Indian Influences on Blake: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

The question of how far the poetry and art of William Blake (1757–1827) were influenced by Indian materials is a difficult one. Everyone
agrees that there was some such influence, and discussions of the question range from the fairly cautious—for example, that of Kathleen Raine, who finds (among other instances) echoes of the Bhagavad Gîtå in Blake’s The Song of Los—to the sweeping claims of C. S. Singh, who believes that “Blake’s borrowings from the Hindu sources available to him concern mythical structures, concepts, imagery and symbolism” and that despite using European sources for its “immediate content,” Blake’s “major poetry . . . is structured and shaped by Hindu thought.”