ABSTRACT
William Blake, prophet of Eternity, pleads for words to express his vision: to see the Saviour over him, and Spreading his beams of love. Blake more than any other, more than Swift or Lear, Donne or O'Leary, combined qualities that belonged to both the man of action and to the dreamer, the swordsman and the saint, the enchanter and the mystic, and as such seemed a fusion of the self and anti-self, the man and the mask. Blake's letters are particularly interesting in showing the difficulties which stood in the way of the Prophet. In the later writings Blake was first of all the prophet, secondarily, the poet and craftsman. His discipline was mainly that of the mystical way, not the creative labour of the artist. Mysticism is generally felt vaguely to be itself vague; a thing of clouds and curtains of darkness or concealing vapours, of bewildering conspiracies or impenetrable symbols.
