The city was London, England, and I (as usual) was lost. Sure, I had the GPS on my phone—the phone with the newly cracked screen, thanks to a patch of VERY UNEVEN SIDEWALK near Big Ben. But the address at which the GPS insisted I had “arrived” looked nothing like the destination I’d expected. Apparently though, somewhere amidst the glassy buildings which now rose above the neighborhood in which I’d landed, there had once stood the home of eighteenth-century poet William Blake.
Why had I embarked on this ill-fated pilgrimage to Blake’s neighborhood? It was another stop along my backpacking journey to trace the history and consequences of Marxism. Blake and his fellow English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had been two key members of the “Romantic” movement, which marked another milestone on the road to the neo-Marxian “sexual humanism” pervading Western culture. Who were these provocative poets, and how has their thinking helped pave that cultural pathway?
William Blake (1757–1827)
Born and raised in London among a family of non-conformists, Blake helped open a print shop and worked with the publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson’s business served as a social epicenter for a circle of influential political radicals including chemist and Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley and feminist forerunner Mary Wollstonecraft, whom some scholars interpret as pioneering the “free love” movement alongside Blake…
