Date and time:
Monday 12 December, 2022 15:00 – 16:00 GMT
Location: Online event
Join us for a live event as part of our Global Blake: In Conversation series. Jodie Marley will discuss George William Russell and his engagement with the mystic reception of William Blake.
‘Another William Blake!’: George William Russell ‘Æ’ and William Blake’s Mystic Reception
In the 1890s, as he moved in Yeats’s artistic circles, Russell’s art, poetry, even his character, was frequently compared to Blake’s. Russell and Yeats came of age reading both Blake and Blake’s esoteric influences like Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake’s influence can certainly be seen in both Russell’s visual and literary output of the 1890s.
My talk will first explore the context of Russell’s engagement with Blake: how Russell and his circle received Blake in the 1890s, and how the late Victorian spiritualist and occult revivals influenced Blake’s popularity. I will then discuss Russell’s 1890s poetry, and his later mystic tract The Candle of Vision (1918), analysing how Blake’s influence as a ‘mystic’ artist contributes to Russell’s own unique artistic vision. Finally, I will argue that instead of considering Russell an eccentric footnote to his more famous friend Yeats, that Russell’s work must stand alongside Yeats’s when we consider Blake’s nineteenth and twentieth century influence. Although both received Blake as a visionary or mystic writer, Russell’s vision of Blake diverges significantly from Yeats’s in practice.
Jodie Marley