October 13, 2026

Cleanse The Doors Of Perception

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Blake wrote this around 1790, in the fevered years after the French Revolution, when he was reacting against Enlightenment rationalism and the narrow moral categories of his age. Working as an engraver in London, he built his own visionary mythology, insisting that imagination was not decoration but a way of seeing truth itself. The line argues that habit and convention close off perception until the world looks small and fixed. For Blake, wonder was not childish escape but the restoration of sight to its full and rightful scope.