Maggie's Farm

Ormbsy in The NY Sun begins:

One fine late 18th-century morning, an affluent collector named Thomas Butts came to call on his friend William Blake and found the poet and his wife sitting stark naked in the summer house of their modest lodgings in Lambeth. The happy couple, "freed from those troublesome disguises which have prevailed since the Fall," as his early biographer Alexander Gilchrist put it, were reciting Milton's "Paradise Lost," with William taking the part of Adam and his wife Catherine the role of Eve. Butts was embarrassed, but Blake called out, "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know!" If you or I did this, Gilchrist remarks, "it would be time for our friends to call in a doctor," but in Blake's case, he writes, a recitation of Milton in the nude served to demonstrate the "full simplicity and naïveté" of the poet's character. And yet, Blake was neither simple nor naïve. For him, the everyday world was only the thinnest band of a vast spectrum which extended from the smallest grain of sand to all eternity. To become Adam in the Garden — or, for that matter, Moses or Socrates — he needed only to open wide the eyes of his imagination.

Read the whole thing.