AustLit

'William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed. William Blake knows very well that he was not all that successful last time he was alive, definitely not famous. He was hardworking, but also pretty weird, and not great at self-promotion. Luckily, William Blake has a smart phone so he can look himself up on Encyclopaedia Britannica (William Blake avoids Wikipedia because it campaigned to weaken Australian copyright law). William Blake reads that after he died the Pre-Raphaelites got interested in his work, and so did Yeats, T S Eliot, and Northrop Frye. William Blake does a quick vanity search on duckduckgo.com. There are a lot of entries. Wow, his drawings and paintings are in the Tate! And his poem ‘Jerusalem’ is sung at rugby matches, cricket games, and Women’s Institute meetings. You can even buy collections of his poetry in the bookshop in Wollongong Mall. And then an ad pops up for a Dr. Martens boot that features his painting ‘Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils’. William Blake thinks a pair of Birkenstocks would suit him better, but he’s not sure of his shoe size, so he has to leave this essay and wander down to the shops to try on sandals, where he will discover that if you say ‘tyger tyger’ to a person of a certain age, they quite often say ‘burning bright’ back to you. Goodbye William Blake. Enjoy the shoe shopping. We’re going to stay here and talk about poetry.' (Introduction)