A Bastard Kind of Reasoning

<p><b>Ranges widely and deeply across William Blake's oeuvre to show how his post-Newtonian vision of space-time anticipates Einsteinian relativity.</b></p><p>What do Einsteinian relativity eighteenth-century field theory Neoplatonism and the overthrow of three-dimensional perspective have in common? The poet and artist William Blake's <i>geometry</i>-the conception of space-time that informs his work across media and genres. In this illuminating inventive new study Andrew M. Cooper reveals Blake to be the vehicle of a single imaginative vision in which art literature physics and metaphysics stand united. Romantic-period physics was not as others have assumed materialist. Blake's cosmology forms part of his age's deep reevaluation of body and soul of matter and Heaven and even probes what it is to understand understanding reason and substance. Far from being anti-Newtonian Blake was prophetically post-Newtonian. His poetry and art realized the revolutionary potential of Enlightened natural philosophy even as that philosophy still needed an Einstein for its physics to snap fully into focus. Blake's mythmaking exploits the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how sensation imparts physical extension to the world. More striking still Cooper shows how Blake's art of vision leads us today to visualize four-dimensional concepts of space time and Man for ourselves.</p>