{"id":1709,"date":"2021-11-18T11:27:38","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T11:27:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/?p=1709"},"modified":"2022-02-17T15:35:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T15:35:06","slug":"william-blake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/englishhistory.net\/poets\/william-blake\/","title":{"rendered":"William Blake"},"content":{"rendered":"Born:<\/strong> November 28, 1757, London, England\nDied:<\/strong> August 12, 1827 (aged 69), London, England\nNotable Works:<\/strong> Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Four Zoas, Jerusalem, Milton, \u201cAnd did those feet in ancient time\u201d\n\nWilliam Blake (28 November 1757 \u2014 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. While he was largely unrecognised during his time, Blake is now considered an important figure in the history of poetry and the Romantic Age.\n\nThroughout his life, Blake was known for his engravings and used relief etching, which was uncommon at the time. He also wrote, with some of his best known works being Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.\n\nBlake\u2019s views were considered radical, particularly as he advocated for free-love, opposed the Church of England and was against slavery, and it is for this reason that his work was not widely read or accepted during his lifetime.\n\nBlake married Charlotte Boucher and taught her how to engrave. The couple had no children and Charlotte outlived Blake by four years after his death in 1827 at the age of 69.\n

William Blake – Early Life<\/h2>\nWilliam Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.) in Soho, London. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy, to James and Catherine Blake (n\u00e9e Wright). Blake was baptised on 11 December at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, London, even though the Blakes were English Dissenters.\n\nBlake attended school only long enough to learn how to read and write. He left at the age of ten and was educated at home by his mother, before being enrolled in drawing classes at Henry Pars\u2019 drawing school in the Strand.\n\nThroughout his childhood, Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father. The amount of prints that were bought for Blake suggests that the family were fairly well off, at least for some time. Through these drawings and engravings, Blake was introduced to the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck and Albrecht D\u00fcrer. He also enjoyed reading and began to discover poetry in his youth.\n

Apprenticeship<\/h3>\nOn 4 August 1772, Blake became an apprentice to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street. He was paid \u00a352.10, for a term of seven years, which took him to the age of 21. Basire would send Blake to the Gothic churches in London to copy images, and images in Westminster Abbey helped Blake to form his artistic style and ideas. Here, he would sometimes see the boys from Westminster School, who were allowed in the Abbey, and they would torment him.\n\nBlake claimed that he experienced visions in the Abbey. He saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard their chant. These visions are something he claimed to see often throughout his entire life.\n\nUpon completing his seven year apprenticeship, Blake became a professional engraver.\n

Royal Academy<\/h3>\nBlake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand, on 8 October 1779. He did not have to pay to study here, but was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year study period. During this time, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens.\n\nThis style was championed by the school’s first president, Joshua Reynolds, whom Blake did not agree with. He preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael, instead of oil paintings that Reynolds was a fan of.\n\nDuring his first year at the Academy, Blake became friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland, with whom he shared radical views.\n

Marriage<\/h3>\nIn 1782, Blake met Catherine Boucher. At the time, he was recovering from a relationship \u2014 he had proposed marriage but she had refused. He married Catherine on 18 August 1782 in St Mary’s Church, Battersea. Catherine was five years Blake\u2019s junior and was illiterate, marking her wedding certificate with an X.\n\nBlake taught Catherine to read and write, as well as teaching her how to engrave. She helped him throughout his life by helping to print his illuminated works. Their marriage was happy and the couple stayed devoted to each other until Blake\u2019s death.\n

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Early Career and First Poems<\/h2>\nBlake\u2019s first poems, a collection named Poetical Sketches, were printed around 1783. In 1784, he opened a print shop with his fellow former apprentice James Parker, and they began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson\u2019s home became a meeting place for English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Richard Price, artist John Henry Fuseli, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and English revolutionary Thomas Paine. The same year, Blake composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.\n\nBlake illustrated Original Stories from Real Life (2nd edition, 1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, with Blake condemning the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love in his 1793 poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion.\n

Relief Etching and Engravings<\/h3>\nAt the age of 31, in 1788, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, which he used to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process, also known as illuminated printing, involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. He then etched the plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper, which left the design standing in relief.\n\nBlake used this method to produce his illuminated books more quickly than via intaglio. He used this method for many of his famous works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem.\n\nWhile Blake is best known for his relief etchings, his commercial work largely surrounded engravings. This process, intaglio engraving, was the standard process of engraving in the 18th century and included the artist incising an image into the copper plate. This was laborious and often took months or years to complete.\n

Move To Felpam<\/h3>\nFrom 1790 to 1800, Blake lived in North Lambeth, London, at 13 Hercules Buildings, Hercules Road. However, in 1800, he moved to a cottage at Felpham, in Sussex (now West Sussex). He made the move in order to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. However, over time, Blake began to resent his new patron, believing that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry.\n\nIt was in this cottage that Blake began Milton (the title page is dated 1804, but Blake continued to work on it until 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning \u201cAnd did those feet in ancient time\u201d, which became the words for the anthem \u201cJerusalem\u201d.\n\nIn 1803, Blake was involved with a physical altercation with a soldier, John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the king. He was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges.\n

London<\/h3>\nIn 1804, Blake returned to London and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804\u201320). He decided he wanted to portray the characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales<\/a>, and approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an engraving.\n\nHowever, knowing Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek commissioned Blake’s friend Thomas Stothard to engrave the concept. Blake then promptly broke off contact with Stothard.\n\nInstead, he set up an independent exhibition in his brother’s haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in Soho. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a result, he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809). It contained analysis\u2019 of Chaucer<\/a> and detailed explanations of his other paintings. Despite this, the exhibition was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review the exhibition received, in The Examiner, was unfavourable.\n\nIn 1818, Blake was introduced to John Linnell, a young artist. He was introduced by George Cumberland’s son. Through Linnell, Blake met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. The group shared Blake’s rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age.\n\n\"\"\n

Later Work<\/h3>\nAt the age of 65, Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. He also began to sell a number of his works later in life, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit.\n\nIn 1826, Blake was commissioned by Linnell to engrave Dante’s Divine Comedy. The illustrations of the poem are not just accompanying works, but rather seem to critically revise certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.\n\nHowever, Blake seemed to disagree with Dante\u2019s admiration of the poetic works of ancient Greece. That being said, they did share the distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power. Blake\u2019s work on Divine Comedy was never finished before his death, with only a handful of watercolours completed, and only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form.\n

Death<\/h3>\nBlake died 12 August 1827. On that day, he worked tirelessly on his Dante series, but died that evening.\n\nHis wife, Catherine, paid for the funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. Blake’s body was buried in a plot shared with others, five days after his death, on the eve of his 45th wedding anniversary, at the Dissenter’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields, in what is today the London Borough of Islington.\n\nBlake\u2019s parents’ bodies were buried in the same graveyard. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and Linnell. Following Blake’s death, Catherine moved into Tatham’s house as a housekeeper. She believed she was regularly visited by Blake’s spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but died four years later, in October 1831.\n\nAfter Catherine died, longtime acquaintance Frederick Tatham took possession of Blake’s works and continued selling them.\n

Most Famous Works<\/h2>\n

Songs of Innocence and of Experience<\/h3>\nSongs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of illustrated poems that appeared in two phases: a few first copies were printed and illuminated by Blake himself in 1789, and five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.\n\n\u201cInnocence\u201d and \u201cExperience\u201d are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton’s existential-mythic states of \u201cParadise\u201d and \u201cFall\u201d. Blake juxtaposes the innocent, pastoral world of childhood against an adult world of corruption and repression, allowing the reader two different perspectives on the world. Many of the poems fall into pairs, so that the same situation or problem is seen through the lens of innocence first and then experience.\n

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/h3>\nThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a series of texts written in imitation of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake’s own personal Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. It was composed between 1790 and 1793 and describes the poet’s visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The book is written in prose, except for the opening \u201cArgument\u201d and the \u201cSong of Liberty\u201d.\n

The Four Zoas<\/h3>\nVala, or The Four Zoas is one of the uncompleted prophet books by Blake, which he started in 1797. The main characters of the book are the Four Zoas (Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas), who were created by the fall of Albion in Blake’s mythology. It consists of nine books, referred to as \u201cnights\u201d, which outline the interactions of the Zoas, their fallen forms and their Emanations.\n\nBlake intended the book to be a summary of his mythic universe but he was dissatisfied with the work and abandoned it in 1807. Therefore, the poem is in a rough draft and the engraving is unfinished.\n

Jerusalem<\/h3>\nJerusalem, subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion, was written between 1804 and 1820 and is the last, longest and greatest of Blake\u2019s prophet books. It tells the story of the fall of Albion, Blake’s embodiment of man, Britain or the western world as a whole, and takes the form of a \u201cdrama of the psyche\u201d.\n\nBlake etched this poem and created accompanying small sketches, marginal figures and huge full-plate illustrations. He believed it was his masterpiece, but only 6 copies were printed in his lifetime.\n\nThe lyric to the famous hymn Jerusalem (text by Blake, with music by Sir Hubert Parry) is not connected to this poem. It is in fact taken from the preface to Blake’s \u201cprophetic book\u201d, Milton.\n

Milton<\/h3>\nMilton is an epic poem by Blake, written and illustrated between 1804 and 1810. Its hero is John Milton<\/a>, who returns from Heaven and unites with Blake to explore the relationship between living writers and their predecessors, and to undergo a mystical journey to correct his own spiritual errors.\n

Blake\u2019s Views<\/h2>\n

Political<\/h3>\nBlake was not active in any well-established political party, but many of his poems rebel against the abuse of class power. He was concerned with the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and many of his poems explore the effects of the French and American revolutions. Blake was also heavily anti-slavery and believed in sexual equality for all.\n

Religious<\/h3>\nCritics who have studied Blake\u2019s works see a development of his views and a contrast between his earlier work and his later work, particularly in regards to religion. His earlier work can be seen as a protest against dogmatic religion, and is primarily rebellious, while his later work he creates a vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while still keeping his strong views on the rigidness of traditional religion.\n\nWhile Blake\u2019s views were shocking in their own day, he did not reject all region. Blake believed Jesus symbolises the vital relationship and unity between divinity and humanity. However, he believed that orthodox Christianity encouraged the suppression of natural desires and discouraged earthly joy.\n\nBlake also had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy \u2014 although he believed the imagination as the most important element of human existence, this actually ran contrary to Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and empiricism.\n

Sexuality<\/h3>\nBlake is sometimes considered (along with Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin) a forerunner of the 19th-century \u201cfree love\u201d movement. This was a broad reform tradition starting in the 1820s that held that marriage is slavery, and advocated the removal of all state restrictions on sexual activity such as homosexuality, prostitution, and adultery. This culminated in the birth control movement of the early 20th century.\n\nWhile the \u201cfree love\u201d movement was not particularly focused on the idea of multiple partners, Blake agreed with Wollstonecraft that state-sanctioned marriage was \u201clegal prostitution\u201d. Because of Catherine’s apparent inability to bear children, Blake directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.\n

Historical Significance<\/h2>\nBlake\u2019s poetry was not well received during his lifetime. At the time of his death, he had sold less than thirty copies of Songs of Innocence.\n\nAfter Blake\u2019s death, some of his manuscripts were burnt. This was due to the influence of conservative members of that church that burned manuscripts that he deemed heretical. William Michael Rossetti also burned works by Blake that he considered lacking in quality, and John Linnell erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake’s drawings.\n\nHis work remained neglected for almost a generation after his death and it was during the Modernist period that this work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists, including William Butler Yeats. Blake has become an important Romantic poet and is known for his views on class system, religion and issues such as slavery, and he has continued to influence writers into the twentieth century.\n\n\"\"\n

List Of Works<\/h2>\n

Illuminated books<\/h3>\n