It’s lucky we have literary academics to advise us. Terry Eagleton takes up space at the Guardian’s CiF to inform us that – shockingly – Gordon Brown’s vision is not the same as William Blake’s:
One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain’s greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called “the vision thing” in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God’s head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. “House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools,” he wrote. “They seem to me to be something other than human life.”
Unlike Eagleton, I’m on the whole quite pleased that Gordon Brown doesn’t have visions or wander around naked in the garden of No. 10. It’s not a politician’s job to point us towards heaven. Ahmadinejad does altogether too much of that kind of thing, and I’m not really a great fan.
The energy captured in Blake’s watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: “To generalise is to be an Idiot,” Blake writes. And again: “The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common.” The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.
But not, I think it’s fair to say, a Communist future.
No commentary on Blake is complete without a sneer at the witless middle classes (well, it’s normally the Women’s Institute) who supposedly don’t understand the lyrics to Jerusalem. Personally I find Blake’s Swedenborgian mythology impossibly recondite, and make no claim to know what he was on about most of the time. The apparent simplicity and beauty of his poetry though make it easy for those with a radical agenda to claim they understand him, and to be quite certain that he was on their side (despite that great big warning sign, “To generalise is to be an Idiot”). Somewhere down the line (the Sixties?) he became the all-purpose visionary poet; a kind of last refuge of the revolutionary scoundrel. Which is where Eagleton comes in.
I’ve seen it suggested that “dark satanic mills” in fact referred to institutions of learning, and by extension academics in general.
[See also Norm]
Mick Hartley 
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