Written within and against a culture in which our capacity for sensuous experience had become truncated by the mechanistic philosophies and sciences of the day, William Blake’s prophetic books align naturally with the ethos of phenomenology. Seizing upon this underexamined kinship, this paper advances a phenomenological reading of a particularly perplexing dynamic within these books: Blake’s complex, oscillatory depictions of nature, now exalted as divine and now degraded as fallen, often within the same works. Enlisting the phenomenological frameworks of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, I argue that Blake’s multivalent conception of nature is not a matter of inconsistency, but rather a cipher of the poet-painter's proto-phenomenological conviction in the immanently creative and constitutive character of human perception. For Blake, as for the post-Husserlian phenomenologists, phenomenal consciousness is not a passive receptor of external realities but an aestheticising force capable of transmuting the same objective world into a manifold of perceptual lifeworlds. Against the materialist dismissal of phenomenal consciousness as marginal, distortional, or altogether illusory, Blake’s prophetic books enable us to wrest from it a redemptive potential: They gesture to how the creative faculty within perception might be harnessed to generate modes of seeing—and in turn modes of being—that place us in harmony, rather than conflict, with our lifeworld.
