The idea of William Blake as a figure representing an aspect of Britishness, or more specifically Englishness, is a well-established one. His poems – The Tyger, London and many others – are fixtures of school syllabuses; his brand of fervent spirituality casts him in a line of free-thinking visionary eccentrics (a view not harmed by his keenness for nudity and belief in the powers of sexual liberation); but most of all it is his words for the hymn Jerusalem that have cemented what has become a determinedly Anglocentric, if also idiosyncratic, reputation.
“Jerusalem as a kind of unofficial national anthem is the usual way into Blake,” says Esther Chadwick, co-curator with David Bindman of William Blake’s Universe, a new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. “But what we’re trying to do here is explicitly break him out of that nationally bound framework. Yes, he was a great English artist just as he was a great English poet, but despite the fact that during his lifetime he barely left London and never left England, he was also subject to wider European intellectual and creative currents.”
