Los

• Typically portrayed as a blacksmith, Los is said to be endlessly labouring with his hammer at the furnace, constructing a city of art known as Golgonooza. This sense of creative effort as hard physical labour without end, forged by sweat, fire and determination, stands in contrast to images of refined aristocratic poets being visited by the graceful muses. It is, however, an apt description of Blake spending his entire life working with metal and acids.

• The creation of art, as Los represents it, is not a pleasing pastime or mild entertainment. It is hard and necessary; it is the only way in which our world can be redeemed

• maybe because it is only from the imagination that something new is created

• In Jerusalem, Blake describes both himself and Los when he writes:

  Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me.

  Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task!

  To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

  Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity

  Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination

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References

• Higgs, John. (2021). William Blake vs The World Chapter 5 THE TYGERS OF WRATH (112). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

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