Back in January I devoted this space to a eulogy in praise of William Blake – my favourite poet, mystic, engraver, visionary, Londoner and 18th-century human being – and expressed the hope that Britain will celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth as fervently as Austria celebrated Mozart’s 250th birthday last year.

Sadly and shamefully, that hasn’t happened. Blake’s birthday falls next Wednesday and there are, it’s true, odd events marking the date. The William Blake Society is holding a “public conversation” (St James’s, Piccadilly, Thursday) between the Archbishop of Canterbury and an Oxford professor, which will doubtless be enthralling. There’s an intriguing show running at the New Players Theatre in London called Divine Humanity, which claims to combine “the timeless genius of Blake’s prophetic works with the breathtaking immediacy of physical theatre”.

The discerning lit-chicks who run Poems on the Underground have ensured that Tube travellers get a (relatively unknown) bit of Blake to mull over and the Burrell Collection in Glasgow has a fascinating exhibition called Mind-Forg’d Manacles, placing Blake’s art in the context of the abolition of the slave trade, 200 years ago. That may seem like a spurious connection – except that Blake’s fierce antiEstablishment views and the theme of innocence versus corruption that pervades his engravings and poems express so perfectly the Zeitgeist of those revolutionary times.

There may be other events around the country, too. But they don’t amount to a feast of recognition for this humble and impoverished genius who (with Beethoven and Turner) virtually defined the Romantic imagination. So I have picked out four other events in the coming week that aren’t directly connected with Blake, but which demonstrate that his vast and protean talents are still potent in modern Britain.

His daring way of simultaneously treating the same subject verbally and visually, for instance, was a pioneering demonstration of the power of “multimedia” thinking in the arts. Friday’s Barbican concert, which has the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Debussy while art by Monet and Hokusai is projected on screens, is very much in that tradition.

Then there’s Blake’s preoccupation with dreams, nightmares and the subconscious: the tension between external and internal reality. That shadow-land still tantalises us, as a fascinating exhibition called Sleeping and Dreaming, at the Wellcome Collection (Euston Road, London), will show.

Blake’s unorthodox but joyous religious fervour is harder to capture in a Britain that seems increasingly divided between atheists and fundamentalists. But the Festival of Life at the ExCel Centre in London’s Docklands on Friday might give us a flavour: 17,000 believers, drawn from all manner of churches, singing, dancing and praying their way through the night.

And finally, what of Blake’s fierce hatred of violence, cruelty and strife? Well, the ever-indignant activists of the Stop the War Coalition are having a music and poetry rant at St James’s Piccadilly on Friday, featuring Tony Benn, Prunella Scales and more. Today we think nothing of artists and luvviesmaking headline-grabbing political gestures. It took more guts when Blake did it. www.blake250.co.uk

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