On the Road with Penguin Classics · Penguin Random House UK

William Blake's poetry with Philip Pullman

February 1, 2024·56 min·5 clips

Blake wrote his poems backwards on copper plates and colored each copy by hand, a process he claimed was revealed to him by his dead brother.

The poetry starts with opposition. Innocence and experience are not treated as a tidy ladder, with one state replacing the other. They sound more like conditions people carry at the same time: fear beside trust, openness beside damage. The guest keeps Blake's own phrase in view, two contrary states of the human soul, which makes the reading feel precise without closing it down. Then the episode moves indoors, where the visionary work gets its hands dirty. Blake's illuminated books sit inside a household where Katherine helped with printing, labour, and the plain work of staying alive. Their marriage comes across as unusually companionable, not saintly, just close and practical. The guest describes Katherine as his helpmate in every sort of way, and the host lingers over the image of the two of them making books together. A line from Vala, or The Four Zoas, opens another door, tying Blake's private mythology back to his wife through a fictional Katherine. The biography stays grounded. Katherine came from a poor family, the couple had no servants, and art lived beside cooking, cleaning, and making do. Even the Lambeth garden scene, comic as it is, gets treated as more than odd behaviour. With Paradise Lost nearby, the story of the couple reading as Adam and Eve folds theology, marriage, and Blake's literal play into one bright little scene. The episode's larger thought stays inward: innocence and experience are not endpoints. The deeper turn is the soul finding its own strength and divinity.

As heard by us

A warm Blake conversation where poetry, printing, marriage, and spiritual contraries sharpen each other.

William Blake's poetry is treated here as a living argument between contraries, craft, marriage, and inner vision, with Philip Pullman helping trace a path through Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

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For a laugh-out-loud listen with Jamita Jamil and guests sharing mortifying disaster stories.

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