Happy Birthday Blake

It's 250 years today since the birth of the poet William Blake in Golden Square, London—in honour of which, among other things, the Guardian has published an excellent essay by Terry Eagleton on Blake's radicalism. Blake is a visionary whose works have endured extraordinarily well, considering the esoteric nature of his mythologies: his call "to see the world in a grain of sand" is an apt description of their marriage of the particular and the universal; and, of course, the written and the seen, thanks to his prodigious gifts as an engraver and illustrator. Admirers can gorge themselves on all things Blakean here.

But how does one spot a visionary? The idea of praising Blake in the same breath as Milton would have been dismissed as absurd by almost the entire literary establishment during Blake's lifetime—and while we may scoff at this today, the clarity of hindsight allows us to forget that innumerable other self-proclaimed visionaries have deservedly vanished into obscurity since 1757 (as, no doubt, some brilliant talents have undeservingly done). The truly original can be hard to identify—and its practitioners often refuse the worldly concessions that might win them early acceptance.

Eager contemporary visionary-spotters could certainly have done worse than listen to the Today programme this morning—which, in honour of Blake, saw poet and sometime Prospectcontributor Michael Horovitz deliver a section from his own book-length work, A New Waste Land: a verse epic inspired by nothing less than the advice of William Blake's ghost. Horovitz certainly got into the spirit of things, concluding his entreaties for the world to "reap the effect of new practical courses" with what can only be described as a feral howl of pure poetic intensity; albeit one pitched an octave or two above the norm for such overmastered outpourings.

You'll find the whole thing about two-and-a-half hours into the Wednesday 28th edition here. But be warned—life may never be quite the same again.