FROM ENGLISH POETRY TO AMERICAN SONG: REMEDIATING WILLIAM BLAKE INTO THE PSYCHEDELIC MUSICAL BEAT OF THE ’60S
FROM ENGLISH POETRY TO AMERICAN SONG: REMEDIATING WILLIAM BLAKE INTO THE PSYCHEDELIC MUSICAL BEAT OF THE ’60S

Summary/Abstract: As William Blake’s work stretches beyond its textual realm and transcends the time and place of its creation, it finds a home in 1960s America’s music scene, where its popular reception and transformation by artists such as Jim Morrison and Allen Ginsberg needs further investigation. The spirit of rebellion, as well as the visionary and hallucinatory character of the English bard’s poetry has proven to be an endless source of inspiration for stars such as Morrison, who named his famous counter-culture band “The Doors” after a Blakean quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, referring to the opening towards the Infinite. Another notable transmedia adaptation is that of Allen Ginsberg, a self-proclaimed Blake disciple who trusted that the only way to reach true poetry was through music. Consequently, he set the Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music and released them as an album, giving them a contemporary voice and sound. This paper will present a different, less examined facet of four American psychedelic songs – The Doors’ “Break on Through” and “End of the Night”, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s “The Sick Rose” and “Ah! Sunflower” – by using David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation, as it appears in their work Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000). However, instead of applying remediation to the online realm, its double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy will be helpful in analysing the re-embodiment of poetry into music. If the latter is present in the musicians’ mediation by their production companies, performances, album covers, textual information, as well as the imprint of the music industry that supports them, the concept of immediacy is rendered rather differently. While Jim Morrison completely integrates William Blake’s lines into his song and brings the listener closer to the experience, as if personally having gone through the journey beyond the doors of perception, Allen Ginsberg erases his compositional input by maintaining he could reach Blake’s intention and render the songs in the way they had been originally sung by their author.

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