Jerusalem!

The Real Life of William Blake

Tobias Churton

$59.99

Hardback

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English

Watkins Publishing
01 November 2018

Biography; Biography: literary

On BBC Radio 3 in April 2013, a call was issued for a specifically English anthem. Top of the list came Jerusalem.

Americans need no reminding that William Blake inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson and US visionary, Walt Whitman. Through poetry, painting and music, Blake addressed our predicament at the dawn of the materialism that has enveloped us. The great poet and Blake commentator Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) would say simply: “Blake is my guru. He taught me everything.” Blake - who could never afford a university education - knew everything worth knowing. But Blake the guru has been lost under a myriad of inadequate biographies, college dissertations and arts commentaries, written by people who have not found the luminescent keys to Blake’s symbolism and liberating spirit and miss the essence of Blake’s titanic spiritual effort. Suddenly, with the advent of LSD, Pink Floyd and Yoga and Sufism in the air, it became possible to join Blake in seeing, really seeing ‘a heaven in a wild flower, a world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour.’ Even science seemed to be on the side of the visionaries; Jacob Bronowski was one of Blake’s biggest fans.

For some, Blake is a ‘romantic poet’ with some prescient ideas about poetic form. To others, he is a proto-socialist revolutionary, an angry Cockney ‘digger’ with some ideas about free sex. Tobias Churton’s new, startling biography reveals, at last, the real William Blake in all his glory, so that anyone who sings ‘Jerusalem’ in future will see its beauty with understanding. This biography requires reading for everyone who desires spiritual awakening and longs for a spirituality that is free from fundamentalist dogmas, fears and rationalisations.

By: Tobias Churton
Imprint: Watkins Publishing
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 166mm, Spine: 41mm
Weight: 798g
ISBN: 9781780287508
ISBN 10: 178028750X
Pages: 464
Publication Date: 01 November 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Tobias Churton is a writer, composer and filmmaker. He has a Master's degree in theology from Oxford, and is an Honorary Fellow of Exeter University, where he lectures on Western Esotericism. He has proved himself to be a bridge-builder between scholarship and the general reader, with the television series and bestselling book Gnostics and many successful titles on the history of Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and alchemy. He is a keen and objective commentator on the contemporary and historical Gnostic phenomenon. The author lives in UK.