Wit & Attitude Quote by William Blake

Blake is doing two things at once: defending difficulty as a moral good, and drawing a bright line between vision and mere comprehension. The insult is the point. By calling the uninitiated "weak men" and, more viciously, "the idiot", he’s not just posturing as a proud artist; he’s attacking an Enlightenment-era faith that everything worthwhile can be flattened into clear, common language. For Blake, that flattening is a spiritual crime. The grand is "necessarily obscure" because the highest realities (imagination, prophecy, God, freedom) can’t be reduced without being damaged.

The subtext is a warning to readers who come looking for neat takeaways: if you demand explicitness, you’re revealing your limitations, not the work’s. Blake’s contempt lands like a dare. He’s also preemptively insulating himself from critics who read opacity as incompetence. No: if you don’t get it, that’s evidence the thing is doing its job.

Context matters. Blake lived amid revolutions, industrialization, and the rise of rationalist systems that promised to measure the world into sense. His art and poems push back with symbols, mythic machinery, and visionary logic that refuses the era’s utilitarian demand: be useful, be legible, be polite. The line’s sneer is strategic. It recruits the reader’s pride, too. Nobody wants to be the "idiot", so the quote pressures you into a more strenuous mode of attention. Difficulty becomes a gate, but also an invitation: grow stronger, and the obscure can turn luminous.