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Chapter I. – William Blake

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 hand-illustrated 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 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]

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 master-engraver, 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]

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 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 two-dimensionality 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 – Pity / 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 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 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]

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]