| William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) was
an English poet, painter
and printmaker, or "Author & Printer," as he signed many of his books.
Early career
Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London into a middle-class family.
His artistic talent was noticed and encouraged from an early age. At ten years old, he began engraving copies of drawings of
Greek antiquities, a practice that was then preferred to real-life
drawing. Four years later he became apprenticed to an engraver, Henry Basire. After
two years Basire sent him to copy art from the Gothic
churches in London. At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set
up as a professional engraver.
In 1779 he became a student at the Royal Academy, where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters
such as Rubens. He preferred the Classical exactness of Michelangelo and Raphael.
In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron. In the same year he
married a poor illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine could neither read nor write and
even signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her reading and writing and even trained her as an engraver. At that
time, George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, became an admirer of Blake's work.
Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa 1783. In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with "relief etching", which was the
method used to produce most of his books of poems. Blake wrote in a letter that the method was revealed to him in a dream of his
dead brother, Robert. The process is also referred to as "illuminated printing," and final products as "illuminated books" or
"prints". Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an
acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in
order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to be
hand-colored in water colors and stiched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the
Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem. Each of his illuminated books was thus a unique work of art and
a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical
discourse. Blake seems to have believed, or rather hoped, that self-published books could liberate the artist and author from the
tyranny of censorship by Church and State but its time-consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic works reached
a minute audience in his lifetime.
Blake also became a friend of the painter John Henry
Fuseli.
Religious and political visions
Blake had an idiosyncratic view of his Christian religion. In 1789 William and Catherine joined the Swedenborgian New Church. He believed that the truth was learned by personal revelation, not by
teaching. What he called his 'visions' were perhaps hallucinations,
experiences that he allowed to guide his life. It was these that gave him such a strong and uncompromising belief in his own
artistic direction, but also led others to call him eccentric or even mad.
In The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell Blake began to develop his own
mythology, which included a pantheon of characters such as Orc, a messiah and Urizen, a cruel Old Testament-style god. Blake loved Milton's work and tried, as Milton had, to create his own definitions of heaven and hell. This desire to
recreate the cosmos is the heart of his work and his psychology. His myths often described the struggle between enlightenment and
free love on the one hand, and restrictive education and morals on the other. Blake believed himself a prophet of a New Age, and
his identification with free love and democracy has helped to make him a hero of
many modern artists. The poet W. B. Yeats admired Blake's
spiritualism and helped to popularise him in the 20th century.
The Last
Judgement is a work in which Blake sums up and illustrates all the mythology that he has created.
Later life
Blake's marriage to Catherine remained a close and devoted one until his death. There were early problems, however, such as
Catherine's illiteracy and the couple's failure to produce children. At one point, in accordance with the beliefs of the
Swedenborgian Society, Blake suggested bringing in a concubine. Catherine was distressed at the idea, and he dropped it. Later in
life, the pair seem to have settled down, and their apparent domestic harmony in middle age is better documented than their early difficulties.
Later in his life Blake sold a great number of works, particularly his Bible
illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend in need than an artist. Geoffrey Keynes, a biographer,
described Butts as 'a dumb admirer of genius, which he could see but not quite
understand.' Dumb or not, we have him to thank for eliciting and preserving so many works.
About 1800 Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex (now West Sussex) to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a mediocre
poet. It was in this cottage that Blake wrote Milton: a Poem (which was published later between 1804 and
1808). The preface to this book included the poem And did those feet in ancient time,
which Blake decided to discard for later editions. This is ironic, because as the words to the hymn Jerusalem, this is now
one of Blake's most well-known if not well-understood poems.
Blake returned to London in 1802 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804-1820). He was introduced by George Cumberland to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell he met Samuel
Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the 'Shoreham Ancients'. This group shared Blake's rejection
of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. Blake benefited from this group technically, by sharing in
their advances in watercolour painting, and personally, by finding a receptive audience for his ideas.
At the age of sixty-five Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of
Job. These works were later admired by John Ruskin, who compared Blake
favourably to Rembrandt.
William Blake died in 1827 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, London. In recent
years, a proper memorial was erected for him and his wife.
He died while still hard at work. His last work was said to be a sketch of his wife. Perhaps Blake's life is summed up by his
statement that "The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."
Works
"Illuminated Books":
- c.1788: All Religions are One, There is No Natural Religion
- 1789: Songs of
Innocence, The Book of Thel
- 1790-1793: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- 1793: Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America: a Prophecy
- 1794: Europe: a Prophecy, The First Book of Urizen, Songs of Experience (The sequel to Songs of Innocence,
with many of its poems intended as counterpoints from the Fallen world to those in the first book, this was Blake's only
Illuminated book to achieve even limited success in his lifetime. It includes the poems The Tyger and The Sick
Rose)
- 1795: The Book of Los
- c.1804-c.1811: Milton: a Poem
- 1804-1820: Jerusalem: The Emanation of The
Giant Albion
Works by other authors illustrated by Blake:
Books on William Blake
External links
Works inspired by Blake
- Red Dragon, a novel by Thomas Harris, whose title refers to Blake's painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in
Sun. After the success of Harris' earlier novel, The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon was also made into a film (twice).
- Themes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, an album by the Norwegian musical group Ulver from 1998, utilizes the complete text of the Blake poem lyrically.
- The Songs of Innocence and Experience have been set to music by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Albums using them as lyrics include Greg Brown's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" and Jah
Wobble's "The Inspiration of William Blake". Allen Ginsberg also
released an album of Blake songs.
- Spring, by Finn Coren
- The World of Tiers books by Philip José Farmer
- Quotations from Blake form the climax of Jerry
Springer - The Opera
- Dead Man, a film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, features a character named William Blake and includes many references to Blake's
work.
- Rouse Up O Young Men
of the New Age!, a novel by Kenzaburo Oe
- Love's Secret Domain (http://brainwashed.com/common/htdocs/discog/torso181.html), an electronic album by
Coil, quotes Blake numerous times in the lyrics. The title track is also
a reinterpretation of The Sick Rose. Various other albums by Coil carry many Blake references and allusions.
- The book The Doors of Perception by
Aldous Huxley draws its title from a line in Blake's The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell. The title of Huxley's book, in turn, inspired the naming of the rock band The Doors.
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