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William Blake, “I Want! I Want!” 1793, Engraving, Butlin 201 40
“By the 1790s, even the most romantically inclined philosophers no longer believed there was a man in the moon. Yet William Blake, with his characteristic combination of unfettered imagination and irrepressible logic, simply surmised that he must have had a very long ladder.
I Want! I Want! is the title of a small etching Blake produced at the height of the French revolutionary terror. A tiny, anonymous figure stands poised on the first rung of a celestial ladder, lodged like a giant toothpick in the smiling crescent moon. It is a devastatingly simple metaphor for the destructive ambition that grows out of humankind’s capacity to dream. The etching is used here as a striking frontispiece for an exhibition in which nine contemporary artists construct their own utopias.”
— Alfred Hickling, I Want! I Want! Northern Gallery, Sunderland, The Guardian, 27 August 2003
