ABSTRACT
This chapter explores William Blake's poetry in relation to the topic of musical inspiration. It argues that musical responsiveness is at the heart of his work, not merely in these ways as an effect, or as an aspect of his own visionary creativity. Musical experience, that is, offers Blake both a means and a dramatic equivalent of individuality, and the redemptive kinds of inspiration and innocence with which it is linked. As Blake's work breaks down the separations between poetry, music and the visual arts, so the nineteenth-century composer was often concerned to use music to evoke or incorporate all kinds of pictorial, narrative, mythological, political, natural and metaphysical material. The chapter examines broader contexts and aspects of these links between music and eternity, particularly the ways in which the eternal is evident for Blake in history itself. Finally, it discusses the features of the historical and political aspects of musical inspiration in Blake.
