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Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

A stage adaptation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is truly singular, and genuinely memorable

Brett Boardman/Belvoir

Like all true visionaries, the English poet William Blake was light-years ahead of his time: a fierce critic of industrial modernity and a thinker deeply suspicious of any mindset that might turn the world into something to be dominated. His work also treats non-human life as morally significant, with abuse of innocent animals registering as an augur of apocalypse.

We get an inkling of this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), where, in an aphoristic turn, he insists:

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