William Blake: Mystic for Modernity, Episode 2 | Jason Whittaker

Welcome to the second episode in our latest series, William Blake: Mystic for Modernity. William Blake (1757–1827) was a visionary English poet, painter, and printmaker of the Romantic Age.     Jason Whittaker is a writer and academic at the University of Lincoln, who spends his time alternating between visions of William Blake and writing about digital media. The author and editor of twenty books, including Jerusalem: Blake, Parry and the Fight for Englishness (OUP, 2022) and You Want What We've Got: Big Tech v Big Journalism.       Largely unrecognized and dismissed as eccentric during his lifetime, William Blake is now celebrated for his fiercely imaginative, spiritually profound works and his radical opposition to institutional religion and rationalism. From an early age, Blake claimed to have had mystical visions, which profoundly influenced his creative and spiritual philosophy.       Blake was a radical thinker who sympathized with the American and French Revolutions. He abhorred slavery and the oppressive impacts of the Industrial Revolution. He rejected rationalism in favor of unbridled human imagination. His philosophical and prophetic works, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Milton, feature his own complex mythology and criticize both societal and religious repression.     ⸻ 📲 Connect with Derek Holser: 🐦 Twitter / X: https://X.com/derekholser 📱 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@derekholser 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theplungewithderekholser/ 📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/derekholser 📚 Latest Book! Lightgliders ➡ https://www.amazon.com/Tambika-Shield-Wisdom-Lightglider-Origins/dp/1645075486 ⸻