Blake, William

Blake, William (1757–1827), did not go to school, but was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver, and then became a student at the Royal Academy. From 1779 he was employed as an engraver by the bookseller J. Johnson. Flaxman, a follower of Swedenborg, deeply influenced Blake, and introduced him to the progressive intellectual circle of the Revd A. S. Mathew and his wife (which included Mrs Barbauld, H. More, and Mrs E. Montagu); Mathew and Flaxman financed the publication of Blake's first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783). In 1784, with help from Mrs Mathew, he set up a print shop at 27 Broad Street, and at about the same period wrote the satirical An Island in the Moon. He engraved and published his Songs of Innocence in 1789, and also The Book of Thel, both works which manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic vision, and in which he embarks on the evolution of his personal mythology; years later (in Jerusalem) he was to state, through the character Los, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's’, words which have been taken by some to apply to his own need to escape from the fetters of 18th-cent. versification, as well as from the materialist philosophy (as he conceived it) of the Enlightenment, and a Puritanical or repressive interpretation of Christianity. The ambiguity of the much-interpreted Book of Thel heralds the increasing complexity of his other works which include Tiriel (written 1789, pub. 1874), which introduces the theme of the blind tyrannic father, ‘the king of rotten wood, and of the bones of death’, that reappears in different forms in many poems; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (engraved c.1790–3), his principal prose work; and the revolutionary works The French Revolution (1791); America: A Prophecy (1793); and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), in which he develops his attitude of revolt against authority, combining political fervour (he had met Paine at Johnson's) and visionary ecstasy. By this time Blake had already established his poetic range; the long, flowing lines and violent energy of the verse combine with phrases of terse and aphoristic clarity, and he was once more to demonstrate his command of the lyric in Songs of Experience (1794), which include ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright’, ‘O Rose thou art sick’, and other of his more accessible pieces.

Meanwhile the Blakes had moved to Lambeth in 1790; there he evolved his mythology further in The Book of Urizen (1794); Europe: A Prophecy (1794); The Song of Los (1795); The Book of Ahania (1795); The Book of Los (1795); and The Four Zoas (written and revised 1797–1804). In 1800 he moved to Felpham, Sussex, where he worked for his friend and patron Hayley, and on Milton (1804–8). In 1803 he returned to London, to work on Milton and Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion (written and etched, 1804–20). In 1805 he was commissioned by R. H. Cromek to produce a set of drawings for R. Blair's poem The Grave, but Cromek defaulted on the contract, and Blake earned neither the money nor the public esteem he had hoped for, and found his designs engraved and weakened by another hand. This was symptomatic of the disappointment of his later years. Both his poetry and his art had failed to find a sympathetic audience, and a lifetime of hard work had not brought him riches or even much comfort. His last years were passed in obscurity, although he continued to attract the interest and admiration of younger artists, and a commission in 1821 from the painter John Linnell produced his well known illustrations for the Book of Job, published in 1826. A later poem, ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, written about 1818, shows undiminished power and attack; it presents Blake's own version of Jesus, in a manner that recalls the paradoxes of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, attacking the conventional ‘Creeping Jesus’, gentle, humble, and chaste, and stressing his rebellious nature.

At Blake's death, general opinion held that he had been, if gifted, insane. It was not until A. Gilchrist's biography of 1863 that interest began to grow. This was followed by an appreciation by Swinburne (1868) and by W. M. Rossetti's edition of 1874, which added new poems to the canon and established his reputation, at least as a lyric poet; his rediscovered engravings considerably influenced the development of art nouveau. In 1893 Yeats produced with E. J. Ellis a three-vol. edition, with a memoir and an interpretation of the mythology, and the 20th cent. saw an enormous increase in interest. The bibliographical studies and editions of G. Keynes, culminating in The Complete Writings of William Blake (1966, 2nd edn), have added greatly to knowledge of both the man and his works, revealing him not only as an apocalyptic visionary but also as a writer of ribald and witty epigrams, a critic of spirit and originality, and an independent thinker who found his own way of resisting the orthodoxies of his age.

Recently, Blake has had a particularly marked influence on the Beat Generation and the English poets of the Underground movement, hailed by both as a liberator.