BLAKE, WILLIAM

Engraver, painter, and mystical poet; b. London, Nov. 28, 1757; d. London, Aug. 12, 1827. Blake's parents, Catharine Harmitage and James Blake, a hosier, encouraged his talent for visualization; at the age of 10, he was sent to a drawing school in the Strand, and at 14 he began his apprenticeship (1772–79) to the line engraver James Basire, for whom he copied royal effigies from Gothic tombs. At 21 he began exhibiting historical and poetical watercolors at the Royal Academy.

In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market gardener. The following year, some of his friends printed a volume of his works entitled Poetical Sketches, containing superb lyrics and ironic dramatic fragments revealing disapproval of the American war. In 1784, he wrote An Island in the Moon, a satiric medley showing the author as "Quid, the Cynic," among philosophizing, artistic, and egocentric friends who were interested in Voltaire, Locke, graveyard meditations, Chatterton, the perhaps uncontrollable chemical discoveries of Priestley, and the obtuseness of the Platonizing Thomas Taylor.

In 1788, he began to publish illustrated manifestoes and songs and prophetic poems utilizing an etching process he called "illuminated printing." His small tractates There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One were probably the earliest of these; The Book of Thel and Songs of Innocence were published in 1789; and The Ghost of Abel (1822) was the last.

Blake was now reading lavater and swedenborg; he attended a London conference of Swedenborgians in April 1789. Soon events in France inspired him to write an epic on The French Revolution; of the seven parts he announced, only the first, printed in 1791, survives. He produced two great series of illuminated works in 1795: three historical prophecies called America, Europe, and The Song of Los (comprising "Africa" and "Asia"), that announced a revolutionary apocalypse in Britain to complete those in America and France; and a philosophical series including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that replaced Swedenborg's vision of a balanced universe with a manifesto of revolutionary Christian humanism, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, probing the psychological roots of slavery, and The Book of Urizen with its sequels Ahania and Los, depicting the imaginative inadequacy and collapse of the exterior and interior worlds of Newton and locke.

His other works of this period include the emblems called The Gates of Paradise (1793), Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794), and an outpouring of colorprinted symbolic pictures. For an ambitious edition of Edward Young's Night Thoughts in 1797, Blake made 537 drawings, but only 43 of them were engraved. He next began a symbolic epic as a unique illuminated manuscript. It's first title was Vala, later changed to The Four Zoas, concerning the generation and regeneration by resurrection of Everyman or "Albion."

During this period, Blake was painting a series of illustrations of the Bible for Thomas Butts. In 1800, he moved to Felpham, Sussex, to work near a new patron, William Hayley, but after 3 years of "slumber" and vexation, he returned to London to live out a busy but unprosperous life. The date 1804 on the title pages of Milton (etched about 1808) and Jerusalem (1818–20) may mark the beginning of his new dedication to the kind of artist's life he considered Jesus to have lived. In 1809, he held an exhibition of 16 "Historical and Poetical" paintings, including "apotheoses" depicting Lord Nelson and William Pitt as angels of war, the former in contention with a militant Christ. Pictorial series of his late period, each constituting a prophetic work, include his illustrations of The Grave, The Canterbury Pilgrims, the Book of Job, Pilgrim's Progress, and The Divine Comedy. In 1818, his poem of fiercely didactic lyric fragments, The Everlasting Gospel, affirmed the essential unity of his life's preaching.

Blake died at age 69, followed by his devoted wife, at the same age, four years later. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields. A member of no church, Blake thought of himself as a Christian, but his savior was the creative genius in every man whose gospel was mutual forgiveness. At Blake's Judgment Day, fools perish, the "dark religions" depart, and "sweet Science reigns"—total imaginative consciousness attained through art. As all Blake's literary and philosophical "sources" were transformed to his own idiom, even the Bible, his greatest source, became in his painting and poetry a philosophical, psychological, historical prophecy—"the Great Code of Art."

See Also: mysticism in literature.

Bibliography: Complete Writings, ed. g. keynes (New York 1957–). The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. d. v. erdman, commentary by h. bloom (New York 1965). Illustrations to the Bible: A Catalogue, comp. g. keynes (Clairvaux 1957). a. gilchrist, Life of William Blake (New York 1942). j. lindsay, William Blake: His Life and Work (New York 1979). d. v. erdman, Blake: Prophet against Empire (3d. ed.; Garden City, N.Y. 1977). n. frye, Fearful Symmetry (2d ed. Princeton 1958). p. e. fisher, The Valley of Vision: Blake as Prophet and Revolutionary (Toronto 1961). h. bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (New York 1963). d. bindman, William Blake: His Art and Times (New York 1982).

[d. v. erdman]