Introduction

William Blake opens an 1800 letter to Thomas Butts, his friend and patron, with a brief paragraph thanking Butts for a recent letter and mentioning that he has not “got any forwarder with … [Butts’s] commissions”; what follows is a leap from the world of pecuniary formalities into a seventy-eight-line poem describing Blake’s “first Vision of Light,” in which his eyes “did Expand/Into regions of air” so that he witnessed The Light of the Morning Heavens Mountains adorning In particles bright. ¹ The readers – Butts himself in 1800 and we, centuries later – are immediately thrust into the challenge this “first” vision offers to the universe of Newtonian time and space: Blake had such visions all his life so that, as his eyes expand beyond the adult concerns of indebtedness to a patron, Blake simultaneously remains William Blake, the poet, painter, and engraver, living temporarily in the cottage of another patron, William Hayley, while he stands out of time “as a Child,” a state in which all he has ever known “bright Shone” before him (Erdman 713, ll. 72–4).