If painting is deaf poetry, as Simonedes suggested, then poetry is blind painting. William Blake's art was complete, neither deaf nor blind. One of the great lyric poets in the language, he was almost as outstanding an artist. And his pictures, like his poems, partake of music. Blake's figures are all dancing in compositions as supple and clear as Mozart. If they do not seem particularly real, it is because Blake saw through the real world into a clearer place. "Imagination is my world," he said, adding that "he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments than his perishing...
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