[In the following review, Bauer offers a positive evaluation of Blake.]

William Blake remains, for many readers, a distant, imposing figure. Those who enjoy his poetry are usually familiar with the early work, the seemingly simple Songs of Innocence and of Experience or The Book of Thel. The later prophetic books, Milton or Jerusalem, for example, with their declamatory tone and private mythology, may seem virtually impenetrable. It is one of the great virtues of his new biography, Blake, that Peter Ackroyd assumes the accessibility of all Blake’s work. Ackroyd does not brush away the difficulties and, at times, admits that Blake’s complexities have never been and may never be fully unraveled. Yet he argues that “much of [Blake’s] prophetic symbolism can actually be understood without undue difficulty, but it requires in the reader a reawakening of what is essentially a clear and simple vision. He is a ‘difficult’ poet only if we decide to make him so” (279).

Ackroyd attempts to account for, or to give some sources for, the shape of Blake’s imagination, from the earliest poetry to the last, from the apprentice copies of tombs in Westminster Abbey to the Dante watercolors he was working on at his death. Blake never forgot anything he saw, Ackroyd maintains; from his youth to his old age, he recalled, reimagined, reinterpreted, adapted, and modified his materials. This recursive technique derives, in part, from the demands on an impoverished engraver frugally reusing his plates, an economic necessity that becomes a way of thinking, a mode of creativity.

Indeed, one of Ackroyd’s major interpretive motifs is the influence of Blake’s engraving work on all his art. The need for a strong outline—the detailed particulars—characterizes his watercolors as well, with their vivid surface, vibrant outline without shadow or indeterminate context. And his poetry, with its absence of inwardness or complex characterization or subtlety of feeling, is heavily influenced by the materials to which the young Blake was apprenticed and by which he made his living. Ackroyd’s intelligent and subtle descriptions of engraving techniques and their effects, his meticulous tracing of the development of Blake’s mature engraving and watercolor styles and their relationship to his poetry, distinguish this biography. Such focused attention to the materiality of Blake’s craft is more common in scholarly studies devoted exclusively to his art work. Ackroyd’s attention to technique, put to the broader service of biography and the investigation of Blake’s creativity, allows us to follow the precise visual and verbal analogies Ackroyd is arguing for. This handsome volume is also provided with numerous plates, both in color and black and white, helping the reader to pursue these connections.

Born in Soho, the son of a hosier, Blake spent almost all his life within walking distance of his birthplace. The sights and sounds of eighteenth-century London permeate his art. Relying on Blake’s letters and poems as well as on historical studies of the period, Ackroyd imagines Blake’s walks through London, and locates the furnaces and mills, the rivers and fields the artist encountered. Blake, to Ackroyd, is an urban poet, one who looks out on a modern city, its horror and its energy, and is inflamed by it. From the early “London” to the late Jerusalem, Blake reacts to what he sees in front of him.

The social protest in Blake’s work is underscored by Ackroyd. Blake foresaw the deterioration of art as it became increasingly influenced by industrial economics and he perceived the decay of the imagination in a consumerist, mechanical, mercantile society. In his ferocious protest, he is not unlike Ruskin, who would also be deemed mad. But Blake saw these forces as they were just beginning to take shape, long before their effects were readily apparent. And he saw their consequences in his own life, in his poverty and neglect, as printing became more mechanized and uniformity and speed became necessary. Blake, a craftsman in an increasingly commercial society, speaks from the experience of personal hardship. And Ackroyd returns repeatedly to the privations Blake and his wife endured, their cramped rooms, meager diet, worn clothing, and fifteen-hour work days.

Ackroyd describes a man for whom nothing came easily, who lived a life of penury and grinding labor. But Ackroyd finally argues that the more obscure Blake became, the more insistent his work grew. Its particular hue and flavor were the result of his sufferings; his was not a personality to flourish in good times. One great gift he was accorded, Ackroyd maintains, differing here from some other biographers, was a happy marriage. Catherine Blake became her husband’s helpmeet in every way, his greatest disciple, the “angel” Blake called her on his deathbed (367). She firmly believed in the truth of his visions. “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company,” she once observed; “he is always in Paradise” (295). But, after his death, she reported that he visited her each day, sat down, and spoke with her for two or three hours.

Blake’s own visions were, to many of his contemporaries, a great stumbling block. He himself never doubted their reality. He saw and conversed with his dead brother, the spirits of the great, the angels. He was inspired by them, directed by them; they constituted the deepest truth in his life. And, as Ackroyd states, Blake, in his obstinate London tradesman’s temperament, was not to be dissuaded from believing what he saw. He was a “born antinomian” (23), with a hatred of authority and submission. Ackroyd, citing psychological studies of eidetic images, suggests that Blake retained throughout his life what is essentially a not uncommon childhood phenomenon. It is the lifelong persistence of his visions that marks Blake as unusual. And, in times of distress, they became more frequent, a source of comfort and support to a man who had few other solaces. Ackroyd suggests that the later visions may have been a recreation of memories, but Blake would never have agreed. He thought all men had the capacity for visions but lost it as they grew older. His blessing was that he had not. And his poverty and obscurity were minor hardships compared to his gift. To Crabb Robinson, he said, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame for whatever natural glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy” (342).

And yet, as Ackroyd makes clear, Blake’s was not a life of complete isolation. Generous patrons commissioned work, and although Blake’s dilatoriness and prickly, suspicious temperament would often exasperate a client, some of his friends continued to support him. Nor was he intellectually isolated. Ackroyd spends much time sketching out the radical political and religious communities of late eighteenth-century London, noting the meetings Blake attended and the circles of acquaintances he developed. Blake’s revolutionary political sentiments, though strong, were yet dampened in their expression by his nervous fear that he would be persecuted for his views. He was more outspoken about his religious opinions. As Ackroyd makes clear, Blake lived in a time when London contained a variety of mystical, millenarian, occultist sects. And he was well read in Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Boehme. Ackroyd argues however, that Blake remains, finally, a man who found it difficult to integrate himself into larger intellectual or social communities. He rejected ready-made ideas, adopting attitudes rather than principles. He creates his own mythology, his own artistic style, his own philosophy.

It is that system that Ackroyd finally approaches, painstakingly tracing through the prophetic books, elucidating the strands of intellect, passion, temperament, and circumstance that weave through them. Profoundly influenced by Blake’s early reading of the Bible and yet deeply insubordinate in doctrine and tone, the prophetic art elaborates, over the embodiments of many years, a theory of human psychology; of the constitution of evil; of the radiant, contentious, frightening power of sexuality; of the divinity within each human being, and the cruel religious and human systems that work to deny and destroy that divinity. Blake’s poetry enacts, in its own terms, the apocalyptic drama of perdition and salvation. It turns with contempt from the merely rational, the life without imagination and faith, and celebrates freedom and joy. The prophetic books are formidable, Ackroyd maintains, because Blake creates his own myth. We readers must enter without outside guidance. But because he defines his own characters and devises his own plot, Blake is able to explore reality, both human and divine, in unique ways. Urizen and Los and Vala, and even Milton and Satan, do not correspond to anyone else’s construction. We must take Blake on his own terms.

In this beautifully written book, Ackroyd once more demonstrates his strong talent for narrative design and vivid scene. He captures the difficult and yet powerfully admirable personality of his subject, one whom he names “the last great religious poet in England” (18). And although Ackroyd concentrates on the comprehensible strands that make up Blake’s art, he acknowledges the limits of his approach, the temperament that is irreducible, the imagination that moves beyond our ability to follow. Blake’s independence and integrity, Ackroyd avers, were part of his genius, but his withdrawal from the world deprived him of a community and an audience. Left to himself, his references became more private and allusive; he lost the opportunity to judge the effectiveness of his work. For these reasons, he today demands more than many readers are willing to give. But Ackroyd insists that our judgment of him as a visionary must be balanced by our appreciation of his pugnacious, down-to-earth character. It is in this insistence, perhaps, that Blake’s values and personality are recognizable, that his work is readable, that Ackroyd’s greatest contribution lies. This sympathetic, intelligent, learned book, which reveals a deep and affecting love of its subject, encourages the reader to turn once again to Blake’s work. Surely this is the most desirable accomplishment for an artist’s biographer.