Uzbekistan state university of world languages english philology faculty

1.2 The philosophical and aesthetic basis of Blake's worldview
Even in his youth, William Blake had learned to spend hours reading and studying almost everything in the library, including the philosophical works of Swedenborg and Boehme, whose works were being translated from German at that time. Blake was very good at languages and had a good command of French, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew, which enabled him to read the original works of many foreign authors, both contemporary and ancient.
Blake was very interested in the history of Christianity, especially the interpretation of self-denial, the basics of the categories of "forgiveness" and"salvation of the soul."
For Blake, Jesus is a symbol of life's relationships and the unity of perfection and humanity: "Everyone spoke the same language and believed the same religion.": it was the religion of Jesus ever-sounding."
One of Blake's strongest objections to Christianity was that it seemed to the poet that it encouraged the suppression of man's natural needs and discouraged earthly joy.
Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Relying on his own fantastic religious beliefs, Blake contrasted them with the Newtonian vision of the universe and created his own justification for the origin and development of galaxies. Even, Blake’s own method of engraving was contrasted with mezzo-tinto, a print that was made by drawing thousands of tiny dots on the surface, depending on the features of the image. Blake traced analogies between this method and Newton's theory of light, and sharply criticized both the imperfection of such printing and the generally accepted physics of Isaac Newton⁴.
Blake never used this technique, choosing to develop the method of engraving in particular in a liquid medium, insisting that lines and features are not formed by chance, a line is a line in its division, whether it is flat or curved.
The poets of the romantic generation relied on certain stable mythological "plots" that had a great artistic history (Cain, Prometheus), and Blake even more fully implemented the principle that Schelling's Philosophy of Art singled out as defining for true art: "Every great poet is called upon to transform into something whole a part of the world that has been revealed to him and to create his own mythology from its material."
At the same time, Blake can also be seen as a poet and artist of the Enlightenment in the sense that he also did not accept the ideas, systems, authorities and traditions of the style. In a dialectical sense, he used the spirit of Enlightenment as a spirit of opposition to external authorities in order to criticize the narrowly focused concept of the period.
Blake abhorred slavery and believed in sexual and racial equality. Several of his poems and paintings express the idea of universal humanity: all people are similar, even though they are infinitely different. Blake had a keen interest in social and political events all his life, and social and political formulations are often found in his mystical symbolism. What he saw as oppression and restriction of freedom was spread by the influence of the Church.
There are many documents that say that Blake himself was looking for collisions with his century. Apparently, he was one of those artists and poets who will later be called either marginal or rebellious, meaning, in essence, the same thing - for them, divergence from the prevailing trends and attitudes becomes a principle that determines the creative position. They can't adapt⁵.
We support the idea expressed by the great Soviet literary critic Zverev that such creators are "not successors, but, to use the word once suggested in the articles of Yuri Tynyanov, 'novo'". His innovation was not only unusual compositions, not only metaphors that convey the imagery of symbolists, he developed a whole concept that is important for the history of romanticism, about the philosophy of poetry." Blake was convinced that art should awaken the reader's imagination, foster a new sense of the world, and therefore a new system of values. So the meaning and purpose of poetry was understood at that time only by Blake. That must be why he alone became something of a prophet.
To see Eternity in a single moment,
A huge world-in a grain of sand,
In a single handful - infinity,
And the sky - in the cup of a flower
The ability to see the sky in the calyx of a flower, as in the quoted quatrain, was inimitable. This was Blake's great discovery. Reality was first perceived by him as a disharmonious unity. At the same time, Blake was not only and not so much a romantic, and not only a philosopher ahead of his time, but also a thinker who determined the development of English-language literature and culture. This was especially evident in the second half of the twentieth century.