William Blake’s Radical Wordplay and the Neologism “Warshipped”

Living in London during the turbulent final decade of the eighteenth century, William Blake witnessed his friend and employer, the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson, jailed for six months. Around the suspension of habeas corpus in 1794, there is a conspicuous shift in Blake’s poetic discourse as he began to systematically implement an idiosyncratic mythopoeic lexicon. His neologisms, moreover, highlight a proximal radical agenda. His modification of “worshipped” into “warshipped” speaks to this preoccupation. As this article will set forth, this linguistic adaptation was both a practical response as well as a creative liberation.