y to salvation. Examples of these groups include some Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, and certain liberal Christian movements, such as Unitarian-Universalism (which can also be a non-Christian faith, depending on the individual follower). As more people begin to question traditional, dogmatic Western religion, Blake's vision of individual revelation and a personal mythology makes powerful sense to many people. Blake cautions us, however, against deluding ourselves with our personal mythologies in his poem "The Little Black boy" from Songs of Experience. In "Black Boy," Blake describes a young black male, who is just becoming aware of the societal differences between himself and a white boy ("English child") and uses his mother's mythology (which he makes his own) to relegate the solution of the problems of racism to an imagined afterlife where I'll shade him from the heat till he can bearTo lean in joy upon our father's knee (Mack 784).Even more compelling to a modern audience (but definitely less important to Blake) is his emphasis upon science as a tool of understanding. The last line of his unfinished epic poem The Four Zoas is "the dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns" (Damon xi). Many modern individuals would accept science while failing to attempt to create a personal mythology, and this is not at all what Blake is looking for. Does Blake provide a solution to the ills of this world? Is this solution as relevant to modern times as it was to his own? Emphatically, yes to both questions. The similarities between our own age and Blake's are striking. Blake had the Industrial Revolution; we are living in the age of the Information Revolution, which is, with the Internet, entering a new phase which will enable information to be distributed on a scale never before possible. Blake lived in a time when greedy upper-class capitalists exploited the working class for personal profit; we are living in an age in which the nu...
