Blake, William - Introduction

William Blake 1757–1827

English poet and artist.

See also Criticism on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

INTRODUCTION

A visionary poet and artist, Blake was often ridiculed during his lifetime but has since been recognized as one of the major poets of English literature. His work is distinguished by the creation and illustration of a complex mythological system, in which imagination is of paramount importance, serving as the vehicle of humanity's communion with the spiritual essence of reality. By bringing his unconventional perspective to bear on such subjects as religion, morality, art, and politics, Blake has become recognized as both a social rebel and as a "hero of the imagination" who played a key role in advancing the Romantic revolt against rationalism. These thematic concerns inform the lyrics in Blake's best-known publication, Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

Biographical Information

Blake was the second of five children born to London hosier James Blake and his wife Catherine. He exhibited visionary tendencies as a child, claiming to see God at his window and a tree adorned with angels, and was artistically precocious as well. Following several years' study at Henry Pars's Drawing School, he was apprenticed in 1772 to the master engraver James Basire. Blake took up studies at The Royal Academy of Arts in 1779, but he openly disagreed with his instructors' artistic theories and soon focused his energies on engraving. This work brought him into contact with the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson and with such fellow artists as Thomas Stothard, John Flaxman, and Henry Fuseli. It was through Flaxman's efforts in particular that Blake obtained many of the engraving and drawing commissions that were the principal source of his meager income. In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, who was devoted to him. Under Blake's instruction she learned to read, write, and help illuminate his books.

Blake first attracted literary notice in the salon of the Reverend and Mrs. A. S. Mathew, where he read his poems and occasionally sang them to his original musical compositions. In 1783 Flaxman and the Reverend Mathew funded the printing of Poetical Sketches, Blake's first collection of verse. Blake suffered the loss of his younger brother Robert in 1787, and later claimed to communicate with his spirit in the "regions of … Imagination." At about the same time, Blake developed his technique of illuminated printing. He first employed this method in about 1788 while producing two treatises entitled There Is No

Blake, William 1757–1827

Natural Religion and All Religions Are One, which urge the claims of imagination over rationalist philosophy. Two more illuminated works, Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel, were printed in 1789. Inasmuch as Blake painstakingly engraved the plates for his illuminated works, printed them personally, and colored each copy by hand, his books are as rare as they are beautiful. This restricted circulation limited Blake's income and prevented his reputation and works from spreading beyond a fairly closed society of friends and connoisseurs.

The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 found Blake in the company of Joseph Johnson's radical coterie, which included such prominent activists as Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In their society he evidently discussed the democratic revolutions in America and France and the political and social turmoil they engendered at home, topics that also became major focuses of his poetry: The French Revolution, for example, covers events in France during May to mid-July, 1789, emphasizing the oppressive authoritarianism of the old regime, while America: A Prophecy predicts the spread of the American experiment to Europe. Blake's sympathy with political and civil liberties put him at odds with the notoriously repressive government of William Pitt, and thus some critics have speculated that Blake obscured his ideas behind the veil of mysticism to circumvent government censure.

In 1790 Blake and his wife moved to Lambeth, where he produced The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and a series of minor symbolic books including, Visions of the Daughters of Albion: The Eye Sees More than the Heart Knows; America; The First Book of Urizen; Europe: A Prophecy; The Song of Los; The Book of Ahania; and The Book of Los; In these works Blake developed the symbolic mythology that he had introduced in Tiriel and The Book of Thel, setting in motion what Mark Schorer has described as "a system of ever-widening metaphorical amplification" through which Blake attempted "to explain his story, the story of his England, the history of the world, prehistory, and the nature of all eternity." Scholars generally agree that Blake's mythology reaches its fullest expression in The Four Zoas: The Torments of Love & Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man, which he probably began to compose during the Lambeth years, and in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, a prophetic work of later origin. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, regarded by many critics as the lyrical counterpart of the symbolic books, is also a product of the Lambeth period.

From 1800 to 1803 Blake and his wife lived at the seaside village of Felpham under the patronage of the minor poet William Hayley, whose mundaneness soon became a source of vexation to the visionary Blake. Scholars speculate that during his unhappy stay at Felpham Blake revised The Four Zoas and began to draft Milton, a reworking of Paradise Lost. Both poems have been interpreted in light of his statement that he had "fought thro' a Hell of terrors & horror … in a Divided Existence" during these years. The Blakes returned to London in 1803, but their homecoming was marred by accusations that William had uttered seditious sentiments while expelling a soldier named Scofield from his garden at Felpham. He was tried for sedition and acquitted in 1804. Blake's next significant publication, his series of illustrations for an 1808 edition of Robert Blair's The Grave, attracted more notice than all of his poetical works combined. However, reviewers castigated his corporeal representation of spiritual phenomena as a piece of imaginative and theological impertinence. Blake's frustrations came to the fore in 1809, when he mounted a private exhibition of his paintings which he hoped would publicize his work and help to vindicate his visionary aesthetic, but which was poorly attended. Moreover, the descriptive catalogue he wrote to accompany the exhibition largely inspired ridicule among its few readers. Blake's later years were distinguished by his completion of Jerusalem, his last and longest prophetic book, and by his creation of a series of engraved illustrations for the Book of Job that is now widely regarded as his greatest artistic achievement. The latter work was commissioned in the early 1820s by John Linnell, one of a group of young artists known as the "Ancients" who gathered around Blake and helped support him in his old age.

Major Works

Blake once defended his art by remarking, "What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care." He thus characterized his work as a combination of grandness and obscurity that he was not particularly eager to elucidate. Fortunately, his aesthetic philosophy emerges in his writings, forming a firm basis for critical insight into his perplexing oeuvre. Blake held the radical view that "Nature is Imagination itself; by extension, he also maintained that exercise of the imagination leads to wisdom and insight (synonymous with vision) and, according to Jerome J. McGann, that poetry, painting, and other imaginative pursuits serve as "vehicles for vision." Given this perception, the world of imagination took precedence for Blake over the world of matter, and rational philosophical systems, based as they are in the material world, gave way to the "Divine Arts of Imagination." Moreover, Blake considered it his personal mission both to express and embody this philosophy in his art, thus giving a prophetic quality to his work.

Blake's passion for originality and imagination informs his creation of a private cosmology that embraces both his lyric and prophetic poetry. Stated in the most general terms, his system posits a universe whose most sweeping movements and minutest particulars reflect ever-fluctuating relationships between reason, love, poetry, energy, and other vital forces. While these forces appear most prominently in the symbolic mythology of the prophetic books, taking the guise of such titanic characters as Urizen, Luvah, Los, and Orc, critics generally maintain that they are integral to the symbolism of the lyric poems as well. Hazard Adams, for example, states that "the whole of Blake's great symbolic system" is assimilated in the symbolic structure of the lyric "The Tyger," while Joseph Wicksteed sees Blake's ideas concerning matter and the flesh reflected in such symbols as dew and grass in the "Introduction" to Songs of Experience. Great as this symbolic system might be, however, it has also been described as "notoriously private" and "hieroglyphic," pointing to a difficulty in interpreting Blake's symbols that led early critics to question the lucidity and even the sanity of his prophetic books.

By virtue of its versification, Jerusalem is considered by many as the culmination of a lifetime of experimentation befitting a poet who despised restriction in all its forms: "Poetry Fetter'd, Fetters the Human Race!" Blake declared in the preface to Jerusalem, proclaiming his liberation from the "monotony" and "bondage" of metered verse. As early as Poetical Sketches, he explored the elimination of end rhyme, substituting rhythmical devices such as word repetition that he subsequently used to great advantage in Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The poems in the latter work are also celebrated for their compression and economy; yet Blake appears to have deemphasized these qualities in selecting the lengthy septenary line (containing seven metrical feet) for The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem. Even here, however, he deviated from his standard line at will, leading to Alicia Ostriker's observation that "Blake, even in his metrics, deliberately breaks every rule he makes, refuses to impose order in art where there is no order in his visions, … [insisting on] keeping beauty afar until he is ready for her." Ostriker and other commentators generally agree that Blake's greatest stylistic triumph occurs in "Night IX" of The Four Zoas, in which the poet triumphantly orchestrates his varied measures in announcing the restoration of universal harmony at the Last Judgment.

Critical Reception

Ironically, Blake was better known among his contemporaries for his engravings and designs than for his poetry. The scarcity of his books and his reputation for madness contributed to the lack of attention from his peers, although Samuel Taylor Coleridge privately recognized Blake as a "man of Genius" and Charles Lamb conceded that he was "one of the most extraordinary persons of the age." Blake's critical fortunes did not improve until 1863 with the publication of Alexander Gilchrist's sympathetic biography, which sparked a revival of interest in the poet that was sustained by the editorial and critical commentary of such nineteenth-century luminaries as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Algernon Swinburne. This impetus has continued unabated into the twentieth century as well, with Northrop Frye and other critics providing explications of Blake's symbolic system that have abetted an ever-widening array of studies.

Blake once wrote, "One Law for the Lion and the Ox is oppression." A kindred appreciation of the claims of individualism may well inform the willingness of modern scholars to elevate this most individual of writers to the front ranks of English poetry. At the same time, however, enthusiasts stress that he transcends the merely personal in his works. In the words of George Saintsbury, Blake set forth an aesthetic in which, in place of the "battered gods of the classical or neo-classical Philistia, are set up Imagination for Reason, Enthusiasm for Good Sense, the Result for the Rule; the execution for the mere conception or even the mere selection of subject; impression for calculation; the heart and the eyes and the pulses and the fancy for the stop-watch and the boxwood measure and the table of specifications." In establishing a system based on these objectives, Blake anticipated many of the dominant artistic impulses of the modern era.