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1. Born 100 years before the publication of Les Fleurs du mal, Blake was the first urban shaman of the first industrial city who – like Baudelaire’s polluted swan – saw the spiritual condition of the modern human as that of the chimney sweep, sold by parents, labouring in the dark satanic mills.

2. Though not, as Yeats, asserted, of Irish parentage, Blake is the Anglo-Celt par excellence and champion of Albion as an Anglo-Celtic island. His is a revival of Celtic shamanism updated to the Age of Revolution. Always English, his work redefines Englishness.

3. Blake’s bardism - unlike Shakespeare’s - is not of the type that appeases monarchs but of the type that seeks to dispose them: that of the poet Corpry who deposed King Bres by writing a satire – Ireland’s first - on the King’s meanness; that of Taliesin who disobeys and humbles King Maelgwn; that of the prophet Daniel who deciphers “the writing on the wall” decreeing the end of the reign of King Belshazzar. It is Judeo-Celtic in its anti-authoritarian fervour. (NB. At his trial for sedition Blake was accused of saying “Down with the King!”)

4. Of all the great Romantics, Blake was the Londoner, who made the city his own, mapped it as visionary territory, twinned it with Jerusalem, and called it Golgonooza – The City of Art.

5. Blake was constantly immersed in the sacred: King James Bible, Non-Conformist theology, Westminster Abbey, Gothic, Milton, Bunyan, Paracelsus, Boheme, Swedenborg, Dante, Michelangelo, Raphael. Even his more fashionable tastes eg. Chatterton and MacPherson were gateways to the past. His main concession to the ‘profane’ was his love of popular song.

6. The name Blake is a derivation from black, which may have influenced his Manichean/Dualist facility in empathising with the other e.g. ‘The Little Black Boy’ (“And I am black but oh! my soul is white!”) and ‘The Chimney Sweep’ (“A little black thing among the snow/Crying weep! weep! in notes of woe.”)

7. Blake is a great reverer of the body and a master healer of the rift between body and spirit, poet/painter of the physiognomies and lineaments of human nature who posits the human body as “The Divine Image” – the common denominator of humanity, a quasi-Platonic Idea in which “Heathen, Turk and Jew” participate equally. This way his work is always healing the divides in both self and society.

8. As shamanism is the origin of religion, art, healing, so it seeks to return to the origins. Blake in ‘All Religions Are One’- written in his dead brother’s notebook and combining words and images for the first time – identifies The Poetic Genius as the source of religions and the spirit of prophecy. The Poetic Genius – an imaginal reservoir available on tap to cognoscenti – is Blake’s God, what The Great Spirit would be to an Amerindian. As for Yahweh, he was lampooned as Nobodaddy i.e. Daddy Nobody.

9. Artists of Blake’s stature – who are religious educators rather than secular entertainers – cannot very easily be acknowledged in their lifetimes because to do so would be to exalt them to impossible heights, to deify them.

10. One of the great primitivists, Blake's work – in Levi-Straussian terms – is raw rather than cooked i.e. shamanic rather than civic. He is a cave-painter, fire-chanter, soul-retriever.

11. Blake’s use of the term Bard is inspired by Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ - however Blake spurns the classical for a fusion of British and  Judaic muses. His bardic idyll is that of Celtic shamanism with its gradation of Bardic/Vatic/Druidic. Such is his innate anti-authoritarianism that he can go wholeheartedly with the Bardic/Vatic but not so with the Druidic. He deplores human sacrifice and uses it as a central symbol in ‘Jerusalem’. Blake as bard looks on the Druid as a prophet would look on a Pharisee (Some argue he was head of the Druidic order from 1799 until his death in 1827! “All things begin and end in Albions Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.”)

12. In the history of English literature there is nothing as subversive, demonic and liberating as ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ – arguably the single most certifiable major poem in the language. It is Nietzsche 100 years before Nietzsche.

13. Blake – born into a family home built on burial ground, who nursed his dying brother and conversed regularly with him after death, who sketched the dead kings in Westminster Abbey - had a highly developed sense of ‘the ancestors’. He witnessed the opening of the tomb of King Edward I, but - no blind patriot - later portrayed the King as ruthless suppressor of the Welsh bardic renaissance.

14. Blake – often derided, always neglected – deserves a commendation for this refusal to be suicided (like Chatterton) or incarcerated (like Smart). The support of his wife – Catherine Sophia Hermitage – was an inestimable aid.

15. In some shamanic cultures ‘black smiths’ are known to daub themselves in soot. Blake was obsessed with smithcraft, which in Celtic myth is inspired by the Triple Goddess Brid, also divine overseer of poetry and healing. In ‘The Tyger’ Blake lovingly itemises the tools of the trade: ‘anvil’ ‘hammer’ ‘chain’ ‘furnace’. In later books Los – the spirit of creativity – is always depicted as blacksmith of man, forger of souls, “raging round his Anvil”. (NB. The incredible labour of engraving his epics onto copper plates was close to metallurgy.)

16. The disorders – sometimes anxious, neurotic, epileptoid, manic, catatonic, hallucinatory – that are often signs of shamanic vocation – were manifest in Blake as what he himself called his “Nervous Fear”. The shaman’s art is in channelling these daemonic powers into the “Energy” that “is Eternal Delight”. Writing and painting were his techniques of ecstasy.

17. Blake in his poetry is always more than a poet and in his painting more than a painter. This is because he is a ‘saman’ i.e. one who knows. Even his smallest works are imbued and illuminated with an extraordinary gnosis. His songs are as compressed, enlightened and accessible as Jesus’ parables. He is blessed with the moral intelligence that is the hallmark of the prophet.

18. Blake is a master of anger-management who instructs us to use our fury as our blacksmith’s furnace.

19. It is another mark of the shaman that this most individual of poets was also the most impersonal. (The shaman is the wounded healer whose duty is to others). However, he often appears in his own poems/paintings as if playing cameos e.g. Satan rousing the rebel angels, the piper writing down his songs, the glow worm lighting the way for the lost ant. His presence in the work is always visible and audible – as his propensity for shapeshifting.

20. Blake is of the school of Dionysus and Orpheus i.e. membership of which entails being dismembered. In his case, it is a psychic phenomenon caused by such slights as being branded by Hunt’s Examiner as “an unfortunate lunatic”. It is a result of the visionary artist’s separateness from the community and usually leads to justifiable paranoia.

21. What did Blake predict? The Sixties when, for a brief flowering, England did become Albion…it songs, its sex, its freedom, its LSD-induced mass visionary culture, and of course the subsequent clampdown.

22. When someone recited ‘The Tyger’ to Charles Lamb he said: “I must look upon Blake as the one of the most extraordinary persons of the age.” (Perhaps he liked the line: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”)

23. Blake’s beacon is always burning and it will never burn out. He is London’s genius locus and “Guardian Prince of Albion”. As such the level of love for Blake is unique. More people may love – say – Shakespeare but Shakespeareans don’t love Shakespeare as much as Blakeans love Blake. He is the legendary shaman to whom all succeeding shamans look back in awe.