An Imaginative Force for Good
My sticky notes from William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare:
His earthly influences are fugitive but you can trace them in the art of his friends.
and:
As John Craxton took his copy of Blake's poems to his army medical as a talisman against the war and the world descended into barbarism and people partied at the Ritz, Bronowski saw Blake as an imaginative force for good. It was through art that opposition could be expressed, Bronowski said, for the generation of Belsen. Yet he too was suspected of radical beliefs, and even as he wrote his book, in which he discussed Blake's trial for sedition, Bronowski was himself placed under the surveillance of the British state.
and:
In their poverty, the Blakes were reduced to just two rooms. The one at the front was a kitchen; it doubled up as a showroom. Its walls were hung with William's art; in the corner, among the pots and pans, stood his press. He and Kate slept in the back room. It was bright in the morning sun, with light forced up from the river. The place was tiny, but clean and orderly, as the Young Ancients would attest. It was their island in the midst of the sea, they said, full of primitive grandeur. They called it the House of the Interpreter and he was their Michael Angelo Blake, sitting up in bed to draw. The nearest to God they could get. There was only one chair and one cupboard; his portfolios lay by his side by his desk, his books in a pile on the floor.
and finally:
I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy, he said.