User:Lordswood Boys School English/sandbox

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison,[112] Van Morrison,[113][114] and English writer Aldous Huxley. Much of the central conceit of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is rooted in the world of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. After World War II, Blake's role in popular culture came to the fore in a variety of areas such as popular music, film, and the graphic novel, leading Edward Larrissy to assert that "Blake is the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century."[115]

The image of a caged bird in Blake's poem 'The Schoolboy' is extended in David Almond's 1998 novel 'Skellig' in which Blakean references to birds abound, the protagonist and narrator is a disillusioned school boy, and the eponymous 'Skellig'...