William Blake occupies a distinctive position in the depth-psychology corpus as a visionary poet-prophet whose mythopoeic system anticipates, and is perpetually recruited to illuminate, the central preoccupations of psychological and philosophical Romanticism. M. H. Abrams devotes sustained attention to Blake as the archetypal exemplar of the circuitous journey: the fall of Universal Man (Albion) into fragmentation and the redemptive return to unified Human Form Divine. Blake’s myth of division and re-integration is read as structurally parallel to Hegel’s Geist, Schiller’s aesthetic education, and Wordsworth’s marriage of mind and world — a family resemblance that places Blake at the generative center of Romantic thought about psychic wholeness. Harold Bloom situates Blake as a decisive precursor for Hart Crane and the American Daemonic Sublime, emphasizing the transmission of visionary energy across transatlantic literary traditions. James Hillman indexes Blake in connection with the mythological imagination and the critique of rationalism. McGilchrist references Blake in relation to the imagination’s resistance to left-hemisphere reduction. Across these deployments a consistent tension emerges: Blake is simultaneously a poet of radical immanence — ‘All deities reside in the human breast’ — and a mythographer of cosmic scope, making him indispensable to any depth-psychological account of imagination, individuation, and the redemption of the fallen psyche.
Blake’s myth has neither prototype nor parallel; but his founding image is recognizably in the lineage of that ancient mythical being, the primal man or Adam, who falls into fragmentation.
Abrams establishes Blake’s Universal Man (Albion) as the quintessential Romantic figure of primordial unity shattered into division, equating evil with separateness and redemption with reintegration.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Blake’s rendering of the apex of human experience parallels that which was put forward by many of his contemporaries, however diverse their premises, forms, and idiom.
Abrams positions Blake’s consummatory vision — the re-humanization of all natural objects into the Human Form Divine — as the mythological correlate of the broader Romantic program of reconciliation shared by Wordsworth, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Blake, who claimed that a literal-minded ‘Priesthood’ had caused men to forget that ‘All deities reside in the human breast,’ and for whom heaven, hell, and paradise were not outward places but states of mind.
Abrams reads Blake as the foremost Romantic internalist, relocating theological categories — heaven, hell, paradise — within the human imagination and aligning him with the Digger radical Winstanley as a prophet of immanent spiritual vision.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Beulah is a peaceable kingdom only in the negative sense that it lacks conflicting contraries … it can become an habitual refuge from ‘intellectual war,’ that creative strife of contraries in the strenuous life of intellect and of imagination.
Abrams explicates Blake’s dialectical psychology of mental states, showing that Blake, like Schiller, regards regressive nostalgia for simple innocence (Beulah) as a danger and insists on the progressive, agonistic labor of imagination.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
Blake and, 337, 428, 430, 432, 436, 453, 474, 475
Bloom’s index entry documents the dense network of connections he traces between Blake and Hart Crane, situating Blake as the primary visionary precursor for Crane’s American Daemonic Sublime.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
Blake and, 9, 91, 122, 123-24, 197, 362
Bloom identifies his own sustained intellectual relationship with Blake as foundational to his critical sensibility and his elaboration of the daemon as a literary-psychological category.
, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, 2015supporting
Blake, William, 63–64, 216, 411, 420
Russell’s index records Hillman’s recurring engagement with Blake across multiple contexts in his work, indicating Blake’s place as a touchstone reference in archetypal psychology’s literary canon.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
Blake, W., 55, 134, 135, 145, 168
Hillman’s index to The Myth of Analysis situates Blake alongside Bentham, Coleridge, and the rationalist tradition, implying Blake as a counter-voice to utilitarian reduction of the psyche.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
The Circuitous journey: From Blake to D. H. Lawrence
Abrams names Blake as the inaugural figure of the ‘circuitous journey’ tradition that structures his entire comparative study, establishing Blake as the originating instance of the Romantic quest-narrative.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside
Jerusalem, 17. 33-44 … On Blake’s ‘Beulah,’ see Harold Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse
Abrams’s scholarly apparatus documents the primary Blakean texts and secondary Bloom commentary that undergird his analysis of Blake’s mythological geography and apocalyptic imagination.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside