Blake's spiritual friends and brothers converse together in “Visionary forms dramatic,” and “every Word and Every Character Is Human.” But their experience of mutual interchange and intellectual commingling is largely foreign to the majority of Blake's readers, at least when they are reading Blake. His notorious obscurity, far from allowing such immediate (or unmediated) exchange, has rather demanded, as the proliferating Blake industry bears witness, the mediation of a host of critics and an ever-expanding interpretive apparatus.

Hypotheses about the reasons for this obscurity are many. Blake was mad, or close to it, increasingly entangled in the Urizenic meshes of his own idiosyncratic and finally private symbolic net of religion; he was a mystic, irrationally compiling esoterica from disparate and often contradictory occult sources in the conviction that all pointed to the same ultimately ineffable and wordless truth; he feared censorship, in England's politically unstable and excessively repressive climate following the French revolution, deciding that “deep dissimulation is the only defense an honest man has left;” he wished pedagogically to force his readers into an active grappling with his text, to “rouze [their] faculties to act,” deliberately speaking in riddles and paradoxes so that “hearing they might not hear.”