Watching the recent film stimulated me to pull down the Peter Ackroyd biography on my shelf and read it. The book is cogent and the right length, always forming and never boring but with just enough analysis from time to time. As I thought, it has helped me appreciate the film a little more. The man was clearly a genius well ahead of his time. The only sad thing is his failure to move in his mind from the light that so much fascinated him to the od who is Light and who created what we see here on earth. I do not suggest for a moment, however, that it would necessarily have made him a better painter - just a safer soul. This has whetted my appetite for a bit more Ackroyd - Blake, More, Poe, Dickens, Collins, Chatterton, Eliot, Pound, Chaucer, etc.
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