Chapter I. – William Blake
4
Introducing William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827), who lived in
the latter half of the eighteenth century and the early part of
the nineteenth, was a profoundly stirring poet who was, in
large part, responsible for bringing about the Romantic
movement in poetry. He was able to achieve "remarkable
results with the simplest means"; and was one of several
poets of the time who restored "rich musicality to the
language".1 His research and introspection into the human
mind and soul has resulted in his being called the "Columbus of the psyche," and because no
language existed at the time to describe what he discovered on his voyages, he created his
own mythology to describe what he found there.2 He was an accomplished poet, painter, and
engraver.
Despite the work of such 17th century baroque poets as Henry Vaughan (1622-1695),
and Richard Crashaw (1612-1649), England had no visionary tradition in its literature before
the brilliant English poet, painter, engraver and visionary mystic - William Blake. His handillustrated series of lyrical and epic poems, beginning with Songs of Innocence (1789) and
Songs of Experience (1794), form one of the most strikingly original and independent bodies
of work in the Western cultural tradition. Blake is now regarded as one of the earliest and
greatest figures of Romanticism. Yet he was ignored by the public of his day and was called
mad because he was single-minded and unworldly; he lived on the edge of poverty and died
in neglect.
"I know I am inspired!" could be the foundation of his obscurity as well as of his dynamic
enthusiasm. He was ambitious for fame; he longed for, even demanded, an audience as
enthusiastic as himself, to build the Jerusalem he was looking for in England's green and
1
Appelbaum, Stanley - Introduction to English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. [Mineola, Dover, 1996.]
(Chpt. V.)
2
Damon, S. Foster. - A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. [New York, Dutton, 1971.]
(Chpt. IX.)
Chapter I. – William Blake
5
pleasant land. He was after all writing at a time when the Age of reason was turning into an
Age of Enthusiasm.3 But he had a naive, almost arrogant confidence in the power of his own
inspiration. Burning with its fire, convinced that to hear him must be to applaud, he failed to
realize that he must also address himself to the minds of his audience before they could hear
him. He never made any concessions to them, and as a result they made none to him. He
sought to project his inner enthusiasm on to the public, but chose one method after another
that ensured that his audience would regard his enthusiasms, not as inspiration, but as mere
eccentricity or worse.
Blake scholars disagree on whether or not Blake was a mystic. In the Norton Anthology, he is
described as "an acknowledged mystic, [who] saw visions from the age of four".4 Frye,
however, who seems to be one of the most influential Blake scholars, disagrees, saying that
Blake was a visionary rather than a mystic. "'Mysticism' . . . means a certain kind of religious
techniques difficult to reconcile with anyone's poetry," says Frye. 5 He next says that
"visionary" is "a word that Blake uses, and uses constantly" and cites the example of Plotinus,
the mystic, who experienced a "direct apprehension of God" four times in his life, and then
only with "great effort and relentless discipline." He finally cites Blake's poem "I rose up at
the dawn of day," in which Blake states,
I am in God's presence night & day,
And he never turns his face away.
Besides all of these achievements, Blake was a social critic of his own time and considered
himself a prophet of times to come. Frye says that "all his poetry was written as though it
were about to have the immediate social impact of a new play". 6 His social criticism is not
only representative of his own country and era, but strikes profound chords in our own time as
well. As Appelbaum said in the introduction to his anthology English Romantic Poetry,
"[Blake] was not fully rediscovered and rehabilitated until a full century after his death". For
Blake was not truly appreciated during his life, except by small cliques of individuals, and
was not well-known during the rest of the nineteenth century.7
3
Murry, John Middleton - William Blake. [London, Jonathan Cape, 1933.] (p.12.)
Mack, Maynard (ed.) - "William Blake" in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition,
Volume 2. [New York: Norton, 1995.] (p. 783.)
5
Frye, Northrop - Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. [Boston, Beacon Press, 1967.] (Chpt. 8.)
6
c.a. (Chpt. 4.)
7
Appelbaum, Stanley - Introduction to English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. [Mineola, Dover, 1996.]
(Chpt. V.)
4
Chapter I. – William Blake
6
Blake's life might seem uneventful, but his inner life was so exciting that it did not
matter. His enthusiasm lifted him out of London into Jerusalem - or rather, brought Jerusalem
into London and turned a rainbow over Hyde Park into a gateway to heaven. Blake's
enthusiasm are not the toad-like crazes of a perpetually unsatisfied man, but the developing
insights of someone with a wide-ranging mind responding to life's rejections of his hopes, not
by losing hope, but by rebuilding it. And each stage has its own artistic correlative.
Blake was born November 28, 1757, in London. His father was a hosier living in
Broad Street in the Soho district of London, where Blake lived most of his life. He was the
second son of a family of four boys and one girl. Only his younger brother Robert was of
great significance in William's life, as he was the one to share his devotion to the arts.8
William grew up in London and later described the visionary experiences he had as a child in
the surrounding countryside, when he saw angels in a tree at Peckham Rye and the prophet
Ezekiel in a field. William very soon declared his intention of becoming an artist in 1767, and
was allowed to leave ordinary school at the age of ten to join a drawing school and started to
attend the drawing school of Henry Pars in the Strand. He educated himself by wide reading
and the study of engravings from paintings by the great Renaissance masters. Here he worked
for five years, but, when the time came for an apprenticeship, his father was unable to afford
the expense of his entrance to a painter's studio. A premium of fifty guineas, however,
enabled him, aged nearly fifteen, to enter on 4 August 1772 the workshop of a masterengraver, James Basire. There, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, he worked
faithfully for seven years, learning all the techniques of engraving, etching, stippling and
copying. This thorough training equipped him as a man who could later claim with justice that
he was one of the finest craftsmen of his time, one moreover able not only to develop and
improve the conventional modes throughout his life, but also to invent methods of his own.
Basire sent him to make drawings of the sculptures in Westminster Abbey, and thus awakened
his interest in Gothic art.9
8
Keynes, Geoffrey - William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967.] ("An Introduction to William Blake")
9
Wilson, Mona - The Life of William Blake. [(ed.) Geoffrey Keynes. London, Oxford University Press, 1971.]
Chapter I. – William Blake
7
On completion of his apprenticeship in 1779 Blake entered the Royal Academy as an
engraving student. His period of study there seems to have been stormy. He took a violent
dislike to Sir Joshua Reynolds, then president of the Royal Academy, rebelling against his
aesthetic doctrines, and felt that his talents were being wasted. He was initially influenced by
the engravings he studied of the works of Michelangelo and Raphael. He made drawings from
the antique in the conventional manner and some life studies, though he soon rejected this
form of training, saying that 'copying nature' deadened the force of his imagination. For the
rest of his life he exalted imaginative art above all other forms of artistic creation, scarcely
any of his productions being strictly representational.
While still at the Academy he was earning his living by engraving for publishers and was also
producing independent watercolours. At this time his friends included the "roman group" of
brilliant young artists, among them the sculptor John Flaxman and the painter Thomas
Stothard.10 He also came into contact with the highly original Romantic painter Henry Fuseli
at this time, whose work may have influenced him. He began his career as an engraver and
artist, and was an apprentice to Henry Fuseli for a time. He then became deeply impressed
with the work of his contemporary figurative painters like James Barry, John Mortimer, and
Henry Fuseli, who, like Blake, depicted dramatically posed nude figures with strongly
rhythmic, linear contours. Fuseli's extravagant pictorial fantasies in particular freed Blake to
distort his figures to express his inner vision.11 In 1784 he set up a print shop; although it
failed after a few years, for the rest of his life Blake eked out a living as an engraver and
illustrator.12
In the late 1760s and '70s the "roman group" circle of British painters in Rome had
already begun to find academic precepts inadequate. James Barry, the brothers John and
Alexander Runciman, John Brown, George Romney, and the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli
favoured themes – whether literary, historical, or purely imaginary – determined by a taste for
the pathetic, bizarre, and extravagantly heroic. Mutually influential and highly eclectic, they
combined, especially in their drawings, the linear tensions of Italian Mannerism with bold
contrasts of light and shade. Though never in Rome, John Hamilton Mortimer had much in
common with this group, for all were participants in a move to found a national school of
10
Wilson, Mona - The Life of William Blake. [(ed.) Geoffrey Keynes. London, Oxford University Press, 1971.]
Bindman, David - Blake as an Artist. [Oxford, Phaidon, 1977.] (p. 53-56.)
12
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.]
11
Chapter I. – William Blake
8
narrative painting. Fuseli's affiliations with the German Romantic Sturm und Drang writers
predisposed him, like Flaxman, toward the "primitive" heroic stories of Homer and Dante.
Flaxman himself, in the two-dimensional linear abstraction of his drawings, a twodimensionality implying rejection of Renaissance perspective and seen for instance in the
expressive purity of "Penelope's Dream" (1792-93), had important repercussions throughout
Europe. Both Fuseli and Flaxman highly influenced both Blake's interest in mythology and
the heroic and also his attitude towards art.13
William
Blake
absorbed
and
outstripped the Fuseli circle, evolving
new images for a unique private
cosmology, rejecting oils in favour of
tempera
and
watercolour,
and
depicting, as in "Pity" (1795), a
shadowless
world
of
soaring,
supernatural beings. His passionate
rejection
of
rationalism
and
materialism, his scorn for both Sir
William Blake – Pity
Joshua Reynolds and the Dutch
Naturalists, stemmed from a conviction that "poetic genius" could alone perceive the infinite,
so essential to the artist since "painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in
immortal thoughts." 14
In his painting, (as well as in his poetry), Blake seemed to most of his contemporaries to be
completely out of the artistic mainstream of their time. His art was in fact far too adventurous
and unconventional to be easily accepted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
He has been called a pre-romantic because it was not only in poetry that he rejected
neoclassical literary style and modes of thought, his graphic art too defied 18th-century
conventions. Always stressing imagination over reason, he felt that ideal forms should be
constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. His rhythmically patterned
linear style is also a repudiation of the painterly academic style. Blake's attenuated, fantastic
figures go back, instead, to the medieval tomb statuary he copied as an apprentice and to
13
14
Bindman, David - William Blake, His Art and Times. [Thames and Hudson, 1982.] (p. 15-23.)
c.a. (p. 45.)
Chapter I. – William Blake
9
Mannerist sources. The influence of Michelangelo is especially evident in the radical
foreshortening and exaggerated muscular form in one of his best-known illustrations,
popularly known as The Ancient of Days, the frontispiece to his poem Europe, a Prophecy
(1794).15
For this reason Blake remained virtually unknown until Alexander Gilchrist's biography was
published in 1863, and he was not fully accepted until his remarkable modernity and his
imaginative force, both as poet and artist, were recognized in the twentieth century. 16 In spite
of this his paintings belong to a recognizable artistic tradition, that of English figurative
painting of the later 18th century.
Throughout his life Blake stressed the superiority of line, or drawing, over colour,
commending the "hard wirey line of rectitude." He condemned everything that he felt made
painting indefinite in contour, such as painterly brushwork and shadowing. Finally, Blake
stressed the primacy of art created from the imagination over that drawn from the observation
of nature. The figures in Blake's many prints and watercolour and tempera paintings are
notable for the rhythmic vitality of their undulating contours, the monumental simplicity of
their stylised forms, and the dramatic effectiveness and originality of their gestures. He also
showed himself a daring and unusually subtle colourist in many of his works. Much of Blake's
painting was on religious subjects: illustrations of the work of John Milton, his favourite poet
(although he rejected Milton's Puritanism), for John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and for the
Bible, including 21 illustrations to the 'Book of Job'. Blake's favourite subjects were episodes
from the Bible, along with episodes found in the works of Milton and Dante. Among his
secular illustrations were those for an edition of Thomas Gray's poems and the 537
watercolours for Edward Young's Night Thoughts - only 43 of which were published. His
illustrations for the Book of Job were done late in life, and they mark the summit of his
achievement in the visual arts.17
15
Blunt, Anthony - The Art of William Blake. [Columbia University Press, New York, 1963.] (p. 78.)
Keynes, Geoffrey - William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967.] ("An Introduction to William Blake")
17
Blunt, Anthony - The Art of William Blake. [Columbia University Press, New York, 1963.] (p. 12.)
16
Chapter I. – William Blake
10
The spiritual, symbolical expression of Blake's complex sympathies, his ability to recognize
God in a single blade of grass, inspired Samuel Palmer, who, with his friend Edward Calvert,
extracted from nature a visionary world of exquisite, though short-lived, intensity.18
On August 18, 1782, Blake married a poor, illiterate girl, Catherine Boucher, who
was to make a perfect companion for him. Having married, Blake left his father's home and
rented a small house round the corner in Poland Street, being joined there by his brother
Robert after their father's death in 1784. William then began to train Robert as an artist.
Meanwhile he himself, self-educated, had already acquired a wide knowledge of poetry,
philosophy and general literature, and was ready to take his place among people of
intelligence. He attended social gatherings of intellectuals, to whom he even communicated
his own poems, sometimes singing them to tunes of his own composition.19 Flaxman
introduced him to the Rev. Anthony S. Mathew and his wife, and for a time Blake was one
of the chief attractions at their literary parties. Flaxman and Mathew paid for the printing of a
collection of verses by their young friend, Poetical Sketches (1783). A preface provides the
information that the verses were written between Blake's 12th and 20th years. This is a
remarkable first volume of poetry, and some of the poems contained in it have a freshness, a
purity of vision, and a lyric intensity unequaled in English poetry since the 17th century.20
Blake's visits to the Mathews' eventually became less frequent and finally ceased.
Nevertheless, in the 1780s he was one of a group of progressive-minded people that met at the
house of Blake's employer, the Radical bookseller Joseph Johnson. His mind was developing
an unconventional and rebellious quality, acutely conscious of any falsity and pomposity in
others, so that about 1784 or 1787 he wrote a burlesque novel, known as An Island in the
Moon, in which he ridiculed contemporary manners and conventions, and in which members
of this group are satirized.
In 1784, after his father's death, Blake started a print shop in London and took his
younger brother Robert to live with him as assistant and pupil. Early in 1787 Robert fell ill
and in February he died; and William, who had nursed him devotedly, later said that he had
seen Robert's soul joyfully rising through the ceiling. At the moment of Robert's death his
18
c.a. (p. 34.)
Keynes, Geoffrey - William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967.] ("An Introduction to William Blake")
20
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.]
19
Chapter I. – William Blake
11
visionary faculty enable him to see "the released spirit ascend heavenwards, clapping its
hands for joy".21 For the rest of his life William claimed that he could communicate with this
brother's spirit and gain strength from his advice. He also said that Robert had appeared to
him in a vision and revealed a method of engraving the text and illustrations of his books
without having recourse to a printer.
This method was Blake's invention of what he called "illuminated printing," in which, by a
special technique of relief etching, each page of the book was printed in monochrome from an
engraved plate containing both text and illustration: an invention foreshadowed by his friend,
George Cumberland. Although his method of illuminated printing is not completely
understood, the most likely explanation is that he wrote the words – not in reversed script, as
an engraver must normally do – and drew the pictures for each poem on a copper plate, using
some liquid impervious to acid, which when applied left text and illustration in relief. After
etching away the unwanted material, the plate became one large piece of type, to be inked and
printed on his engraver's press. Ink or a colour wash was then applied, and the printed picture
was finished by hand in watercolours. Thus each print is itself a unique work of art. As an
artist Blake broke the ground that would later be cultivated by the Pre-Raphaelites.
Most of Blake's works after the Poetical Sketches were engraved and "published" in this way,
and so reached only a limited public during his lifetime. Today these "illuminated books,"
with their dynamic designs and glowing colours, are among the world's art treasures. Most of
Blake's paintings (such as "The Ancient of Days" or the frontispiece to Europe: a Prophecy)
are actually prints too made from copper plates, which he etched in his 'illuminated printing'
method.
The product of his first enthusiasm is the foundation of all the rest; it reveals him, not
as the preacher of doctrines of free innocence, or as a mystical thinker, but as that typical
eighteen-century figure, the inventor. In other hands his invention might well have succeeded:
the re-creation in modern guise of the medieval illuminated book, text and design together as
unity, but using new techniques to make reproduction feasible. Illustrated books were much in
demand, but not easy to produce. Blake was writing poetry; how better to see it published
than in the style of medieval illuminated book, a hand-made, unique work of art? As a poet
21
Keynes, Geoffrey - William Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience. [New York: Oxford University
Press, 1967.] ("An Introduction to William Blake")
Chapter I. – William Blake
12
and artist, he could create the whole work, and the result would be as fine as an illustrated
manuscript. But there was no need for the work to remain unique; as an engraver he had the
skill and the means to make multiple copies. Many of the plates, especially in the Songs,
America and Europe, fulfil his hopes and make one artistic unity, poem and design.22
In his readiness to invent new techniques, Blake was typical of his age. His "illuminated books"
were usually coloured with watercolour or printed in colour by Blake and his wife, bound
together in paper covers, and sold for prices ranging from a few shillings to 10 guineas. He
must have thought his fortune was made. True, it was a clumsy process by our standards, and
did not produce a very well-defined or legible text, but it satisfied Blake's needs, and he used it
as long as he wrote poetry. It might well have made him a success, if he had produced works
that the public wanted to see. But apart from Songs of Innocence, a children's poetry book
which might well have found a market, he used it almost entirely for his own ideological
campaign. Even this might have succeeded – Shelley found an audience – but Blake's books
used an idiom that even his friends found hard to understand.
William Blake created a unique form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical
vision, belongs to the most original lyric and prophetic poetry in the language. His poetry and
visual art are inextricably linked, therefore to fully appreciate one you must see it in context
with the other. As was to be Blake's custom, he illustrated the Songs with designs that demand
an imaginative reading of the complicated dialogue between word and picture. 23 You could
say, he was one of those 19th century figures who could have and should have been
"beatniks", along with Rimbaud, Verlaine, Manet, Cézanne and Whitman.
The first books in which Blake made use of his new printing method were two little
tracts, There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One, engraved about 1788. They
contain the seeds of practically all the subsequent development of his thought. In them he
boldly challenges accepted contemporary theories of the human mind derived from Locke and
the prevailing rationalistic-materialistic philosophy and proclaims the superiority of the
imagination over other "organs of perception," since it is the means of perceiving "the
Infinite," or God. Immediately following these tracts came Blake's first masterpieces, in an
astonishing outburst of creative activity: Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel (both
22
Bindman, David - Blake as an Artist. [Oxford, Phaidon, 1977.] (p.58.)
Mitchell, W.J.T. - Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1978.] (p. 13.)
23
Chapter I. – William Blake
13
engraved 1789), The French Revolution (1791), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (both engraved 1793), and Songs of Innocence and
Experience (1794). The production of these works coincided with the outbreak of the French
Revolution, of which Blake, like the other members of the group that met at Johnson's shop,
was at first an enthusiastic supporter. Blake significantly differed from other English
revolutionaries, however, in his hatred of deism, atheism, and materialism, and his profound,
though undogmatic, religious sense.24
Blake did, however, approve of some of the measures that individuals and societies took to
gain and maintain individual freedom. As Appelbaum said, "He was liberal in politics,
sensitive to the oppressive government measures of his day, [and] favorably inspired by the
American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution".25 This is the time when Blake
keeps an intensive communication with the revolutionary American political thinker Thomas
Paine. According to Keynes, Blake wrote many positive and appreciative things about him,
for instance, such as "The Bishop never saw the Everlasting Gospel any more than Tom
Paine".26 As "London" shows, however, Blake did not entirely approve of the measures taken
to forward the causes he longed to advance: "London" refers to how the "hapless Soldier's
sigh/ runs in blood down Palace walls" ["London" 791]. Among many other events which
took place during the French Revolution, this could possibly refer to the storming of the
Bastille or the executions of the French nobility.
Blake began writing poetry at the age of 12, and his first printed work, Poetical
Sketches (1783), is a collection of youthful verse. Amid its traditional, derivative elements are
hints of his later innovative style and themes. As with all his poetry, this volume reached few
contemporary readers. Blake's most popular poems have always been Songs of Innocence
(1789). These lyrics are notable for their eloquence. In 1794, disillusioned with the possibility
of human perfection, Blake issued Songs of Experience, employing the same lyric style and
much of the same subject matter as in Songs of Innocence. Both series of poems take on deeper
resonances when read in conjunction. Innocence and Experience, “the two contrary states of the
human soul,” are contrasted in such companion pieces as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger.”
24
Bindman, David - William Blake, His Art and Times. [Thames and Hudson, 1982.] (p. 45-50.)
Appelbaum, Stanley - Introduction to English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. [Mineola, Dover, 1996.] (Chpt. V.)
26
Damon, S. Foster. - A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. [New York, Dutton, 1971.]
(p. 318.)
25
Chapter I. – William Blake
14
Blake's subsequent poetry develops the implication that true innocence is impossible without
experience, transformed by the creative force of the human imagination.
Songs of Innocence is Blake's first masterpiece of "illuminated printing." Blake made the
twenty-seven plates of Songs of Innocence, dating the title page 1789, and thus initiated the
series of his now famous Illuminated Books. The impulse to produce his poems in this form
was partly due to his cast of mind, whereby the life of the imagination was more real to him
than the material world. This philosophy demanded the identification of ideas with symbols
which could be translated into visual images – word and symbol each reinforcing the other.
His lyrical poems have content enough to make them acceptable without the visual addition,
but he did not choose that they should be read in this plain shape, and consequently his output
of books reckoned in numbers of copies was always very limited.
Songs of Innocence differs radically from the rather derivative pastoral mode of the Poetical
Sketches. In the Songs, Blake took as his models the popular street ballads and rhymes for
children of his own time, transmuting these forms by his genius into some of the purest lyric
poetry in the English language. There is no reason for thinking that when he composed the
Songs of Innocence he had already envisaged a second set of antithetical poems embodying
Experience. The Innocence poems were the products of a mind in a state of innocence and of
an imagination unspoiled be stains of worldliness. Public events and private emotions soon
converted Innocence into Experience, producing Blake's preoccupation with the problem of
Good and Evil. This, with his feelings of indignation and pity for the sufferings of mankind as
he saw them in the streets of London, resulted in his composing the second set. So in 1794 he
finished a slightly rearranged version of Songs of Innocence with the addition of Songs of
Experience; the double collection, in Blake's own words in the subtitle, "shewing the two
contrary states of the human soul." The "two contrary states" are innocence, when the child's
imagination has simply the function of completing its own growth; and experience, when it is
faced with the world of law, morality, and repression. Songs of Experience provides a kind of
ironic answer to Songs of Innocence. The earlier collection's celebration of a beneficent God
is countered by the image of him in Experience, in which he becomes the tyrannous God of
repression. The key symbol of Innocence is the Lamb, the corresponding image in Experience
is the Tyger.27
27
Mack, Maynard (ed.) - "William Blake" in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition,
Volume 2. [New York: Norton, 1995.] (p.784.)
Chapter I. – William Blake
15
The Tyger in this poem is the incarnation of energy, strength, lust, and cruelty, and the tragic
dilemma of mankind is poignantly summarized in the final question, "Did he who made the
Lamb make thee?" Blake also viewed the larger society, in the form of contemporary London,
with agonized doubt in Experience, in contrast to his happy visions of the city in Innocence.
In the great poem "London," which has been described as summing up many implications of
Songs of Experience, Blake describes the woes that the Industrial Revolution and the breaking
of the common man's ties to the land have brought upon him. "London" is an especially
powerful indictment of the new "acquisitive society" then coming into being, and the poem's
naked simplicity of language is the perfect medium for conveying Blake's anguished vision of
a society dominated by money.28
When Blake's first great enthusiasm gripped him, the world was in the ferment of
revolution. But Blake was convinced that art, the works of the imagination, not political
revolution, were the key to its renovation. In the first group of legends (1789-93), Blake
presents his case: the indestructibility of innocence. The soul that freely follows its imaginative
instincts will be innocent and virtuous; nature protects this innocence and the only sin is to
allow one's nature to be prevented by law and custom. Free love is only true love; law destroys
both love and freedom.29
Some see him as true nonconformist radical who numbered among his associates such English
freethinkers as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft.30 But for Blake freedom could not
come about except through the imagination. The Bible presented a view, not of freedom, love,
innocent happiness and above all, imagination, but law. The world's images were all wrong.
Blake would put it right with a series of narrative poems in the new medium, to illustrate the
nature of imaginative truth. Poems such as ‘The French Revolution’ (1791), ‘America’, a
‘Prophecy’ (1793), ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’ (1793), and ‘Europe, a Prophecy’
(1794) express his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny. Political
revolution was not in itself the antidote to tyranny, but a symptom of mankind's awakening to
the freedom of the spirit. In the exercise of the imagination, the purity and inviolability of
28
Mack, Maynard (ed.) - "William Blake" in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition,
Volume 2. [New York: Norton, 1995.] (p.785.)
29
Varanyi Szilvia - Sin and Error in William Blake . [Budapest, ELTE-BTK DELL, Szakdolgozat 19xx.]
30
Erdman, David V. – Blake: Prophet against Empire. [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.] (p. 45.)
Chapter I. – William Blake
16
innocence would reveal itself. The need for law, and tyranny itself, would not wither at the
hand of war, but at the breath of the free imagination.
Theological tyranny is one subject of The Book of Urizen (1794), and the dreadful
cycle set up by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in ‘The Mental
Traveller’ (circa 1803).31 These books, including the Songs of Experience (1794), are devoted
to discovering what had gone wrong. Typically Blake did not reject his beliefs, but went on to
improve them. Now he understood that it was too simple to see the world's problems as the
hostility of evil minds against good - the tyrant threatening the innocent imagination. His new
visions emerged in his enthusiasm for the plan of a great epic, Vala, which he started writing
on the black proofs of his Night Thoughts designs.32 Among the Prophetic Books is a prose
work, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ (1790-93), which develops Blake's idea that
“without Contraries is no progression.” It includes the “Proverbs of Hell,” such as “The tygers
of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”
Blake was experimenting in narrative as well as lyrical poetry at this time. Tiriel, a
first attempt, was never engraved. The Book of Thel, with its lovely flowing designs, is an
idyll akin to Songs of Innocence in its flowerlike delicacy and transparency. In Tiriel and The
Book of Thel Blake uses for the first time the long unrhymed line of 14 syllables, which was
to become the staple metre of his narrative poetry.33 The fragment called The French
Revolution is a heroic attempt to make epic poetry out of contemporary history.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell satire, prophecy, humour, poetry, and philosophy are
mingled in a way that has few parallels. Written mainly in terse, sinewy prose, it may be
described as a satire on institutional religion and conventional morality. In it Blake defines the
ideal use of sensuality: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to
man as it is, infinite." Blake reverses the tenets of conventional Christianity, equating the
good with reason and repression and regarding evil as the natural expression of a fundamental
psychic energy.34 As Appelbaum said of Blake, "Blake replaced the arid atheism or tepid
31
Nurmi, Martin K. - William Blake. [London, Hutchinson, 1975.] (p. 54.)
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.] (p. 79.)
33
c.a. (p. 124.)
34
Damon, S. Foster. - A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. [New York, Dutton, 1971.]
(Chpt. XI.)
32
Chapter I. – William Blake
17
deism of the encyclopaedists and their disciples with a glowing new personal religion".35
Besides rejecting "arid atheism" and "tepid deism," Blake also attacked conventional religion.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he wrote "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels
with bricks of Religion" and "As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,
so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys" ["Proverbs" 19; "Proverbs" 20]. Rather than
accepting a traditional religion from an organized church, Blake designed his own mythology
to accompany his personal, revealed religion. Blake's personal religion was an outgrowth of
his search for the Everlasting Gospel, which he believed to be the original, pre-Jesus
revelation which Jesus preached. As Blake said, "all had originally one language and one
religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel
of Jesus". Blake's religion was based upon the joy of man, which he believed glorified God.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell culminates in the "Song of Liberty," a hymn of faith in
revolution, ending with the affirmation that "everything that lives is Holy."36
The book includes a famous criticism of Milton and the "Proverbs of Hell," 70 pithy
aphorisms that are notable for their praise of heroic energy and their sense of creative vitality.
In Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake develops the theme of sexual freedom suggested
in several of the Songs of Experience. The central figure in the poem, Oothoon, finds that she
has attained to a new purity through sexual delight and regeneration. In this poem the
repressive god of abstract morality is first called Urizen.
About 1789 Blake and his wife had
moved to a small house on the south side
of the Thames in a terrace called Hercules
Buildings, Lambeth. They lived there for
seven years, and this, the period of Blake's
greatest worldly prosperity, was also that
of his deepest spiritual uncertainty. Here
35
Appelbaum, Stanley - Introduction to English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. [Mineola, Dover, 1996.]
(Chpt. III.)
36
Damon, S. Foster. - A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. [New York, Dutton, 1971.]
(p. 344.)
Chapter I. – William Blake
18
he set about making a number of books embodying his philosophical system, which he
expressed in an increasingly obscure form. These have become known as his Prophetic
Books, their production going on at the same time as he was painting numbers of pictures and
making large colour prints, using a tempera medium instead of oil paints for the former. In the
Prophetic Book – America, A Prophecy (1793), Europe, A Prophecy (1794), The Book of
Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania, The Book of Los, and The Song of Los (all 1795) – Blake
elaborates a series of cosmic myths and epics through which he sets forth a complex and
intricate philosophical scheme. A principal symbolic figure in these books is Urizen, a
spurned and outcast immortal who embodies both Jehovah and the forces of reason and law
that Blake viewed as restricting and suppressing the natural energies of the human soul.37
The Prophetic Books describe a series of epic battles fought out in the cosmos, in history, and
in the human soul, between entities symbolizing the conflicting forces of reason (Urizen),
imagination (Los), and the spirit of rebellion (Orc). America, illustrated with brilliantly
coloured designs, is a powerful short narrative poem giving a visionary interpretation of the
American Revolution as the uprising of Orc, the spirit of rebellion. Europe shows the coming
of Christ and the French Revolution of the late 18th century as part of the same manifestation
of the spirit of rebellion. The Book of Urizen is Blake's version of the biblical Book of
Genesis. Here the Creator is not a beneficent, righteous Jehovah, but Urizen, a "dark power"
whose rebellion against the primeval unity leads to his entrapment in the material world. The
poetry of The Book of Urizen, written in short unrhymed lines of three accents, has a gloomy
power, but is inferior in effect to the magnificent accompanying designs, which have an
energy and monumental grandeur anticipating the quality of those of Jerusalem, Blake's most
splendid illuminated book. Blake's saga of myths is continued in The Book of Ahania, a kind
of Exodus following the Genesis of Urizen, and in The Book of Los.
In The Song of Los Blake returns to the cosmic theme and brings the story of humanity down
to his own time. By this time Blake seems to have reached his spiritual nadir, and his poetry
peters out in the last of the Prophetic books. He had lost faith in the French Revolution as an
apocalyptic and regenerating force, and was finding his attempt at a synthesis based on the
37
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.]
Chapter I. – William Blake
19
"contraries" of good and evil inadequate as an answer to the complexities of human
existence.38
Blake was in many ways typical of his age and like William Morris seventy years later, he was
just as typical in his fascination with the medieval. Gothic stories and melodramas of castles,
knights and monks and fair ladies were already popular enough for Jane Austen to parody in
Northanger Abbey. Matthew Lewis's notorious soft-porn The Monk sold very well indeed.
Scott, not Wordsworth, became the favourite poet of the age.39
Blake, unfortunately for him, was captured, not by the clarity and humour of Chaucer, much as
he admired him, but by the cloudy pseudo-medievalism of Chatterton and Ossian.40 This kind
of writing is most suitable for escapist literature, but Blake used it for most of his work in
'illuminated printing', to convey his most urgent messages. Apart from the Songs (1789-94),
virtually all his completed books are such gothic legends. Grandiose, superhuman figures
gesticulate across his pages; and since they crowd past, not to entertain us but to evangelise,
bearing names we have never heard of and associations we can slowly grasp, it is not surprising
that Blake's major poetry, far from bringing him fame, brought only ridicule. When later he
added to his myth the fumblings of antiquaries – notably the theories of William Stukeley –
who identified Eastern religions with ancient Britain, linked the Syrian mother-goddess with
Avebury and the Druids with the biblical patriarchs, even his best friends found it almost
impossible to follow his imaginative fights; and so do we.41 In his so-called Prophetic Books, a
series of longer poems written from 1789 on, Blake created a complex personal mythology and
invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought
and expression, he declares in one of these poems, “I must create a system or be enslaved by
another man's.”
With The Song of Los the experimental period of his poetic career ended: he engraved no
more books for nearly 10 years. In 1795 he had been commissioned by a bookseller to make
designs for an edition of Edward Young's Night Thoughts. He worked on this until 1797,
producing 537 watercolour drawings. It seems to have been while he was working on these
illustrations that a fresh creative impulse led to the beginning of his first full-scale epic poem.
38
Damon, S. Foster. - A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake. [New York, Dutton, 1971.]
Appelbaum, Stanley - Introduction to English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology. [Mineola, Dover, 1996.] (Chpt. I.)
40
Phillips, Michael (ed.) - Interpreting Blake. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.] (p. 193.)
41
Fisher, F. Peter - Blake and the Druids . [in Frye (ed.): Blake . Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1966.]
39
Chapter I. – William Blake
20
The first draft of the epic, called Vala, was begun in 1795. He worked on it for about nine
years, during which period he rewrote it under the title of The Four Zoas, but never engraved
it. It remains a magnificent torso, but the quality of this work's poetry and its thought are
obscured by its overly complicated mythological scheme. In spite of the grandeur of
individual passages and of the major conception, The Four Zoas remains fragmentary and
lacking in coherence. It provided the materials out of which Blake constructed his later epics,
Milton and Jerusalem. 42
In 1800, at the invitation of William Hayley, a Sussex squire, Blake and his wife went
to live in a cottage provided by Hayley at Felpham on the Sussex coast, where he lived and
worked until 1803 under the patronage of Hayley. There he experienced profound spiritual
insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched
between about 1804 and 1820. Milton (1804-08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (that is, aspects of the
human soul, 1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-20) have neither traditional plot,
characters, rhyme, nor meter; the rhetorical free-verse lines demand new modes of reading.
They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason.
In his new vision of the ideal world, all beings are united in one perfect Human Form. After the
Fall - which as always in Blake is a failure of the imagination - the Human is fragmented, and
hostility arises between his now separated elements. None of these elements is perfectly good
or evil; the creatures of the earlier myth, Orc, Urizen and Los, are now all damaged pieces of
the Universal Human Form, and none will be complete without the rest. From this time on,
Urizen, the great evil of America (1793), becomes less hated and more pitied. Even Vala, the
female form who is at first blamed for the disintegration, is at last regenerated.43
William Hayley, a well-meaning, obtuse dilettante, who had employed Blake to make
engravings, regarded his imaginative works with contempt and tried to turn him into a
miniature painter and tame poet on his estate. At first Blake was delighted with life in Sussex,
but he soon found the patronizing Hayley intolerable. The cottage was damp and Mrs. Blake's
health suffered, and in 1803 the Blake returned to London. Toward the end of his stay at
Felpham, Blake was accused by a soldier called Schofield of having uttered seditious words
when he had ejected him from his cottage garden. He was tried at the quarter sessions at
42
43
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.]
Damon, S. Foster. - William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols. [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958.]
Chapter I. – William Blake
21
Chichester, denied the charges, and was acquitted. Hayley gave bail for Blake and employed
counsel to defend him. This experience became part of the mythology underlying Jerusalem
and Milton. 44
It was also probably at Felpham that Blake wrote the most notable of his later lyrical poems,
including "Auguries of Innocence", with its memorable opening stanza:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
It was at Felpham, too, that he wrote some of his finest letters, many of them addressed to
Thomas Butts, a government clerk who was for years a generous and loyal supporter and
patron of Blake and who commissioned almost his total output of paintings and watercolours
at this period.
In 1804-08 Blake engraved Milton. This poem is a comparatively brief epic, which
deals with a contest between the hero (Milton) and Satan; it too is couched in the prophetic
grandeur and obscurity of Blake's invented mythology. Milton's struggle with evil in the poem
is a reflection of Blake's own conflicts with the domineering patronage of William Hayley.
Jerusalem is Blake's third major epic and his longest poem. Begun about 1804, and written
and engraved soon after the completion of Milton, it is also the most richly decorated of
Blake's illuminated books, and only a few of its 100 plates are without illustration. Although
the details are complex and present many difficulties, the poem's main outlines are simple. At
the opening of the poem the giant Albion (who represents both England and humanity) is
shown plunged into the "Sleep of Ulro," or the hell of abstract materialism. The core of the
poem describes his awakening and regeneration through the agency of Los, the archetypal
craftsman or creative man. The poem's consummation is the reunion of Albion with Jerusalem
(his lost soul) and with God through his acceptance of Jesus' doctrine of universal
brotherhood.45
44
45
Wilson, Mona - The Life of William Blake. [(ed.) Geoffrey Keynes. London, Oxford University Press, 1971.]
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.]
Chapter I. – William Blake
22
During Blake's Felpham years another enthusiasm arrived, close on the heels of the Immortal
Man. It is a time once more for the restatement of the vision and the third development of the
myth, not this time through disillusionment but because his images had taken a new colouring.
Markedly Christian language begins to creep into Vala, which eventually collapses under the
strain. Even before Felpham, Blake has used the phrase, "We who call ourselves Christians".
Now the belief grows into its own images which must be incorporated into the myth.
It is a complex development. The Druids of Ancient Britain are identified with the patriarchs
of the Bible, and the Giant Albion - the Spirit of Britain - is identified with the Israel of the
Bible. Thus Albion is the Holy Land, London is Jerusalem, and Jesus did indeed walk (in the
truth of the imagination) across these hills. The solution to the disintegration of man is
reconciliation through forgiveness, and the reconciliation of Christ and Albion brings about
the reunion of the disintegrated Eternal Human, who appears then as Christ himself. It is not
enough now, as in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to find one's own imaginative life. The
Human Form Divine will not be re-created until the whole nation, the whole of mankind, the
whole universe, is drawn together; but this can begin in the smallest of single actions. Blake
has returned to the idealistic hope of America, but now his thought is less simple and more
mystical; yet as the pages of Jerusalem show, no less radical.46
Blake's life during the period from 1803 to about 1820 was one of worldly failure. He
found it difficult to get work, and the engravings that can be identified as his from this period
are often hack jobs. In 1809 he made a last effort to put his work before the public and held an
exhibition of 16 paintings and watercolour drawings. He wrote a thoughtful Descriptive
Catalogue for the exhibition, but only a few people attended. But after this long period of
obscurity, Blake found in 1819 a new and generous patron in the painter John Linnell, who
introduced him to a group of young artists among whom was Samuel Palmer. In his last years
Blake became the centre of this group, whose members shared Blake's religious seriousness
and revered him as their master.
The most notable poetry Blake wrote after Jerusalem is to be found in The Everlasting Gospel
(1818?), a fragmentary and unfinished work containing a challenging reinterpretation of the
character and teaching of Christ. Blake's writings also include An Island in the Moon (1784),
a rollicking satire on events in his early life; a collection of letters; and a notebook containing
46
Nathan, Norman - Prince William B. - The Philosophical Conceptions of William Blake. [Paris, Mouton, 1975.]
Chapter I. – William Blake
23
sketches and some shorter poems dating between 1793 and 1818. It was called the Rossetti
Manuscript, because it was acquired in 1847 by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one
of the first to recognize Blake's genius.
But Blake's last years were devoted mainly to pictorial art. In 1821 Linnell commissioned him
to make a series of 22 watercolours inspired by the Book of Job; these include some of his best
known pictures. Linnell also commissioned Blake's designs for Dante's Divine Comedy, begun
in 1825 and left unfinished at his death. These consist of 102 watercolours notable for their
brilliant colour. Blake thus found in his 60s a following and support for the imaginative work
he had longed to do all his life. As a result, it was in his last years that he produced his most
technically assured and beautiful designs. Toward the end of his life Blake still coloured copies
of his books while resting in bed, and that is how he died in a room off the Strand, in London,
on the 12th August 1827, – in his 70th year – leaving uncompleted a cycle of drawings inspired
by Dante's Divine Comedy. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields.
Blake is frequently referred to as a mystic, but this is not really accurate. He deliberately
wrote in the style of the Hebrew prophets and apocalyptic writers. He envisioned his works as
expressions of prophecy, following in the footsteps (or, more precisely strapping on the
sandals) of Elijah and Milton. In his filthy London studio he succumbed to constant visions of
angels and prophets who instructed him in his work. He once painted while receiving a vision
of Voltaire, and when asked later whether Voltaire spoke English, replied: "To my sensations it
was English. It was like the touch of a musical key. He touched it probably French, but to my
ear it became English."47
It is the difficulty of Blake's visionary poetry, rather than the vividness that has captured the
commentators. They have sought high and low in the mystical philosophies, or in the politics,
of East and West for the "key" to his work. It is true that he has a habit of allusiveness that is
certainly obscure. In the famous song, for example, England is 'clouded' by spiritual blindness
more than by cumuli, and the 'Satanic mills' are the shackles of the mind, of which the
Industrial Revolution is only one manifestation. The difficulty is not to be solved by finding a
missing key. It is something less systematic; the problem of Blake himself.
47
Levi Asher - Literary Kicks on William Blake
Chapter I. – William Blake
24
Each of Blake's new enthusiasm reshapes the legend of his poems. As Blake refines his beliefs,
he refines his myth too. The function of Orc and Urizen in America (1793) is quite plain; one
fights for freedom, the other for law. In The Book of Urizen (1794) it is much more complex,
and by Vala (1803) and Milton (1810) they have had to be altered almost out of recognition, but
they are never quite abandoned. Blake was not by instinct a narrative poet. He tended to
'improve' his longer poems by a process of accumulation rather than by following the demands
of the narrative. His mind was like an untidy desk. He threw nothing away, and often used old
material for new tasks. One never knows what one will find. The reader ploughing through
pages full of 'dismal howling woe' comes across an unexpected line of startling beauty which
only Blake could have written.48
It is therefore no use trying to understand Blake by means of a key. No one scheme fits all his
works; each stage grows out of the one preceding it. Each enthusiasm gives a striking new
turn to his legend and its imagery, but the new is always superimposed on the old. If we can
understand the series of enthusiasms, we can begin to find our way through the difficulties of
his work.
It is easy to dismiss Blake as 'primitive', an artist whose attraction resides in his naivety,
which is lost when the work becomes heavy and charmless. This is also too simple. There is an
odd contradiction at the heart of Blake's writing. He repeatedly called for art to concern itself
with the 'minute particulars' of life: "To generalise is to be an idiot!" he scribbled in the margin
of Reynold's Discourses.49 On the other hand he criticized Wordsworth for paying too much
attention to the details of nature at the expense of inner realities.50 More important, much of his
poetry disregards his own rule. Words like 'howling' and 'dismal' appear far too often. His lyrics
are usually marvels of conciseness, but he chose to express his dearest beliefs, not as 'minute
particulars', but as cloudy, generalized figures representing eternal states of humanity. Milton
ceases to be a seventeenth-century poet and becomes a state of Los, the eternal spirit of the
imagination. From first to last, Blake champions the imagination, but too much misplaced
convention. At his greatest, minutiae become eternal; at his worst, the eternal becomes a
scheme.51
48
Phillips, Michael (ed.) - Interpreting Blake. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.] (p. 114-116.)
Lindsay, Jack - William Blake: His Life and Work. [London, Constable, 1978.] (p. 106.)
50
c.a. (p.112.)
51
Behrendt, Stephen C. - Reading William Blake. [London, Macmillan Press, 1992.] (p. 87.)
49
Chapter I. – William Blake
25
Here if anywhere else, lies the "key" to Blake. He was not a "Romantic" writer, whatever that
is; he was neo-classic by training and inclination. He had no time for classical myth, but that is
irrelevant. His instinct was to create – inspired by his own visions – not symbols out of
mystical tradition, nor vivid observations of human life, but representative figures to embody
both the inner nature of the subject and his own response to it. His long epic poems are made
up of a mixture of inspiration, pig-headedness, evangelic fervour and profound imagery. When
he failed, he became obscure or tedious – often both. When he succeeded, he created a kind of
magic of which no other poet has been capable. He blundered into greatness, just as he often
blundered away from it. Yet there are many occasions, as his mystical figures move across the
abyss, when all the elements come together, and then he produces poetry of a unique kind of
genius, which leave the reader in something more than admiration – in wonderment.