In this episode of Visionary, Jason Whittaker is joined by the scholar Jodie Marley, whose work includes a study of W. B. Yeats's reception of Blake in mystical circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In this wide-ranging discussion, they look at how Blake was adopted as a mystic and occultist, as well as the important work done by Yeats and his colleague Edwin John Ellis to edit the first collected works of William Blake.

Biographer of the Beats and co-founder of the counter-culture newspaper, International Times, Barry Miles joins Camila Oliveira in conversation about how, through Zapple Records which he set up with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, he came to record Allen Ginsberg's settings of the poetry of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In this fascinating discussion, he also reminisces as to how - with Ginsberg and filmmaker Barbara Rubin - he was instrumental in helping to bring about the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965.

James Keery and Steve Clark begin with a discussion of the ‘song’ performed by ‘Tambourine Man’, which is often regarded as an invitation to Blakean ‘immortal moments’. If ‘the Ruins of Time build Mansions in Eternity’, in Dylan these have become ‘foggy ruins of time’, trading posts on a ‘windy beach’, where black captives may be ‘silhouetted by the sea’. It is also performed within the ‘love and theft’ tradition of blackface minstrelsy: Mr Tambo as a ‘ragged clown’, casting a ‘dancing spell’ upon ‘circus sands’. Race has become a hyper-sensitive issue in recent Blake studies. If Black lives matter, is any representation by a white artist necessarily exploitative; if so, what about Black voices? This talk examines the mid-18th century convergence of British evangelical hymnody with African musical forms, to the extent that one might speak of the negro appropriation of Watts and Wesley. It explores what Blake may have known of this tradition and its influence throughout his work, chart its genealogy through 19th-century blackface minstrelsy, and explore its subsequent exfoliation across 20th century culture. It will conclude by arguing that Blake's prominence in recent popular music (including but not limited to Dylan), usually attributed to celebration of enhanced states of consciousness, is inseparable from his positive ‘Responsing’ to this inheritance.