Nearly two centuries after his death, the final resting place of William Blake (1757-1827) was finally marked with a gravestone. The remains of the poet-painter lie in a common grave under an anonymous patch of grass in Bunhill Fields cemetery, just outside the City of London.
Patti Smith would celebrate Blake as “the loom’s loom, spinning the fiber of revelation” — a guiding sun in the human cosmos of creativity.
For Maria Popova, Blake was a painter, a poet, a philosopher without meaning to, an early prophet of panpsychism, a mystic who lived not to solve the mystery but to revel in it, to encode it in verses and etch it onto copper plates and stain it onto canvases and seed it into souls for centuries to come.
Blake has long intrigued me, not least because I read a few lines from his immortal Auguries of Innocence at our first daughter Maddy's naming day:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
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