‘Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age!’: William Blake, Theodore Roszak, and the Counter Culture of the 1960s–1970s

Abstract

‘[T]he voice of Blake … is the voice I have now’, Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1975 (‘Notes’ 28). Although few claimed so completely to possess or to be possessed by Blake, throughout the 1960s and 1970s he seemed an obvious progenitor of the counter culture and its rebellion against technocracy and ‘ one-dimensional man’ (Marcuse). Figured variously as prophet, poet, cultural critic, visionary, revolutionary, and shaman, Blake’s influence during this period is evident in, to cite only a few examples, cult books such as Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body (1966), the underground poetry collected by Michael Horowitz in Children of Albion (1969), and the advice given in Timothy Leary’s ‘Start Your Own Religion’ (1967) to ‘leave LBJ and Bob Hope’ and instead ‘join Lao-tse, Christ, Blake’ ( High Priest 322). But why Blake? And why the 1960s and 1970s? Given his modest early reputation, why should Blake, more than 130 years after his death, become so prominent in the popular imagination that he was able to rub shoulders with Lao-tse, Christ, Marx, and indeed a host of other luminaries? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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