Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies

Originally intended to introduce William Blake’s major prophecies, the late Karl Kroeber’s Blake in a Post-Secular Era: Early Prophecies is an accessible and astute survey of the prophetic work that Blake executed between 1788 and 1794. For Kroeber (1926-2009), former Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, the post-secular era we are now entering should re-establish Blake’s central presence in academic literary humanism, which—in its secular phase—has excluded Blake due to his radical Christianity. Such exclusion, Kroeber notes, has not diminished Blake’s immense—and still growing—impact on popular culture and concepts of individuality. In stark contrast to the idea of a “universal heart” and to the ideal rational societies envisioned by his contemporaries, Blake argued that each individual was absolutely unique and that only social structures based not on reason but on the imagination, like Golgonooza, the City of Art, can realize and sustain the individual's innate divinity. 28 illus.