Nature as imagination itself

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity … and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself." 

                                                                                            William Blake

The quote is from a letter written by Blake to one of his patrons, the Reverend John Trusler, in the summer of 1799. Trusler had hired Blake to produce a series of moral artworks in the style of contemporary caricature. When Trusler criticized Blake’s artistic vision as too ‘imaginative’, Blake let Trusler know in no uncertain terms what he thought of his aesthetic sense. ‘If I am wrong, I am wrong in good company … What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.’ (Collected in Alfred Kazin (ed.), The Portable Blake (London: Penguin Classics, 1979 and reproduced in James Bridle's Ways of Being (London: Penguin Books, 2022)