Visionaries and Revolutionaries: William Blake and Thomas De Quincey on Transgressions and the Authenticity of the Artist Anonymous College

William Blake and Thomas De Quincey embark on the quest of knowledge to enlighten humanity on that which lies beyond the peripheries of everyday life. Their visionary quest is a personal mission, in which their agenda is to broaden society’s understanding of intangible ideas and their multiplicities and effervescence: love, death, fears, God, dreams, nightmares, and the inward self. De Quincey stumbles onto this by chance – the visionary gift awaiting him on the cusp of actualization. He uses opium to relieve a bodily ache, instead what he experienced were the lines in between daily life. Pleasure and pain are on the same dimension, and like the Songs of Innocence and Experience, one cannot have one without the other.

Blake is to bear the weight of the visionary gift his entire life, from childhood to death’s door. This is the work of a lifetime and he masters it, rather than letting it master him. Though Blake and De Quincey are both writers who beheld the visionary gift, Blake’s writing is revolutionary and transgressive. De Quincey’s visions are under the influence of opium, and that limits his experiences to only a state of intoxication. He does not allow it to take him over completely, which leads to a fear of the gift...