188 Ideals in the Modern World
Experience. But Blake could simply not garner signifi cant attention.
He tried to sell his illuminated books; he tried to find buyers
for his grand illustrations. He was often poor—he and his wife
had to scrape. At one point fi nances became so strained that Blake
went off to the country under the protection of a prosperous,
kindly mediocrity named William Hayley. But Blake loved London,
and loved his in de pen dence more. In time he broke with Hayley,
returned to the city, and continued his struggles. By the end of his
life, Blake had gathered a small group of young admirers around
him, but he never lived to see the recognition that his original
and profound work deserved. Yet Blake did not die unhappy— far
from it.
One poem of Blake’s, above all others, compresses his diagnosis
of the world he lives in and its need for transformation. The world
has become the province of the Self: Soul has been driven out. To
use Blake’s parlance, Satan has triumphed completely, though it is
not the conventional Satan, but Satan in a new guise. The poem
is “London” from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. “London”
is spoken by a poet- prophet wandering through the imperial city
stunned by what he sees and feels. Human misery is everywhere
around him: “I... mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness,
marks of woe” (26). There are multiple sources for this misery, but
perhaps the main one—or at least the one Blake cites fi rst—is the
locking down of human consciousness. The people Blake sees are
miserable because their minds are radically restricted. They are vic-
tims of “mind-forg’d manacles” (27). They are imprisoned by their
own mental limits and by the limits imposed on them by the cul-
ture. To Blake, many of the most esteemed among his contempo-
raries and near- contemporaries have created shackles for the mind:
Pope and Dryden, Locke and Hobbes, Samuel Johnson and Joshua
Reynolds are all enemies of imagination and allies of smothering
conformity.