An ‘Apostle of Futurity’: William Blake as Herald of a Universal Religious Worldview

Abstract

This article examines a strand of William Blake criticism from the second quarter of the twentieth century that styled his work as an embodiment of a universal religious worldview. In particular, it focuses on the writings of Max Plowman and John Middleton Murry from the mid 1920s to the early 1940s, for whom Blake’s works were portals into eternity and the future, and who celebrated Blake as prophet of a spiritual Weltanschauung for the modern age. The article examines similar principles in the work of British artists in this period, and is framed by exploring a parallel between the Blake of Plowman and Murry, and the use of painter-poet’s name for the Australian Blake Prize for religious art, inaugurated in 1950–51.