On William Blake, for Romanticon

For Romanticon, I have written a long essay on biographical approaches to William Blake, covering the last thirty years of Blake biography, including what I call the magical war for Blake’s soul that took place between English writers Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, John Higgs’s breezy Blake-as-TED-Talk explainer William Blake vs. The World, and Philip Hoare’s mad, wonderful compendium William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Blake is an artist who has been such a constant presence and inspiration in my life that I felt trying to write directly about him would be like trying to describe the sun, but I have always loved what could be called biographies of reputations, books like Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman or Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars, so I was pleased to make a contribution to this genre via an artist who has meant so much to me. The full piece is paywalled, but a generous chunk (2,500 words or so) covering Ackroyd and Sinclair is free. I do of course encourage you to support Romanticon with a paid subscription.

I should also mention that though it has been rather quiet in the inbox, the last two months have in fact been the hardest I have ever worked at writing, and there are several things I’m very excited to see published, two of which should appear in the next few weeks and one of which will appear in early 2026. I wrote last month of my mild discomfort with the content-creator/subscriber relationship, and in general I would much prefer to strike the aristocratic pose and let writing emerge when it is ready, even if it sometimes means a month or more of silence. The last thing I want is to feel as if you are my customers and I am the harried waiter assuring you that the steak you ordered will arrive on your table soon. And yet, I do feel the need to reassure you, if only because I feel I have done a faintly absurd thing in maintaining a rigorous publishing schedule, writing a long my-year-in-writing recap in which I gush about how much I love maintaining this Substack and subtly intimate that paid subscriptions would be helpful1, and then going dark for a month. Whoops! In any case, be assured you will soon be unable to escape my work, my byline will be in every magazine, my grinning face will be plastered on every billboard and telephone pole, and all of you will curse the day you ever clicked that little blue Subscribe button.