‘Rouze up o young men of the new age!’: William blake, theodore roszak, and the counter culture of the 1960s-1970s

Abstract

The voice of Blake … is the voice I have now’, Allen Ginsberg remarked in 1975 (‘Notes’ 28). Although few claimed so completely to possess or to be possessed by Blake, throughout the 1960s and 1970s he seemed an obvious progenitor of the counter culture and its rebellion against technocracy and ‘one-dimensional man’ (Marcuse). Figured variously as prophet, poet, cultural critic, visionary, revolutionary, and shaman, Blake’s influence during this period is evident in, to cite only a few examples, cult books such as Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body (1966), the underground poetry collected by Michael Horowitz in Children of Albion (1969), and the advice given in Timothy Leary’s ‘Start Your Own Rel..