A journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the genius of William Blake.

This program explores four classic poems: "The Tyger" by William Blake, "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll, "in Just - /Spring" by E. E. Cummings, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Poets Kate Clanchy, Michael Donaghy, Roger McGough, Tom Paulin, Clare Pollard, Jean Binta Breeze, and Andrew Motion read the selections, considering their rhythm, rhyme, imagery, and themes.

Ignored during his lifetime, the artist and poet William Blake is now a literary institution. How did this reversal come about? How did a republican, dissident printer, who was considered insane by his contemporaries, become transformed into an icon? The author Peter Ackroyd, Blake's latest biographer, is the guide as this program explores late-Georgian London: a world of political ferment and religious dispute, where the winds of revolution were...

"William Blake, overlooked in his time, remains an enigmatic figure to contemporary readers despite his near canonical status. Out of a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness he created a profoundly original symbolic language, in which words and images unite in a unique interpretation of self and society. He was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience - social, political,...