Spiritual Bodies and Mental Reality in Blake

Abstract

Abstract William Blake is often thought of as a kind of materialist, given the very physical and even embodied nature of his craft; yet his own writings repeatedly and forcefully reject materialism and even the physical world in favour of what Blake called spiritual reality. Taking Berkeley’s thought as its guide, this chapter proposes one way in which the materiality of Blake’s work can be reconciled with his immaterialism: that for Blake, as for Berkeley, what we traditionally think of as physical bodies are already immaterial forms. The chapter outlines the full extent of what we know of Blake’s reading of Berkeley, before reconstructing some of his most Berkeleian concepts in his poetry: the spiritual body, the minute particular, and the structure of generality and general ideas.