William Blake

William Blake was a poet and printmaker born in London in the mid-1700s during the Romantic era. Blake lived and worked at a time of great social and political changes, including the American Revolution in 1775 and the French Revolution in 1789, that profoundly influenced his writing. Like many at the time, Blake was critical of the monarchy, but he was also critical of the increasingly industrial, scientific age—the age of reason—and felt creativity, imagination, and spirituality were the most important parts of being human. He was suspicious of most organized religions at the time and even crafted his own mythology about the world and how we came to be. He’s often said to be a visionary, or someone who was before his time and who was able to imagine the future.

Read "Jerusalem," a poem where Blake imagines that Jesus Christ has visited England. In Christianity, the word “Jerusalem” is sometimes used to mean “Heaven.” Why might Blake have chosen to imagine Jesus Christ coming to England? What might Blake think Christ’s opinion of England would be? What might he have witnessed of the working conditions in Britain’s new factories and industries that would lead him to use the words “satanic mill”? What does Blake resolve to do by the end of the poem? What kind of “mental fight” do writers get to mount?

Read "From 'summer, somewhere'” by Danez Smith, a poem that imagines a utopia where young black victims of police killings are resurrected, or “unfuneraled.” What is this utopia like, and why?

Write the following lists:

• 5 things you love
• 5 things you hate
• 5 things you wish you could change

Now, think: if you could create your ideal world, what would it look like? Write a few sentences describing it and answering the following questions:

• What would everyone have?
• How many hours a week would we go to school or work?
• What would we study? What would we do for work?
• Where would we live?
• What would be missing? What wouldn’t be?

Prompt
As a young person, William Blake experienced visions. As an adult, he wrote prophetic accounts of the ways in which government and organized religion limited and oppressed society. Using the lists you’ve brainstormed about your ideal world, write an imaginative, visionary poem in order to call attention to an issue that concerns you regarding inequality and injustice.