Blake said that reading the prospectus to Wordsworth’s Recluse caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him. What upset his stomach was Wordsworth’s insistence that the imagination cannot be autonomous, that the mind must wed itself to external nature. This position is in stark contrast to Blake’s own faith that ‘Mental Things are alone Real,’ and accordingly that ‘Natural Objects always did – now do weaken, deaden – obliterate Imagination in me.
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