William Blake

William Blake (1757-1827) was an English poet, engraver, and painter. A boldly imaginative rebel in both his thought and his art, he combined poetic and pictorial genius to explore important issues in politics, religion, and psychology.

William Blake was born in London on Nov. 28, 1757, the second son of a hosier and haberdasher. Except for a few years in Sussex, his entire life was spent in London. Its streets and their names took on spiritual symbolism in his writings, much as the place names of the Holy Land did in the writings of the biblical prophets whom Blake always regarded as his spiritual progenitors. From his earliest years he saw visions— trees full of angels, for example. If these were not true mystical visions, it is probably best to regard them not as hallucinations but as the artist's intense spiritual and sensory realization of the world.

At 10 Blake started to attend drawing school; at 14 he began a 7-year apprenticeship to an engraver, and it was as an engraver that Blake was to earn his living for the rest of his life. After he was 21, he studied for a time at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he formed a violent distaste for the academic canons of excellence in art.

In August 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who had fallen in love with him at first sight. He taught her to read and write, and she later became a valued assistant. Although their marriage was to suffer from some of the normal frictions, his "sweet shadow of delight," as Blake called Catherine, was a devoted and loving wife. On her authority there is a description of his appearance: short with a large head and shoulders; not handsome but with a noble and expressive face; his hair yellow-brown, luxuriant, and curling like flames.

Early Works

From his early teens Blake wrote poems, often setting them to melodies of his own composition. When he was 26, a collection entitled Poetical Sketches was printed with the help of the Reverend and Mrs. Mathew, who conducted a cultural salon and were patrons of Blake. This volume was the only one of Blake's poetic works to appear in conventional printed form; he later invented and practiced a new method.

After his father died in 1784, Blake set up a print shop with a partner next door to the family hosiery shop. In 1787 his beloved younger brother and pupil Robert died; thereafter William claimed that Robert communicated with him in visions and guided him. It was Robert, William said, who inspired him with the new method of illuminated etching that was to be the vehicle for his poems. The words, design, or some combination of the two was drawn in reverse on a plate covered with an acid-resisting substance; a corrosive was then applied. From these etched plates pages were printed and later hand-colored. Blake used his unique methods to print almost all his long poems with the exception of An Island in the Moon (ca. 1784), Tiriel (ca. 1789), The Four Zoas (ca. 1795-1803), The Everlasting Gospel (ca. 1818), and a number of short works. The French Revolution exists as printer's proofs.

As an engraver, Blake favored the line rather than chiaroscuro, or masses of light and dark. Blake's predilection for the line rather than "blurs" (as he called them) of color and mass had a philosophical as well as an artistic dimension. To him the line represented the honest clarity of human day as distinguished from the mystery of night.

In 1787 Blake moved to Poland Street, where he produced Songs of Innocence (1789) as the first major work in his new process. This book was later complemented by Songs of Experience (1794). The magnificent lyrics in these two collections systematically contrast the unguarded openness of innocence with the embitteredness of experience. They are a milestone in the history of the arts, not only because they exhibit originality and high quality but because they are a rare instance of the successful fusion of two art media by one man.

After a brief period of admiration for the religious thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, Blake produced in disillusioned reaction The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793). In this satire the "devils" are identified with energy and creative genius, and the "angels" with repression of desire and the oppressive aspects of order and rationality. Some of the same issues arise in The Book of Thel (1789-1791) and Vision of the Daughters of Albion (1793). The former portrays a timid shepherdess who is reluctant to commit herself to the risks of existence, while the latter shows a heroine who casts off such timidity and chooses psychic and sexual liberation.

Blake had become a political radical and was in sympathy with the American Revolution and with the French Revolution during its early years. At Poland Street and shortly after his move to Lambeth in 1793, Blake composed and etched short "prophetic" books concerning these events, religious and political repression in general, and the more basic repression of the individual psyche, which he came to see as the root of institutional tyranny. Among these works (all composed between 1793 and 1795) are America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los, The Song of Los, and The Book of Ahania. In these poems Blake began to work out the powerful mythology he refined in his later and longer prophecies. He presented this mythology completely in his first epic-length poem, The Four Zoas (ca. 1795-1803). This difficult but mighty myth shows how religious and social evils are rooted in the internal warfare of man's basic faculties—reason (Urizen), passion (Luvah), instinct (Tharmas), and inspiration or prophetic imagination (Los or Urthona, who becomes more markedly the hero of Blake's long epics). But Blake was apparently unsatisfied with The Four Zoas. Although he drew freely on it for his later epics, he left the poem unengraved.

Felpham Period

Blake spent the years 1800 to 1803 working in Felpham, Sussex, with William Hayley, a minor poet and man of letters. With genuine good intentions Hayley tried to cure Blake of his unprofitable and unseemly enthusiasms and secured him commissions for safely genteel projects— painting ladies' fans, for example. Blake finally rebelled against this condescension and rejected Hayley's help. One result of this conflict was Blake's long poem Milton (ca. 1800-1810). In this work the spiritual issues involved in the quarrel with Hayley are allegorized, and Blake's larger themes are dramatized through an account of the decision of the poet Milton to renounce the safety of heaven and return to earth to rectify the errors of the Puritan heritage he had fostered.

In 1803 Blake had a still more disturbing experience when a soldier whom he had evicted from his garden accused him of uttering seditious sentiments—a charge that in the witch-hunting atmosphere of the time was serious indeed. Blake was tried and acquitted, but he saw in the incident further confirmation of his views on the conflict between a sadistic society and the man of humane genius. The trial experience colors much of Blake's titanic final epic, Jerusalem (ca. 1804-1820).

Later Years

Back in London, living in South Molton Street, Blake worked hard at his poems, engraving, and painting, but he suffered several reverses. He was the victim of fraud in connection with his designs for Blair's The Grave and received insulting reviews of that project and of an exhibition he gave in 1809 to introduce his idea of decorating public buildings with portable frescoes. Blake wrote three prose pieces based on the events of this time: Descriptive Catalogue (1809), Public Address (1810), and Vision of the Last Judgment (1810).

The next decade is a somber and obscure period in Blake's life. He did some significant work, including his designs for Milton's poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso (1816) and the writing of his own poem The Everlasting Gospel (ca. 1818), but he was sometimes reduced to hackwork and the public did not purchase or read his prophecies. After 1818, however, conditions improved. He became acquainted with a group of young artists who respected him and appreciated his work. His last 6 years were spent at Fountain Court, where Blake did some of his best pictorial work: the illustrations to the Book of Job and his unfinished Dante. In 1824 his health began to weaken, and he died singing on Aug. 12, 1827.

Continuing Influence

Blake's history does not end with his death. In his own lifetime he was almost unknown except to a few friends and faithful patrons, like Thomas Butts and the young disciples he attracted in his last years. He was even suspected of being mad. But interest in his work grew during the mid-19th century, and since then painstaking commentators have gradually elucidated Blake's beautiful, intricate, and difficult mythology. The 20th century has made him its own; he has been acclaimed as a kindred spirit by psychologists, writers (most notably William Butler Yeats), radical theologians, rock-and-roll musicians, and devotees of Oriental religion. He has furnished texts to a wide variety of rebels against war, orthodoxy, and almost every kind of psychic and personal repression.

Further Reading

The standard editions of Blake's writings are Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Complete Writings of William Blake (1957; rev. ed. 1966), and David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (1965), with commentary by Harold Bloom. Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake (1863), is still a standard biography; another biography is Mona Wilson, The Life of William Blake (1927; rev. ed. 1948). For Blake the artist see Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (1959). For the reader making his first acquaintance with Blake, Max Plowman, An Introduction to the Study of Blake (1927; 2d ed. 1967), and Herschel M. Margoliouth, William Blake (1951), are recommended. The most searching critical study is Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947). Excellent commentary on the longer poems is provided by S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), and Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (1963). □

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.

Blake, William (1757–1827) English poet, philosopher, and artist, one of the most extraordinary personalities to emerge during the period of Romanticism. A visionary, he believed that spiritual reality lies hidden behind the visible world of the senses and he attempted to create a symbolic language to represent his spiritual visions. He worked as a commercial engraver in the 1780s, but from c.1787 he began printing his own illustrated poems in colour. The first example was Songs of Innocence (1789). Blake's two patrons, Thomas Butts and John Linnell, enabled him to pursue his individual path as a poet-illustrator, producing notable engravings for Jerusalem (1804–20). Towards the end of his life, he joined a circle of younger artists who appreciated his remarkable powers, notably Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert. It was not until the late 19th century that Blake's work achieved general recognition. He was extremely prolific and his prints, illustrations, and tempera paintings can be found in several important public collections in England and the USA. Among his other productions were Songs of Experience (1794), prophetic books portraying his private mythologies such as The Book of Urizen (1794) and The Four Zoas (1797), and illustrations to The Book of Job and to the Divine Comedy by Dante

http://www.blakearchive.org.uk; http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/blakeinteractive

Blake, William (1757–1827). Artist, engraver, philosopher, visionary, and poet, Blake regarded art, imagination, and religion as one and aimed to create, through poetry and painting, a ‘visual symbolism’ to express his ‘spiritual vision’ and ‘mystical philosophy’. After drawing school and apprenticeship to an engraver, Blake briefly attended the Royal Academy where he was at odds with Joshua Reynolds. Returning to engraving, he became engrossed in what he called ‘illuminated painting’, an attempt to produce books in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts. His first major work was Songs of Innocence in 1789, and Songs of Experience was published in 1794. Blake longed for fame and an enthusiastic audience, to build a New Jerusalem, but refused to compromise to make his work more accessible. He spent many years in poverty, saved only by the patronage of artist John Linnell and others. He spent his later years drawing rather than writing, surrounded by admirers, who included Samuel Palmer. Individual, nonconformist, experimental, Blake's work still challenges and mystifies, yet it includes two of the best-known poems in the English language, ‘Tyger, tyger’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

June Cochrane

Blake, William (1757–1827). Artist, engraver, philosopher, visionary, and poet, Blake regarded art, imagination, and religion as one. His first major work was Songs of Innocence in 1789, and Songs of Experience was published in 1794. Blake longed for fame and an enthusiastic audience, to build a New Jerusalem, but spent many years in poverty, saved only by the patronage of artist John Linnell. He spent his lateryears drawing rather than writing, surrounded by admirers. Individual, nonconformist, experimental, Blake's work still challenges and mystifies, yet it includes two of the best‐known poems in the English language, ‘Tyger, tyger’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

Blake, William (1757–1827). Poet, artist, and visionary. Trained as an engraver, he soon combined his talent for illustration with his poetic gifts and, with Songs of Innocence (1789), began a series of works, engraved and combining text and coloured illustration. His vision combined a positive acceptance of, and delight in, the world of the senses, both the immediately pleasing and that which is darker and more threatening: it was expressed through verbal and visual imagery that became increasingly complex and allegorical. The key to all this Blake found in various occult traditions—hermetic, Neoplatonic, gnostic, and especially the theosophy of Swedenborg.

Blake, William (1757–1827), poet and artist. His works include Songs of Innocence (1789); Songs of Experience (1794); his poem Milton (1804), the proem of which consists of the famous ‘Jerusalem’, widely used as a national hymn; and his allegorical poem Jerusalem. His books were mostly engraved by hand and illustrated by coloured drawings. In the Illustrations to the Book of Job (1826) the figures, often of elemental strength and beauty, move in the atmosphere of crude black and white contrasts which give Blake's works their characteristic impression of haunting unreality.