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

Effectively interweaving recurring topics of religion, spiritual matters, visions, the Bible, and the autodidacticism of William Blake, Peter Ackroyd repeatedly refers to the contraries, or oppositions, in the life and personality as well as the verbal and visual works of his subject [in Blake]; in so doing, he reminds the reader of Blake’s own declaration that “Without contraries is no progression.” From the three opening chapters treating the early religious influences on Blake through intermediate sections of the biography concerning subsequent periods and those tracing the closing years of Blake’s life, the author emphasizes the circumstances and events that rendered the visionary engraver-painter-poet unique among creators of great art. It should be noted that Ackroyd prefers the designation of engraver to that of painter even though he writes about the artist’s paintings.

By focusing on the fact that both James and Catherine Blake, the parents of William, were Dissenters, Ackroyd establishes the religious milieu of the poet’s childhood. He states that “all the evidence of Blake’s art and writing suggests that he was imbued with a religion of piety” and that “he is the last great religious poet in England.” Ackroyd further observes that the prophet and visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose views would influence Blake, wrote in the year of Blake’s birth: “The Last Judgment was accomplished in the year 1757 … the former heaven and the former earth are passed away, and all things are become New” (18). Blake read the prophecy and referred to it in a poem. As one who understood prophecy and visions, he himself experienced visions: of God, of Elijah, of a biblical city he identified with London. This childhood capacity for visions continued throughout his life, and Ackroyd explains the visions as a kind of second sight. Appropriately, he titles his second chapter “The Whole Life is fill’d with Imagination & Visions” and the final one “The Imagination which Liveth for Ever,” drawing from Blake’s own writings. The early and late concern with imagination and vision emphasizes a theme basic to the entire biography.

With the concept of Blake as visionary and prophet carefully established, Ackroyd devotes succeeding sections to Blake’s preparation as an artist and to influences by both literary and visual arts on his work. Sent by the engraver James Basire, to whom he was apprenticed, to make drawings of art (especially of figures on tombs) in Westminster Abbey, Blake found that the great church strengthened his religious impulses and provided him images for his poems and for the illuminations to accompany them. Never willing merely to copy nature, he relied on imagination and vision for his artistic inspiration.

For literary landscapes Blake turned to Dante’s Inferno and James Macpherson’s “Ossian,” and he was influenced by the vocabulary and imagery of Thomas Chatterton’s ballads. His assiduous reading of Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, when their poetry was less fashionable than it would later become, attests not only to his deep commitment to self-education but also to his considering himself a member of their visionary company.

Study of John Milton contributed to Blake’s cadences and imagery in his poetry. But Ackroyd avers that the poet’s desire was not limited to praising or imitating Milton: “He wanted to rewrite Paradise Lost with … vigour and visionary intensity” and thus “to change the epic of the Fall into the prophecy of Man’s faculties restored” (311). In the epic poem Milton the deceased poet descends to earth as “a falling star” but then joins with Blake to celebrate vision and poetic genius. Blake felt free to praise but also to criticize Milton even as he incorporated Milton into his myth of man’s fall and ultimate regeneration through poetic vision.

Aside from direct artistic and literary influences on Blake, Ackroyd considers the roles of his contemporaries Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and William Hayley in encouraging him and in sometimes disagreeing with him. So also does Ackroyd devote attention to the roles of Catherine Boucher Blake, his wife, and Robert Blake, his younger brother. Catherine, whom Blake married in 1782, was known to their friends as a good wife who helped Blake in his work and who, according to Hayley, was “‘the only female on earth who could have suited him exactly’” (232). Robert was the sibling to whom Blake was most closely attached; after death Robert appeared to Blake in a vision, the poet said, and offered advice on how to proceed in employing a new engraving technique—relief etching—and so became a kind of muse to the artist.

Ackroyd’s biography encompasses more than influences on Blake’s life and work. It records events in his lifetime: political occurrences, revolutions, and Blake’s disputes and rifts with acquaintances. It also explicates various works—Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Jerusalem, Milton, The Four Zoas, and other writings—as well as his major engravings related to his own poems or to the works of other masters. Ackroyd’s interpretations throughout are clear and well founded.

As the author brings the biography to its close, he refers to the artist’s work on a series of watercolors as companion pieces to Dante’s poetry and on an illuminated version of the Bible, which were incomplete at the time of Blake’s death in 1827. At the end of his life as at the beginning of it, Blake was thinking of religious matters. Ackroyd quotes from a letter written by Blake’s friend George Richmond to Samuel Palmer: “‘He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see and expressed Himself Happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ—Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out into Singing of the things he saw in Heaven’” (367). Ackroyd concludes that Blake’s “vision had not faded in the pilgrimage of seventy years, and it has not faded yet” (369).

A meticulous researcher, Ackroyd cites material from Frederick Tatham, who had the advantage of knowing and talking with Blake before writing the first biography of him. Ackroyd also refers to Alexander Gilchrist’s 1863 Life of William Blake, which embraces information gathered from acquaintances of the poet. And he further cites the Thomas Wright biography of 1929 and the Mona Wilson life of 1933 as well as numerous other sources. However, his biography deserves recognition as a definitive work on its own merits: its style and its thoughtful assessment of Blake’s engravings and paintings and writings, supported by plates of Blake’s drawings and pictures of his associates, a comprehensive and valuable bibliography, and a full and well organized index. The volume should be in every research library and in every general library.