Essay on Man, Pope had already chastised poets like Milton who attempted visionary poetry about transcendent realms. The Rape of the Lock is double-edged satire: it satirizes the presumptuousness of the old epic conventions that attempt to soar “above the Aonian Mount” while at the same time satirizing the triviality of the society in which he lived, a society that had become trivial by reducing itself to a rational Lockean norm.

Yet Johnson’s fear that the imagination could lead, not just to pretentiousness but to outright madness, was well founded. The mind of a poet inspired by the fully unleashed imagination might be blown apart as if he had touched a 12,000-volt line. Johnson was friends with one such poet, Christopher Smart, who was shut up in a madhouse. Was Smart truly insane? Johnson, in a touchingly kind remark reported in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, seemed to doubt it:

“I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.”

A society clinging to “normality,” however, often resorts fearfully to incarceration out of a need for control and a need to keep the eccentrics out of sight, for they are a visible reminder of the repression on which conventional society is founded. We know this all too well, for respectable repressiveness survived well into the 20^th century and is still alive and all too well in the 21^st, in the form of demands that something be done to get the homeless off public streets and subways. Repressive normality was especially enforced in the case of women, as shown in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s famous story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1898), based on Gilman’s own experience. Suffering from post-partum depression, the protagonist is incarcerated in a former mental hospital by her own husband, a doctor who is a rigid rationalist and scared to death, as he explicitly says, of his wife’s imagination, as expressed in her writing, which is what he is sure is making her sick. Once again, the fear of “the return of the repressed” is well founded, for, kept in compete isolation, the woman goes authentically mad, and her husband’s reaction at the end of the story is to faint—a dead giveaway that his rigid attitude is an attempt to keep under control his own “womanly” emotions. Normality insists that it is grounded in “sense,” in the experience of a “real world” from which the mentally ill have become unmoored. But that real world is really an arbitrary construct, and the difference between sanity and mental illness really comes down to a majority vote. In “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” Frye recounts the experience of poet and dramatist Nathaniel Lee, a contemporary of Dryden, who remarked, “They said I was mad, and I said they were mad, and, damn them, they outvoted me” (163).

In the madhouse, Smart wrote a fragmentary rhapsodic poem called Jubilate Agno, rejoice in the Lamb. Depending on which parts you quoted, it would be easy to cite it as evidence of some kind of schizophrenia:

Let Singleton, house of Singleton rejoice with the Hog-Plump. Lord have mercy on the soul of Lord Vane.

Let Thickness, house of Thickness rejoice with The Papah a fruit found at Chequetan.

Let Heartly, house of Heartly rejoice with the Drummer-Fish. God be gracious to Heartly of Christ, to Marsh, Hingeston & Bill.

And yet—Frye says that in Jubilate Agno,

there is more of Blake than in any other eighteenth-century poem. Here, too, the poet is a seer of the apocalyptic vision and expounder of the Word of God: he sees in every object of nature an “augury of innocence” and unites it to a name from the Bible which is evidently the human spirit in it: he makes associations of the most far-fetched kind within his own experience in order to suggest an underlying form in nature which is to be revealed at the last day. (179)

In addition to names, Jubilate Agno speaks of power latent in numbers and the letters of the English and Hebrew alphabets in a manner that suggests the Jewish Kaballah. There are passages that do not seem mad to me at all, or, if they are, I would gladly share that madness, including passages that evoke the way that Blake explodes “consensus reality” with the energy of an active imagination. In terms of the human body, that energy is released as voice, giving a reason for Smart’s propensity for erupting into loud prayer, to the consternation of those who live up to the stereotype of the uptight librarian who is always demanding quiet:

For the AIR is purified by prayer which is made aloud and with all our might.

For loud prayer is good for weak lungs and for a vitiated throat...

For a man speaks HIMSELF from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet.

For a LION roars HIMSELF compleat from head to tail...

For EARTH which is an intelligence hath a voice and a propensity to speak in all her parts.

Where should Smart have been praying? Maybe at an African-American church service, with its shouting, speaking in tongues, and gospel music. It is the same “enthusiasm,” regarded with distaste by the arbiters of control.

Counterbalancing the not-fully-controlled sublime are moments of visionary pathos: “For I rejoice like a worm in the rain in him that cherishes and from him that tramples,” which reminds me of Job praising the God who both tramples and cherishes him. In the most famous passage of Jubilate Agno, Smart praises the spiritual, humanized form of his cat Jeoffry:

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness....

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes....

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.

For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry the rat has bit thy throat.

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better....

For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity....

For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies of both man and beast.

Those who will not or cannot fit into the respectable and stable social consensus founded upon a Lockean ideal of “sense” are left outside in the darkness and the gnashing of teeth, whether they are shut up as mad like Smart, are dismissed as mad, as Blake was for over a century, or find themselves on the “margins,” outside the city limits where there is order and safety. That is where Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre was, beyond the reach of the law, where the whorehouses and bearbaiting were. It is where visionaries, would-be visionaries, and failed visionaries all reside, with no good way of telling which is which, a motley crew united in their rejection of consensus reality, as in Allan Ginsberg’s great poem Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
     hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
     fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
     starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
     supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
     cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammadan angels
     staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating
     Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
     on the windows of the skull....

Blake is an explicit influence, but the technique is that of Jubilate Agno, combined with Whitman. Ginsberg was not in an insane asylum when he wrote it, but the man it is dedicated to was, Carl Solomon, whom he met while visiting his mother incarcerated for paranoid schizophrenia, like my own mother.

Ginsberg and I belonged to a generation that rejected the normative even as it rejected us. But the Beat movement and the hippie counterculture had been preceded by a Decadence that, especially in France, defined itself in terms of a thoroughgoing rejection of the bourgeois captured in the phrase epater le bourgeois, scandalize the middle class. Again the rejection of consensus reality was associated with drugs, sexual perversity—defined as anything that a bourgeois would not find respectable—and, in the case of Rimbaud, a visionary poetry that comprehended both “illuminations” and “a season in hell,” the titles of two of his works. And it was out of France that the radical philosophy and literary theory emerged in the 1970’s through the 1990’s, doing its best to subvert the liberal consensus of Western civilization, radical and subversive of all “humanism” and yet having no coherent political aim, only a freewheeling anarchism that at times flirted with nihilism.

But there is another side to this picture of a conformist middle class life that achieved stability at the cost of a repression of so many desires and so much difference. All that is true, and I was part of a rebellion against it. I was reading Blake for the first time when, in May, 1970, the National Guard, in the name of social order, fired into a crowd of student demonstrators and killed four of them. Kent State University was only 40 minutes away from me, and I was hitchhiking back from it when I heard the news of what happened. Yet I am determined to look at a larger perspective. For most of my life, the middle class was accused of an attitude of selfish complacency born of privilege.

Well, maybe that fits the description of some people’s ancestors, but not mine. Mine were working class immigrants, farmers and coal miners in Poland and Italy, farmers and coal miners over here. They worked at hard and dangerous jobs just to survive, and the men on both sides came to America to avoid being drafted into the senseless conflict of World War I. The middle class? It was not a soft cushion on which they had been sitting since they were born. It was something that had to be achieved, clawing their way up out of poverty, and in the teeth of respectable people who despised them for their difference—for their weird languages and weird foods and their tendency to be loud and demonstrative. I realize now with full force what it had been like for my mother, who grew up on a farm without electricity or plumbing, where it was a quarter mile’s walk down a rural route just to get the mail, whose dad was a coal miner with, eventually, black lung and a crushed leg, whose mother farmed plowing with horses—I had no idea until a few years ago that my Polish grandmother plowed with horses. My mother went for seven years to a one-room school.

The Sokowoski’s and Kluba’s and Dolzani’s worked their way up like some species evolving into more and more complex forms. First from the farm to jobs in the small town of New Philadelphia. Then marriage and my dad’s job as lathe operator at Timken Roller Bearing in the larger city of Canton, where they went from an apartment to a tiny house eventually to the ample house on Roslyn Avenue where we had a TV (eventually color), a dishwasher, an electric stove, so that life was not so hard and exhausting all the time. To be middle class and live a peaceful normal life with comforts and financial security achieved through hard work—this was the American Dream. I represented a further step, the ability to send your kids to college so that they might do even better than their parents. My family were not consumer zombies, the pawns of “late stage capitalism.” They were survivors. Literary theory used to talk about “the oppressed.” My family and other immigrant families were not oppressed as African-Americans and Native Americans were oppressed, but they were not privileged either, not until their later years, when they finally achieved some hard-won financial security and creature comforts.

In his later work, Blake realized that the imagination was not going to expand human vision in one great apocalyptic fireworks show. Instead, it has been working, slowly and invisibly, throughout human history, and in fact prehistory. In the beginning, Albion fell into a chaotic state on the edge of non-being. Blake shows what we would now call evolution as the work of the imagination beginning on the lowest level to build up organized life in a slow climb up levels of complexity until finally reaching the level of consciousness, after that as working through cycles of history to expand that consciousness until awareness dawns that we do not need to live under political oppression and tyranny: we do not even need to live as isolated egos in an inhuman universe of dead matter. This evolution of imaginative awareness through time is the theme of all his later poems. It is the work of Los in history. This vision is what was lacking in radical literary theory when I was young. Indeed, radical theory emphatically rejected any such long-range vision: “No more master narratives” was one way of putting it. Master narratives were just a form of imperialism. Consequently, radical theory slowly dissolved into an atomized anarchism and special-interest tribalism.

But what America needs is a progressive vision of history that is not the false one of exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and the triumphant march of capitalism but a counter-vision that will do battle with that ideological lie. That is how Blake saw the imagination: not as escapism or fantasy but as “Mental Fight” that awakened the universal consciousness of Albion slowly through a process of the clarification of error. The true immigrant experience is a moving and inspiring story, but it has to be clarified of what was false in that experience. Their achievement of a “normal” and secure middle-class life has to be seen as only a way station, even if a necessary one. For “normality,” being founded on the subject-object cloven fiction, is only a means, not an end. The problem with subject-object dualism is that it is inherently paranoid. Subjective consciousness stares out at a world in which everything and everybody are “other,” unknown and therefore a possible threat. Hence there is an innate suspicion and hostility that get projected on the other, resulting in attempts to dominate or destroy. From such paranoia come the notions that Native Americans and African Americans are subhuman, so that cheating them, mistreating them, enslaving them is not wrong.

We may add that the element of paranoia provides something of a litmus test to distinguish between genuine imaginative vision and mere “magical thinking.” After all, it may seem as if the present is the worst possible time to defend Blake’s idea that we create our own reality through the imagination. Aren’t we surrounded by people who are doing that, who are living in la-la land, disregarding facts, believing any old thing they want to believe or that some influencer has persuaded them to believe, and never mind the evidence of your own lying eyes? Isn’t this an ultimate argument against a reality-creating imagination? Don’t we need less of such wish-fulfilment, not more? To this one can only say that all imaginative constructions of reality are self-validating. Blake expresses this in a terrible phrase: “They became what they beheld.” Radical theory is right that there is no “ground,” no “foundation.” It is wrong in thinking that the implication is that we are falling into an endless abyss. When you are falling, imagine wings. People act as if “magical thinking” means living in one’s happy place, looking at life through rose- or Jesus-colored glasses. But magical thinking is not carefree—it is clear when you look closely that the smiley faces are a way of warding off anxiety. Magical thinking is characterized by a sense of threat: it is a component of conspiracy thinking. Positive sorts of fantasizing, such as some of the esoteric groups of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the hippie fantasies of a Woodstock Nation and an Age of Aquarius, and the visionary self-help books called New Age, are what Blake in the title of an important poem called “Auguries of Innocence.” He would say that they have something genuine at the heart of them but not yet fully born. In fact he did say that of the writers of what Frye called “kook books,” such as Swedenborg and Boehme. They have their value, but they are more limited than the fully released and clarified imaginations of a Shakespeare, a Milton—or a Blake.

Applied to the problem of social change, the Blakean dialectic of the “clarification of error” attempts to refine the genuine American vision from this demonic parody of it. The genuine American vision is no esoteric secret: it is exactly what we know it to be in our best moments: the vision that all are created equal, that out of many may come a One that does not have to be bought at the cost of conformism and oppression, that all people are entitled to the gratification of what Maslow called basic needs and Frye primary concerns, without having to “earn” them from some capitalist profiteer, that we are all in this together and that any kind of Social Darwinist libertarianism that says that there is an elite that deserves to rule is a lie. The American Revolution was not a once-for-all-time event but is still going on. The Civil War was one of its episodes, an attempt to clarify what freedom and equality really mean, refuting the lies of those claiming to be superior. And the revolution we call the 60’s was another episode, out of which came clarification of vision about the equality of women, the normality of LBGBTQ+ and other differences and the rejection of labels like “deviant” and “pervert” so common when I was growing up, the acceptance of people with physical disabilities or neurodivergence as part of a widened and more flexible version of normality and not as “cripples” and “weirdos.” One of the few advantages of being old is having a long perspective. I can see that, despite many failures and ironies, genuine progress has occurred in my lifetime. This is the real myth of progress, not the capitalist and imperialist version in which progress means the triumph of self-proclaimed elites. Thus, Blake’s myth turns out to be the same as that of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Cox Richardson in her recent book America Awakening (2024). It also turns out to be the same as the social vision of one of my heroes, Abraham Maslow. The point of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is that self-actualization is not a light bulb you can turn on if you could only figure out where the switch is. Self-actualization is a slow climb from beginnings in the most basic physiological needs, and it is not going to be achieved without the full gratification of those needs.

And this is where we have faltered since the 1980’s. Income inequality has ballooned, leading to the disintegration of the middle class, the loss of financial security and even the ability to pay the bills without going deeper into debt, the increasing loss of what my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents worked so hard to achieve. That security grounded average Americans in a kind of basic sanity that is now tempted into what subject-object dualism is always liable to: paranoia. The triumph of Trump and the far right has been enabled by the culture wars, and the culture wars are a combination of paranoid conspiracy theories. This dark paranoid consciousness was what Blake’s mythology called Ulro, a state of solipsistic nihilism. The oligarchic and fascistic forces have regrouped and attacked again, as they always do—readers of superhero comics know that supervillains are only temporarily defeated but always return.

But we also know that they are defeated. We can eventually defeat Trump and his minions—they will help by undoing themselves, as villains do. Beyond that is a larger battle that we have shirked: we can no longer turn a blind eye to the danger of corporate, financial, and tech elites who have used Trump and his zoo crew as an instrument of dominance. We have allowed a kind of liberal elitism to dominate the whole upper echelon of the Democrat Party, which accounts for its recent paralysis in the face of an authoritarian takeover. But political activism should go hand in hand with education. Long before Trump began attacking Harvard, liberal education was being starved to death by those who proclaimed it obsolete, meaning that they did not want to pay for it. But it is no accident that so many of the best progressive intellectuals are lifelong teachers. In addition to Heather Cox Richardson, there has also been Robert Reich, whose career as a teacher has been so long and memorable that his retirement at the age of nearly 80 has inspired a whole retrospective film, Last Class. We hear much about how Trump voters are typically non-college educated and resent higher education as another badge of an uncaring elite. But that is another casualty of the working class decline into conspiracy thinking. Historically, the working class hungered for education and clamored for the establishment of working class universities in England and public universities in the U.S. so that such education could be affordable, if not for themselves then for their kids. The role of liberal education is neither job training nor social “adjustment.” It is rather a cure for blindness. It does not work inevitably or by magic, but for those of good will it shows how they have the power latent within themselves to see those blazing spirits singing “Glory glory glory” where before all they had seen was another stupid capitalist coin.

References

Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2004. Originally published by Princeton University Press, 1947.

Frye, Northrop. “The Imaginative and the Imaginary.” In Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1951. 151-67.

Ginsberg, Allan. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights Books, 1956.

Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Shorter 11^th Edition. General Editor Stephen Greenblatt. Volume 1. Norton, 2024. 1404-37.

Smart, Christopher. Jubilate Agno. Edited by W.H. Bond. Harvard University Press, 1954.