In my book, I want to draw out two facets of William Blake, which I think get routinely sidelined now. My conversation with Jane Clark and Nikos Yiangou enabled us to explore these dimensions.One is that Blake was a very sharp thinker. He had a very accurate and clear critique of the ideas that were beginning to bed down in his time and have really shaped our times in the modern Christian West. A second is that he is a religious figure, which gets sidelined in two ways. He lived daily with perceptions of angels and other entities: the divine, the dead. I don't explain that away by pathologising Blake. He is also a clear Christian mystic, a very important voice in Western Christianity since the Reformation - connecting us back to a mystical core, which again is very often sidelined.For more about my book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination see - https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imaginationFor more about Beshara Magazine see - https://besharamagazine.orgA transcript is online here - https://besharamagazine.org/podcast/mark-vernon-awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-imagination/0:00 Introductions1:57 Blake as thinker and mystic5:20 The power of the imagination14:40 Blake and science21:12 The interconnection of music and poetry26:04 Innocence and wisdom32:29 Blake's Christianity39:57 Blake the philosopher

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