Blake, William

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BLAKE, WILLIAM

BLAKE, WILLIAM (1757–1827), English poet and visual artist.

William Blake, now regarded as a major poet and visual artist, was born and lived all of his life in London with the exception of three years that he spent in the hamlet of Felpham on the southern coast. He was self-educated, having been sent to drawing school at an early age and then apprenticed to an engraver. A painter and professional engraver himself, he published his own works by an original process called "relief etching." These hand-colored works included designs, were produced in small numbers, and are now highly prized. The best known are the collections of short poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, brought together in 1794. His early longer poems America (1793), Europe (1794), and Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1794) had been preceded by the conventionally printed The French Revolution (1791), one book being set in type but never distributed and the others lost or perhaps never written. Blake knew many of the political radicals of his day: Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), William Godwin (1756–1836), Horne Tooke (1736–1812), Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), and others; and to his death he called himself a "liberty boy." However,

his later long works are less overtly political than those mentioned above. Perhaps his most intellectually important work was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1792), which is partly a satirical treatment of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and an expression of a theory of "contraries" derived from but also at odds with that writer's notions. For Blake, "without contraries is no progression"; the human world proceeds by the prolific clash of opposite but necessary forces.

Beginning around 1795, Blake worked on an enormous manuscript poem first called Vala and later The Four Zoas. He never completed it, and the poem was unknown to readers and scholars until Edwin John Ellis (1848–1916) and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) published an inaccurate transcription in 1893. Though chaotic, it is the fullest presentation of the mythology Blake created. It tells of a fall into division of the archetypal giant Albion, representing England, the strife between his parts, and his eventual restoration to unity. Without knowing the story eccentrically told here, readers find Blake's two great later poems Milton and Jerusalem quite obscure. There is some political allegory in all of these poems, but Blake's eccentric, humanistic, radically Protestant religious views had become more important.

Blake's political interests were deeply affected by two events. The first was the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, in which he was physically caught up. His hatred of violence was fueled by this experience. The second was an accusation made against him in 1803. Blake and his wife were living in Felpham at the time, when a drunken soldier entered his garden and refused to leave. Blake forced him up the road toward his barracks. The soldier accused Blake of seditious remarks about the king, a serious charge given the war with France. Since Blake had written critically of George III in Europe, though not actually naming him, it is not implausible that in his anger he may have uttered something quite uncomplimentary. In 1804, Blake stood trial for high treason and was acquitted.

Blake was deeply influenced by the Bible and by the work of John Milton (1608–1674). His Milton (1804–c. 1811) tells of Milton's return from heaven into the spirit of Blake in order to correct the errors of his life and work, one of which in Paradise Lost was the giving of more life and energy to the devil than to God and Jesus. In Jerusalem (completed 1820), Blake tells in one hundred elaborately designed pages of the alienation of Albion from his creations, particularly his daughter Jerusalem, and their eventual reconciliation.

Blake's late years were spent in severe poverty, but in continued artistic activity. In these years he executed some of his greatest designs: the illustrations to the Book of Job, the illustrations to Dante's Commedia, and the splendid woodcuts for Robert John Thornton's 1821 edition of the pastorals of Virgil. In these years, a group of young artists, including George Richmond (1809–1896), Edward Calvert (1799–1883), John Linnell (1792–1882), and Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), gathered about him. Blake influenced these painters and those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. There was a biography in 1863, and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) wrote a study of Blake's poetry in 1868, but his reputation was really rescued from relative obscurity by poets and critics in the early twentieth century.