jenks
thread death
ackroyd not all bad
ackroyd is a great populiser - Hawksmoor is a tidied up version of Sinclair's poem Lud Heat for example but i don't think we should dismiss his work so flippantly - a judgement made on a cursroy reading of a chapter is hardly enough.
His work on 'cockney visionanaries' is interesting and if you read his original speech is far more challenging than maybe the oddball tv version we got for his London programme - a travesty of an interesting book.
his blake may well have become a standardised version in schools etc but i would claim that blake is just the kind of writer who cannot sit comfortably in a box for long - he resists any attempt t co-opt him into any one reading - back to my quote from an earlier -"i must create my own system or be enslav'd to another mans" - any reading of blake is about engaging with that sysytem in all its ornery awkwardness, its difficulties and contradictions.
people want to talk about the political blake and it is clear that this is what makes him engagingly modern - the republican who wore the red cap of the french revolution before it turned bloody but again he is cussedly contradictiry - he would seem to be influenced by Paine but he states he is no fan, more profit i think can be made in his relationship to Wesley and Walton - the dissenter who dissents from the dissenters, so to speak.
it is interesting how the establishment attempts to co-opt him into the fold through the adoption of Jerusalem - look again at the words, it is not jingoistic but a blatant damnation of industrailisation and a song of rage not celebration.
ackroyd is a great populiser - Hawksmoor is a tidied up version of Sinclair's poem Lud Heat for example but i don't think we should dismiss his work so flippantly - a judgement made on a cursroy reading of a chapter is hardly enough.
His work on 'cockney visionanaries' is interesting and if you read his original speech is far more challenging than maybe the oddball tv version we got for his London programme - a travesty of an interesting book.
his blake may well have become a standardised version in schools etc but i would claim that blake is just the kind of writer who cannot sit comfortably in a box for long - he resists any attempt t co-opt him into any one reading - back to my quote from an earlier -"i must create my own system or be enslav'd to another mans" - any reading of blake is about engaging with that sysytem in all its ornery awkwardness, its difficulties and contradictions.
people want to talk about the political blake and it is clear that this is what makes him engagingly modern - the republican who wore the red cap of the french revolution before it turned bloody but again he is cussedly contradictiry - he would seem to be influenced by Paine but he states he is no fan, more profit i think can be made in his relationship to Wesley and Walton - the dissenter who dissents from the dissenters, so to speak.
it is interesting how the establishment attempts to co-opt him into the fold through the adoption of Jerusalem - look again at the words, it is not jingoistic but a blatant damnation of industrailisation and a song of rage not celebration.