William Blake 1757-1827 (Jane Austen 1775-1817)
Life
No formal education
Trained in art, apprenticed to an engraver
Married, wife illiterate
Moved to coast from London under patronage of wealthy poet
Key episode: drunken soldier enters his garden, approaches wife
Blake drives him off, tried for sedition for shouting anti-patriotic words at the soldier. Acquitted but felt attacked by the political and social system
Back to London- poverty
Work
Artist/poet – total creative vision – poems on copper engravings
Most famous collections of poems:
Songs of Innocence and Experience: lamb symbolizes the soul uncorrupted by
experience; the tiger symbolizes the soul exposed to evil
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: warring elements
Jerusalem- vision of reunion of universal man with Jerusalem
Style
Expresses the profoundest ideas about the human condition in the simplest of
language
Spiritual intensity
Imagination, spontaneity, feeling, visionary
Uncompromising rebel in poetry and life
Philosophy
· The need to recover “the universal man.”
· The fall is not from God, but from God as man – from oneself – a sort of psychic disintegration alienation from oneself, one’s world, one’s fellow human beings, hope of recovery lies in the process of reintegration
Reflection
Blake was an iconoclastic poet who saw the world from a deeply personal religious perspective. The two books of poems, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, represent the world in terms of the “two contrary states of the human soul” (37). What are the good and evil aspects of life that Blake portrays in these poems? In what ways can he be perceived as a very modern poet in his themes and style.