Edward Clarke thinks as he runs, and this piece is the result of the process

Three or four mornings a week I run across the Devil’s Backbone, up the Happy Valley, past Chilswell Farm, and on to Boars Hill. At the bottom of John Masefield’s old garden, I reflect without fail that I really must read some of his poetry one of these days, and then I turn back to town, quickly to forget all about Masefield yet again.

As I slither down the soggy paths in my Italian mountain-running shoes and rapt dawn mood, Oxford looks to me just like John’s vision of the New Jerusalem at the very end of the Bible. If it is a sunny morning the city looks momentarily like “a new heaven and a new earth”, as if it is “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”.

Then I hear traffic on the ring road. I start thinking about small outstanding administrative tasks, meetings scheduled for the day, or all of the essays I have yet to mark. At last my sprint, back along the Devil’s Backbone, fixes me again, like Dante’s Satan at the end of the Inferno, in the pleasant enough Hell of modern academia.

The Gothic towers and spires of Oxford were, of course, intended to embody in stone and glass John’s description of “that great city”: “the holy Jerusalem” that comes to us out of our future in eternity.

The intricate stained windows of the college chapels were made to reflect this city of “pure gold like unto clear glass”.

The origins of the university are religious; the earliest students were young monks who attended lectures in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin on the High Street.

Generations later, in the 18th century, the poet-prophet-engraver William Blake sought to create in his art a city he called “Golgonooza”, or “the spiritual fourfold of London eternal”, a kind of New Jerusalem for our age “In England’s green and pleasant Land”.

I’m always half-disturbed and amused when my students of Romantic poetry misread “Golgonooza” as “gorgonzola” in class. Perhaps they’re thinking more of lunch than sacred knowledge.

But I remind them that Blake is concerned about cultivating the divine Imagination in your skull. He is definitely not fantasising about Italian cheese. He is trying to awake you from the deadly sleep of materialism into a New Jerusalem within.

When I reflect on falling applications for arts degrees across British universities and the valorisation of STEM subjects, or even the materialist concerns of many current humanities courses, I know that no campus today could be described in terms of the New Jerusalem or Golgonooza.

Blake would have complained that these are not places in which the divine Imagination is encouraged especially to expand into boundless creativity.

Could he visit our lecture halls and heavily-inspected schools he would probably see in his mind’s eye “Aged Ignorance” clipping the wings of fiery youth.

Occasionally, though, when I’m teaching Yeats and Blake or even Milton and Shakespeare, I have a feeling that I’m maturing thoughts of gorgonzola into visions of Golgonooza.

Read aright, I am certain that these figures have already smuggled back into Oxford’s quads the spiritual resources to live hereafter in our troubled and all too reasonable world.

Edward Clarke’s new book, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, is published by IFF Books.