biography of willam blake

William Blake

(1757-1827)

Who Was William Blake?

William Blake began writing at an early age and claimed to have had his first vision, of a tree full of angels, at age 10. He studied engraving and grew to love Gothic art, which he incorporated into his own unique works. A misunderstood poet, artist and visionary throughout much of his life, Blake found admirers late in life and has been vastly influential since his death in 1827.

Early Years

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in the Soho district of London, England. He only briefly attended school, being chiefly educated at home by his mother. The Bible had an early, profound influence on Blake, and it would remain a lifetime source of inspiration, coloring his life and works with intense spirituality.

At an early age, Blake began experiencing visions, and his friend and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that Blake saw God's head appear in a window when Blake was 4 years old. He also allegedly saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree and had a vision of "a tree filled with angels." Blake's visions would have a lasting effect on the art and writings that he produced.

The Young Artist

Blake's artistic ability became evident in his youth, and by age 10, he was enrolled at Henry Pars' drawing school, where he sketched the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient statues. At age 14, he apprenticed with an engraver. Blake's master was the engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries, and Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and monuments, where his lifelong love of gothic art was seeded.

The Maturing Artist

In 1779, at age 21, Blake completed his seven-year apprenticeship and became a journeyman copy engraver, working on projects for book and print publishers. Also preparing himself for a career as a painter, that same year, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art's Schools of Design, where he began exhibiting his own works in 1780. Blake's artistic energies branched out at this point, and he privately published his Poetical Sketches (1783), a collection of poems that he had written over the previous 14 years.

In August 1782, Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher, who was illiterate. Blake taught her how to read, write, draw and color (his designs and prints). He also helped her to experience visions, as he did. Catherine believed explicitly in her husband's visions and his genius, and supported him in everything he did, right up to his death 45 years later.

One of the most traumatic events of Blake's life occurred in 1787, when his beloved brother, Robert, died from tuberculosis at age 24. At the moment of Robert's death, Blake allegedly saw his spirit ascend through the ceiling, joyously; the moment, which entered into Blake's psyche, greatly influenced his later poetry. The following year, Robert appeared to Blake in a vision and presented him with a new method of printing his works, which Blake called "illuminated printing." Once incorporated, this method allowed Blake to control every aspect of the production of his art.

While Blake was an established engraver, soon he began receiving commissions to paint watercolors, and he painted scenes from the works of Milton, Dante , Shakespeare and the Bible.

The Move to Felpham and Charges of Sedition

In 1800, Blake accepted an invitation from poet William Hayley to move to the little seaside village of Felpham and work as his protégé. While the relationship between Hayley and Blake began to sour, Blake ran into trouble of a different stripe: In August 1803, Blake found a soldier, John Schofield, on the property and demanded that he leave. After Schofield refused and an argument ensued, Blake removed him by force. Schofield accused Blake of assault and, worse, of sedition, claiming that he had damned the king.

The punishments for sedition in England at the time (during the Napoleonic Wars) were severe. Blake anguished, uncertain of his fate. Hayley hired a lawyer on Blake's behalf, and he was acquitted in January 1804, by which time Blake and Catherine had moved back to London.

Later Years

In 1804, Blake began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804-20), his most ambitious work to date. He also began showing more work at exhibitions (including Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims and Satan Calling Up His Legions ), but these works were met with silence, and the one published review was absurdly negative; the reviewer called the exhibit a display of "nonsense, unintelligibleness and egregious vanity," and referred to Blake as "an unfortunate lunatic."

Blake was devastated by the review and lack of attention to his works, and, subsequently, he withdrew more and more from any attempt at success. From 1809 to 1818, he engraved few plates (there is no record of Blake producing any commercial engravings from 1806 to 1813). He also sank deeper into poverty, obscurity and paranoia.

In 1819, however, Blake began sketching a series of "visionary heads," claiming that the historical and imaginary figures that he depicted actually appeared and sat for him. By 1825, Blake had sketched more than 100 of them, including those of Solomon and Merlin the magician and those included in "The Man Who Built the Pyramids" and "Harold Killed at the Battle of Hastings"; along with the most famous visionary head, that included in Blake's "The Ghost of a Flea."

Remaining artistically busy, between 1823 and 1825, Blake engraved 21 designs for an illustrated Book of Job (from the Bible) and Dante's Inferno . In 1824, he began a series of 102 watercolor illustrations of Dante — a project that would be cut short by Blake's death in 1827.

Death and Legacy

In the final years of his life, Blake suffered from recurring bouts of an undiagnosed disease that he called "that sickness to which there is no name." He died on August 12, 1827, leaving unfinished watercolor illustrations to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and an illuminated manuscript of the Bible's Book of Genesis. In death, as in life, Blake received short shrift from observers, and obituaries tended to underscore his personal idiosyncrasies at the expense of his artistic accomplishments. The Literary Chronicle , for example, described him as "one of those ingenious persons ... whose eccentricities were still more remarkable than their professional abilities."

Unappreciated in life, Blake has since become a giant in literary and artistic circles, and his visionary approach to art and writing has not only spawned countless, spellbound speculations about Blake, they have inspired a vast array of artists and writers.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: William Blake
• Birth Year: 1757
• Birth date: November 28, 1757
• Birth City: London, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: William Blake was a 19th-century writer and artist who is regarded as a seminal figure of the Romantic Age. His writings have influenced countless writers and artists through the ages.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Christianity
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Royal Academy of Art's Schools of Design
• Death Year: 1827
• Death date: August 12, 1827
• Death City: London, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: William Blake Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/william-blake
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 27, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven daily and nightly.
• The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision's greatest enemy. Both read the Bible day and night, but thou readst black where I read white.

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Biography William Blake

“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

– William Blake – The Tyger (from Songs of Experience )

Short Bio of William Blake

William Blake was born in London 28 November 1757, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier and attracted by the Religious teachings of  Emmanuel Swedenborg. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother.  Blake remained very close to his mother and wrote a lot of poetry about her.  Poems such as Cradle Song illustrate Blake’s fond memories for his upbringing by his mother:

Sweet dreams, form a shade O’er my lovely infant’s head; Sweet dreams of pleasant streams By happy, silent, moony beams. Sweet sleep, with soft down Weave thy brows an infant crown. Sweep sleep, Angel mild, Hover o’er my happy child.

– William Blake

His parents were broadly sympathetic with his artistic temperament and they encouraged him to collect Italian prints. He found work as an engraver, joining the trade at an early age. He found the early apprenticeship rather boring, but the skills he learnt proved useful throughout his artistic life. He became very skilled as an engraver and after completing his apprenticeship in 1779, he set up as an independent artist. He received many commissions and became well known as a skilled artist. Throughout his life, Blake was innovative and his willingness to depict the spirit world in physical form was criticised by elements of the press.

In 1791, Blake fell in love with Catherine Boucher, an illiterate and poor woman from Battersea across the Thames. The marriage proved a real meeting of mind and spirit. Blake taught his wife to read and write, and freely shared his inner and outer experiences. Catherine became a devoted wife and an uncompromising supporter of Blake’s artistic genius.

“Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a heaven in hell’s despair.”

– Songs of Experience, The Clod and the Pebble, st. 1

Mystical experiences and poetry

‘Pity’ by William Blake

As a young boy, Blake recalls having a most revealing vision of seeing angels in the trees. These mystical visions returned throughout his life, leaving a profound mark on his poetry and outlook.

“I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what Ought to be Told: That I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly; but the nature of such things is not, as some suppose, without trouble or care.” – Letters of William Blake

William Blake was also particularly sensitive to cruelty. His heart wept at the sight of man’s inhumanity to other men and children. In many ways he was also of radical temperament, rebelling against the prevailing orthodoxy of the day. His anger and frustration at the world can be seen in his collection of poems “ Songs of Experience ”

“How can the bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring!”

– William Blake: The Schoolboy

As well as writing poetry that revealed and exposed the harsh realities of life, William Blake never lost touch with his heavenly visions. Like a true seer, he could see beyond the ordinary world and glimpse another possibility.

“To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.”

This poem from Auguries of Innocence is one of the most loved poems in the English language. Within four short lines, he gives an impression of the infinite in the finite, and the eternal in the transient.

One of Blake’s greatest poems – popularly referred to as ‘Jerusalem’ – was the preface to his epic work “Milton: A poem in two books”. This hymn was inspired by the story that Jesus travelled to Glastonbury, England – in the years before his documented life in the Gospels. To Blake, Jerusalem was a metaphor for creating Heaven on earth and transforming all that is ugly about modern life ‘dark satanic mills’ into ‘England’s green and pleasant land.” Jerusalem, set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916, is often seen as England’s unofficial national anthem.

On one occasion he got into trouble with the authorities for forcing a soldier to leave his back garden. It was in the period of the Napoleonic Wars where the government were cracking down on any perceived lack of patriotism. In this climate, he was arrested for sedition and faced the possibility of jail. Blake defended himself and despite the prejudices of those who disliked Blake’s anti-military attitude, he was able to gain an acquittal.

Religion of Blake

Outwardly Blake was a member of the Church of England, where he was christened, married and buried. However, his faith and spiritual experience was much deeper and more unconventional than orthodox religion. He considered himself a sincere Christian but was frequently critical of organised religion.

“And now let me finish with assuring you that, Tho I have been very unhappy, I am so no longer. I am again. Emerged into the light of day; I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God” – Letters of Blake

For the last few decades of his life, he never attended formal worship but saw religion as an inner experience to be held in private. Throughout his life, he experienced mystical experiences and visions of heavenly angels. These experiences informed his poetry, art and outlook on life. It made Blake see beyond conventional piety and value human goodness and kindness. He was a strong opponent of slavery and supported the idea of equality of man.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” – Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

Blake read the Bible and admired the New Testament, he was less enamoured of the judgements and restrictions found in the Old Testament. He was also influenced by the teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg, a charismatic preacher who saw the Bible as the literal word of God. Although Blake was, at times, enthusiastic about Swedenborg, he never became a member of his church, preferring to retain his intellectual and spiritual independence.

Blake died on August 12 1827. Eyewitnesses report that his death was a ‘glorious affair’. After falling ill, Blake sang hymns and prepared himself to depart. He was buried in an unmarked grave in a public cemetery and Bunhill Fields. After his death, his influence steadily grew through the Pre-Raphaelites and later noted poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats.

The esteemed poet, William Wordsworth , said on the death of Blake:

 “There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”

The Art of William Blake

Newton by Blake

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of William Blake” , Oxford, UK www.biographyonline.net , 1st June. 2006. Page updated 23rd Jan 2020.

The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake

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To See a World in a Grain of Sand

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Poems & Poets

William Blake

Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men. Though in his lifetime his work was largely neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and his work has only grown in popularity. In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself  ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of his peers. Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. In addition to being considered one of the most visionary of English poets and one of the great progenitors of English Romanticism, his visual artwork is highly regarded around the world. 

Blake was born on November 28, 1757. Unlike many well-known writers of his day, Blake was born into a family of moderate means. His father, James, was a hosier, and the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but “respectable” neighborhood. In all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Wright Blake, but only five survived infancy. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died young.

By all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by skipping any formal schooling. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Even at an early age, however, his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. According to Gilchrist, on one ramble he was startled to “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His parents were not amused at such a story, and only his mother’s pleadings prevented him from receiving a beating. His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at the age of 10 in Pars’ drawing school. The expense of continued formal training in art was a prohibitive, and the family decided that at the age of 14 William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. At first his father took him to William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. William, however, resisted the arrangement telling his father, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!” The grim prophecy was to come true 12 years later. Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver, James Basire. Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft.

At the age of 21, Blake left Basire’s apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the newly formed Royal Academy. He earned his living as a journeyman engraver. Booksellers employed him to engrave illustrations for publications ranging from novels such as Don Quixote to serials such as Ladies’ Magazine .

One incident at this time affected Blake deeply. In June of 1780 riots broke out in London incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon and by resistance to continued war against the American colonists. Houses, churches, and prisons were burned by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. On one evening, whether by design or by accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burned Newgate prison. These images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave Blake powerful material for works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793).

Not all of the young man’s interests were confined to art and politics. After one ill-fated romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher. After a year’s courtship the couple were married on August 18, 1782. The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women of her class, could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and to write, and under Blake’s tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him in the execution of his designs. By all accounts the marriage was a successful one, but no children were born to the Blakes.

Blake’s friend John Flaxman introduced Blake to the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, wife of the Rev. Henry Mathew, whose drawing room was often a meeting place for artists and musicians. There Blake gained favor by reciting and even singing his early poems. Thanks to the support of Flaxman and Mrs. Mathew, a thin volume of poems was published under the title Poetical Sketches (1783). Many of these poems are imitations of classical models, much like the sketches of models of antiquity the young artist made to learn his trade. Even here, however, one sees signs of Blake’s protest against war and the tyranny of kings. Only about 50 copies of Poetical Sketches are known to have been printed. Blake’s financial enterprises also did not fare well. In 1784, after his father’s death, Blake used part of the money he inherited to set up shop as a printseller with his friend James Parker. The Blakes moved to 27 Broad Street, next door to the family home and close to Blake’s brothers. The business did not do well, however, and the Blakes soon moved out.

Of more concern to Blake was the deteriorating health of his favorite brother, Robert. Blake tended to his brother in his illness and according to Gilchrist watched the spirit of his brother escape his body in his death: “At the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heaven ward through the matter-of-fact ceiling,  ‘clapping its hands for joy.’"

Blake always felt the spirit of Robert lived with him. He even announced that it was Robert who informed him how to illustrate his poems in “illuminated writing.” Blake’s technique was to produce his text and design on a copper plate with an impervious liquid. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the text and design remained in relief. That plate could be used to print on paper, and the final copy would be then hand colored.

After experimenting with this method in a series of aphorisms entitled There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788?), Blake designed the series of plates for the poems entitled Songs of Innocence and dated the title page 1789. Blake continued to experiment with the process of illuminated writing and in 1794 combined the early poems with companion poems entitled Songs of Experience . The title page of the combined set announces that the poems show “the two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”

The introductory poems to each series display Blake’s dual image of the poet as both a “piper” and a “Bard.” As man goes through various stages of innocence and experience in the poems, the poet also is in different stages of innocence and experience. The pleasant lyrical aspect of poetry is shown in the role of the “piper” while the more somber prophetic nature of poetry is displayed by the stern Bard.

The dual role played by the poet is Blake’s interpretation of the ancient dictum that poetry should both delight and instruct. More important, for Blake the poet speaks both from the personal experience of his own vision and from the “inherited” tradition of ancient Bards and prophets who carried the Holy Word to the nations.

The two states of innocence and experience are not always clearly separate in the poems, and one can see signs of both states in many poems. The companion poems titled “Holy Thursday” are on the same subject, the forced marching of poor children to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The speaker in the state of innocence approves warmly of the progression of children:

’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean The children walking two & two in red & blue & green Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow[.]

The brutal irony is that in this world of truly “innocent” children there are evil men who repress the children, round them up like herd of cattle, and force them to show their piety. In this state of innocence, experience is very much present.

If experience has a way of creeping into the world of innocence, innocence also has a way of creeping into experience. The golden land where the “sun does shine” and the “rain does fall” is a land of bountiful goodness and innocence. But even here in this blessed land, there are children starving. The sharp contrast between the two conditions makes the social commentary all the more striking and supplies the energy of the poem.

The storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the agonies of the French Revolution sent shock waves through England. Some hoped for a corresponding outbreak of liberty in England while others feared a breakdown of the social order. In much of his writing Blake argues against the monarchy. In his early Tiriel (written circa 1789) Blake traces the fall of a tyrannical king.

Politics was surely often the topic of conversation at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s house, where Blake was often invited. There Blake met important literary and political figures such as William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. According to one legend Blake is even said to have saved Paine’s life by warning him of his impending arrest. Whether or not that is true, it is clear that Blake was familiar with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day.

In The French Revolution Blake celebrates the rise of democracy in France and the fall of the monarchy. King Louis represents a monarchy that is old and dying. The sick king is lethargic and unable to act: “From my window I see the old mountains of France, like aged men, fading away.” The “voice of the people” demands the removal of the king’s troops from Paris, and their departure at the end of the first book signals the triumph of democracy.

On the title page for book one of The French Revolution Blake announces that it is “A Poem in Seven Books,” but none of the other books has been found. Johnson never published the poem, perhaps because of fear of prosecution, or perhaps because Blake himself withdrew it from publication. Johnson did have cause to be nervous. Erdman points out that in the same year booksellers were thrown in jail for selling the works of Thomas Paine.

In America (1793) Blake also addresses the idea of revolution–less as a commentary on the actual revolution in America as a commentary on universal principles that are at work in any revolution. The figure of Orc represents all revolutions:

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands, What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness, That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.

The same force that causes the colonists to rebel against King George is the force that overthrows the perverted rules and restrictions of established religions.

The revolution in America suggests to Blake a similar revolution in England. In the poem the king, like the ancient pharaohs of Egypt, sends pestilence to America to punish the rebels, but the colonists are able to redirect the forces of destruction to England. Erdman suggests that Blake is thinking of the riots in England during the war and the chaotic condition of the English troops, many of whom deserted. Writing this poem in the 1790s, Blake also surely imagined the possible effect of the French Revolution on England.

Another product of the radical 1790s is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . Written and etched between 1790 and 1793, Blake’s poem brutally satirizes oppressive authority in church and state.

The powerful opening of the poem suggests a world of violence: “Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air / Hungry clouds swag on the deep.” The fire and smoke suggest a battlefield and the chaos of revolution. The cause of that chaos is analyzed at the beginning of the poem. The world has been turned upside down. The “just man” has been turned away from the institutions of church and state, and in his place are fools and hypocrites who preach law and order but create chaos. Those who proclaim restrictive moral rules and oppressive laws as “goodness” are in themselves evil. Hence to counteract this repression, Blake announces that he is of the “Devil’s Party” that will advocate freedom and energy and gratified desire.

The “Proverbs of Hell” are clearly designed to shock the reader out of his commonplace notion of what is good and what is evil:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

It is the oppressive nature of church and state that has created the repulsive prisons and brothels. Sexual energy is not an inherent evil, but the repression of that energy is. The preachers of morality fail to understand that God is in all things, including the sexual nature of men and women.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains many of the basic religious ideas developed in the major prophecies. Blake analyzes the development of organized religion as a perversion of ancient visions: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & Numerous senses could perceive.” Ancient man created those gods to express his vision of the spiritual properties that he perceived in the physical world. The gods began to take on a life of their own separate from man: “Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.” The “system” or organized religion keeps man from perceiving the spiritual in the physical. The gods are seen as separate from man, and an elite race of priests is developed to approach the gods: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” Instead of looking for God on remote altars, Blake warns, man should look within.

In August of 1790 Blake moved from his house on Poland Street across the Thames to the area known as Lambeth. The Blakes lived in the house for 10 years, and the surrounding neighborhood often becomes mythologized in his poetry. Felpham was a “lovely vale,” a place of trees and open meadows, but it also contained signs of human cruelty, such as the house for orphans. At his home Blake kept busy not only with his illuminated poetry but also with the daily chore of making money. During the 1790s Blake earned fame as an engraver and was glad to receive numerous commissions.

One story told by Blake’s friend Thomas Butts shows how much the Blakes enjoyed the pastoral surroundings of Lambeth. At the end of Blake’s garden was a small summer house, and coming to call on the Blakes one day Butts was shocked to find the couple stark naked: “Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” The Blakes were reciting passages from Paradise Lost , apparently “in character."Sexual freedom is addressed in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), also written during the Lambeth period.

Between 1793 and 1795 Blake produced a remarkable collection of illuminated works that have come to be known as the “Minor Prophecies.” In Europe (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Song of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania (1795) Blake develops the major outlines of his universal mythology. In these poems Blake examines the fall of man. In Blake’s mythology man and God were once united, but man separated himself from God and became weaker and weaker as he became further divided.

The narrative of the universal mythology is interwoven with the historical events of Blake’s own time. The execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 led to an inevitable reaction, and England soon declared war on France. England’s participation in the war against France and its attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit is addressed in Europe . The very force of that repression, however, will cause its opposite to appear in the revolutionary figure of Orc: “And in the vineyards of reds France appear’d the light of his fury.”

The causes of that repression are examined in The First Book of Urizen . The word Urizen suggests “your reason” and also “horizon.” He represents that part of the mind that constantly defines and limits human thought and action. In the frontispiece to the poem he is pictured as an aged man hunched over a massive book writing with both hands in other books. Behind him stand the tablets of the 10 commandments, and Urizen is surely writing other “thou shalt nots” for others to follow. His twisted anatomical position shows the perversity of what should be the “human form divine."

The poem traces the birth of Urizen as a separate part of the human mind. He insists on laws for all to follow:

One command, one joy, one desire One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law.

Urizen’s repressive laws bring only further chaos and destruction. Appalled by the chaos he himself created, Urizen fashions a world apart.

The process of separation continues as the character of Los is divided from Urizen. Los, the “Eternal Prophet,” represents another power of the human mind. Los forges the creative aspects of the mind into works of art. Like Urizen he is a limiter, but the limitations he creates are productive and necessary. In the poem Los forms “nets and gins” to bring an end to Urizen’s continual chaotic separation.

Los is horrified by the figure of the bound Urizen and is separated by his pity, “for Pity divides the Soul.” Los undergoes a separation into a male and female form. His female form is called Enitharmon, and her creation is viewed with horror:

Eternity shudder’d when they saw Man begetting his likeness On his own divided image.

This separation into separate sexual identities is yet another sign of man’s fall. The “Eternals” contain both male and female forms within themselves, but man is divided and weak.

Enitharmon gives birth to the fiery Orc, whose violent birth gives some hope for radical change in a fallen world, but Orc is bound in chains by Los, now a victim of jealousy. Enitharmon bears an “enormous race,” but it is a race of men and women who are weak and divided and who have lost sight of eternity. 

In his fallen state man has limited senses and fails to perceive the infinite. Divided from God and caught by the narrow traps of religion, he sees God only as a crude lawgiver who must be obeyed.

The Book of Los also examines man’s fall and the binding of Urizen, but from the perspective of Los, whose task it is to place a limit on the chaotic separation begun by Urizen. The decayed world is again one of ignorance where there is “no light from the fires.” From this chaos the bare outlines of the human form begin to appear:

Many ages of groans, till there grew Branchy forms organizing the Human Into finite inflexible organs.

The human senses are pale imitations of the true senses that allow one to perceive eternity. Urizen’s world where man now lives is spoken of as an “illusion” because it masks the spiritual world that is everywhere present.

In The Song of Los , Los sings of the decayed state of man, where the arbitrary laws of Urizen have become institutionalized:

Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave Laws & Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more And more to Earth, closing and restraining, Till a Philosophy of five Senses was complete. Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke.

The “philosophy of the five senses” espoused by scientists and philosophers argues that the world and the mind are like industrial machines operating by fixed laws but devoid of imagination, creativity, or any spiritual life. Blake condemns this materialistic view of the world espoused in the writings of Newton and Locke.

Although man is in a fallen state, the end of the poem points to the regeneration that is to come:

Orc, raging in European darkness, Arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps, Like a serpent of fiery flame!

The coming of Orc is likened not only to the fires of revolution sweeping Europe, but also to the final apocalypse when the “Grave shrieks with delight."

The separation of man is also examined in The Book of Ahania , which Blake later incorporated in Vala, or The Four Zoas . In The Book of Ahania Urizen is further divided into male and female forms. Urizen is repulsed by his feminine shadow that is called Ahania:

He groan’d anguish’d, & called her Sin, Kissing her and weeping over her; Then hid her in darkness, in silence, Jealous, tho’ she was invisible.

“Ahania” is only a “sin” in that she is given that name. Urizen, the lawgiver, can not accept the liberating aspects of sexual pleasure. At the end of the poem, Ahania laments the lost pleasures of eternity:

Where is my golden palace? Where my ivory bed? Where the joy of my morning hour? Where the sons of eternity singing.

The physical pleasures of sexual union are celebrated as an entrance to a spiritual state. The physical union of man and woman is sign of the spiritual union that is to come.

The Four Zoas is subtitled “The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man,” and the poem develops Blake’s myth of Albion, who represents both the country of England and the unification of all men. Albion is composed of “Four Mighty Ones": Tharmas, Urthona, Urizen, and Luvah. Originally, in Eden, these four exist in the unity of “The Universal Brotherhood.” At this early time all parts of man lived in perfect harmony, but now they are fallen into warring camps. The poem traces the changes in Albion:

His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity: His fall into the Generation of decay & death, & his Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead.

The poem begins with Tharmas and examines the fall of each aspect of man’s identity. The poem progresses from disunity toward unity as each Zoa moves toward final unification.

In the apocalyptic “Night the Ninth,” the evils of oppression are overturned in the turmoil of the Last Judgment: “The thrones of Kings are shaken, they have lost their robes & crowns/ The poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest.”

As dead men are rejuvenated, Christ, the “Lamb of God,” is brought back to life and sheds the evils of institutionalized religions:

Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity, Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride & wife That we his Children evermore may live in Jerusalem Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman Mother of myriads redeem’d & born in her spiritual palaces, By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.

Very little of Blake’s poetry of the 1790s was known to the general public. His reputation as an artist was mixed. Response to his art ranged from praise to derision, but he did gain some fame as an engraver. His commissions did not produce much in the way of income, but Blake never seems to have been discouraged. In 1799 Blake wrote to George Cumberland, “I laugh at Fortune & Go on & on."

Because of his monetary woes, Blake often had to depend on the benevolence of patrons of the arts. This sometimes led to heated exchanges between the independent artist and the wealthy patron. Dr. John Trusler was one such patron whom Blake failed to please. Dr. Trusler was a clergyman, a student of medicine, a bookseller, and the author of such works as Hogarth Moralized (1768), The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1750?), and A Sure Way to Lengthen Life with Vigor (circa 1819). Blake found himself unable to follow the clergyman’s wishes: “I attempted every morning for a fortnight together to follow your Dictate, but when I found my attempts were in vain, resolv’d to shew an independence which I know will please an Author better than slavishly following the track of another, however admirable that track may be. At any rate, my Excuse must be: I could not do otherwise; it was out of my power!” Dr. Trusler was not convinced and replied that he found Blake’s “Fancy” to be located in the “World of Spirits” and not in this world. Dr. Trusler was not the only patron that tried to make Blake conform to popular tastes; for example, Blake’s stormy relation to his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley directly affected the writing of the epics Milton and Jerusalem .

Blake left Felpham in 1803 and returned to London. In April of that year he wrote to Butts that he was overjoyed to return to the city: “That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & Prophecy & Speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals.” In the same letter Blake refers to his epic poem Milton , composed while at Felpham: “But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years  ‘Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the Spirit, or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts."

In his “slumber on the banks of the Ocean,” Blake, surrounded by financial worries and hounded by a patron who could not appreciate his art, reflected on the value of visionary poetry. Milton , which Blake started to engrave in 1804 (probably finishing in 1808), is a poem that constantly draws attention to itself as a work of literature. Its ostensible subject is the poet John Milton , but the author, William Blake, also creates a character for himself in his own poem. Blake examines the entire range of mental activity involved in the art of poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to the reception of his vision by the reader of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject the very nature of poetry: what it means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be a reader of poetry.

In the preface to the poem, Blake issues a battle cry to his readers to reject what is merely fashionable in art:

Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.

In attacking the “ignorant Hirelings” in the “Camp, the Court & the University,” Blake repeats a familiar dissenting cry against established figures in English society. Blake’s insistence on being “just & true to our own Imaginations” places a special burden on the reader of his poem. For as he makes clear, Blake demands the exercise of the creative imagination from his own readers.

In the well-known lyric that follows, Blake asks for a continuation of Christ’s vision in modern-day England:

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green & pleasant Land.

The poet-prophet must lead the reader away from man’s fallen state and toward a revitalized state where man can perceive eternity.

"Book the First” contains a poem-within-a-poem, a “Bard’s Prophetic Song.” The Bard’s Song describes man’s fall from a state of vision. We see man’s fall in the ruined form of Albion as a representative of all men and in the fall of Palamabron from his proper position as prophet to a nation. Interwoven into this narrative are the Bard’s addresses to the reader, challenges to the reader’s senses, descriptions of contemporary events and locations in England, and references to the life of William Blake. Blake is at pains to show us that his mythology is not something far removed from us but is part of our day to day life. Blake describes the reader’s own fall from vision and the possibility of regaining those faculties necessary for vision.

The climax of the Bard’s Song is the Bard’s sudden vision of the “Holy Lamb of God": “Glory! Glory! to the Holy lamb of God: / I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord.” At the end of the Bard’s Song, his spirit is incorporated into that of the poet Milton. Blake portrays Milton as a great but flawed poet who must unify the separated elements of his own identity before he can reclaim his powers of vision and become a true poet, casting off “all that is not inspiration."

As Milton is presented as a man in the process of becoming a poet, Blake presents himself as a character in the poem undergoing the transformation necessary to become a poet. Only Milton believes in the vision of the Bard’s Song, and the Bard takes “refuge in Milton’s bosom.” As Blake realizes the insignificance of this “Vegetable World,” Los merges with Blake, and he arises in “fury and strength.” This ongoing belief in the hidden powers of the mind heals divisions and increases powers of perception. The Bard, Milton, Los, and Blake begin to merge into a powerful bardic union. Yet it is but one stage in a greater drive toward the unification of all men in a “Universal Brotherhood."

In the second book of Milton Blake initiates the reader into the order of poets and prophets. Blake continues the process begun in book one of taking the reader through different stages in the growth of a poet.

Turning the outside world upside down is a preliminary stage in an extensive examination of man’s internal world. A searching inquiry into the self is a necessary stage in the development of the poet. Milton is told he must first look within: “Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore, / What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable.”  Central to the process of judging the self is a confrontation with that destructive part of man’s identity Blake calls the Selfhood, which blocks “the human center of creativity.” Only by annihilating the Selfhood, Blake believes, can one hope to participate in the visionary experience of the poem.

The Selfhood places two powerful forces to block our path: the socially accepted values of “love” and “reason.” In its purest state love is given freely with no restrictions and no thought of return. In its fallen state love is reduced to a form of trade: “Thy love depends on him thou lovest, & on his dear loves / Depend thy pleasures, which thou hast cut off by jealousy.” “Female love” is given only in exchange for love received. It is bartering in human emotions and is not love at all. When Milton denounces his own Selfhood, he gives up “Female love” and loves freely and openly.

As Blake attacks accepted notions of love, he also forces the reader to question the value society places on reason. In his struggle with Urizen, who represents man’s limited power of reason, Milton seeks to cast off the deadening effect of the reasoning power and free the mind for the power of the imagination.

Destroying the Selfhood allows Milton to unite with others. He descends upon Blake’s path and continues the process of uniting with Blake that had begun in book one. This union is also a reflection of Blake’s encounter with Los that is described in book one and illustrated in book two.

The apex of Blake’s vision is the brief image of the Throne of God. In Revelation, John’s vision of the Throne of God is a prelude to the apocalypse itself. Similarly Blake’s vision of the throne is also a prelude to the coming apocalypse. Blake’s vision is abruptly cut off as the Four Zoas sound the Four Trumpets, signaling the call to judgment of the peoples of the earth. The trumpets bring to a halt Blake’s vision, as he falls to the ground and returns to his mortal state. The apocalypse is still to come.

The author falls before the vision of the Throne of God and the awful sound of the coming apocalypse. However, the author’s vision does not fall with him to the ground. In the very next line after Blake describes his faint, we see his vision soar: “Immediately the lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham’s Vale.” We have seen the lark as the messenger of Los and the carrier of inspiration. Its sudden flight here demonstrates that the vision of the poem continues. It is up to the reader to follow the flight of the lark to the Gate of Los and continue the vision of Milton .

Before Blake could leave Felpham and return to London, an incident occurred that was very disturbing to him and possibly even dangerous. Without Blake’s knowledge, his gardener had invited a soldier by the name of John Scofield into his garden to help with the work. Blake seeing the soldier and thinking he had no business being there promptly tossed him out.

What made this incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake had said “Damn the King” and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he was forced to post bail and appear in court. Blake left Felpham at the end of September 1803 and settled in a new residence on South Molton Street in London. His trial was set for the following January at Chichester. The soldier’s testimony was shown to be false, and the jury acquitted Blake.

Blake’s radical political views made him fear persecution, and he wondered if Scofield had been a government agent sent to entrap him. In any event Blake forever damned the soldier by attacking him in the epic poem Jerusalem .

Jerusalem is in many ways Blake’s major achievement. It is an epic poem consisting of 100 illuminated plates. Blake dated the title page 1804, but he seems to have worked on the poem for a considerable length of time after that date. In Jerusalem he develops his mythology to explore man’s fall and redemption. As the narrative begins, man is apart from God and split into separate identities. As the poem progresses man’s split identities are unified, and man is reunited with the divinity that is within him.

In chapter one Blake announces the purpose of his “great task": To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

It is sometimes easy to get lost in the complex mythology of Blake’s poetry and forget that he is describing not outside events but a “Mental Fight” that takes place in the mind. Much of Jerusalem is devoted to the idea of awakening the human senses, so that the reader can perceive the spiritual world that is everywhere present.

At the beginning of the poem, Jesus addresses the fallen Albion: “’I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;  ‘Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.’” In his fallen state Albion rejects this close union with God and dismisses Jesus as the “Phantom of the overheated brain!” Driven by jealousy Albion hides his emanation, Jerusalem. Separation from God leads to further separation into countless male and female forms creating endless division and dispute.

Blake describes the fallen state of man by describing the present day. Interwoven into the mythology are references to present-day London. In chapter two the “disease of Albion” leads to further separation and decay. As the human body is a limited form of its divine origin, the cities of England are limited representations of the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Fortunately for man, there is “a limit of contraction,” and the fall must come to an end.

Caught by the errors of sin and vengeance, Albion gives up hope and dies. The flawed religions of moral law cannot save him: “The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death.” Our limited senses make us think of our lives as bounded by time and space apart from eternity. In such a framework physical death marks the end of existence. But there is also a limit to death, and Albion’s body is preserved by the Savior.

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William Blake

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God “put his head to the window”; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels. Although his parents tried to discourage him from “lying,” they did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend a conventional school. Instead, he learned to read and write at home. At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter; so, his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. One of Blake’s assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career. After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy.

In 1782, Blake married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today; the couple had no children. In 1784, Blake set up a print shop with friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker; but this venture failed after several years. For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother, Robert, in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787, having probably succumbed to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother’s spirit rise up through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.” He believed that Robert’s spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other “illuminated” works.

Blake’s first printed work, Poetical Sketches (1783), is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. The poems protest against war, tyranny, and King George III’s treatment of the American colonies. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence , in 1789 and followed it, in 1794, with Songs of Experience . Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children’s book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics. Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors.

Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, including Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of eighteenth-century Neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Works such as “The French Revolution” (1791), “America, a Prophecy” (1793), “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793), and “Europe, a Prophecy” (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to eighteenth-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), he satirized the oppressive authority of both church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest.

In 1800, Blake moved to the seacoast town of Felpham, where he lived and worked until 1803 under the patronage of William Hayley. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, so that he could read classical works in their original language. In Felpham, Blake experienced profound spiritual insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched between about 1804 and 1820. Milton (1804–08);  Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; rewritten after 1800); and Jerusalem (1804–20) have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor meter. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence—the human spirit triumphing over reason.

Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by common people, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. In 1808, he exhibited some of his watercolors at the Royal Academy and, in May 1809, he exhibited his works at his brother James’s house. Some of those who saw the exhibit praised Blake’s artistry, but others thought the paintings “hideous” and more than a few called him insane. Blake’s poetry was not well known by the general public, but he was mentioned in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland , published in 1816. Samuel Taylor Coleridge , who had been lent a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience , considered Blake a “man of Genius,” and William  Wordsworth made his own copies of several songs. Charles Lamb sent a copy of “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing Boys’ Album (1824), and Robert Southey (who, like Wordsworth, considered Blake insane) attended Blake’s exhibition and included the “Mad Song” from Poetical Sketches in his miscellany, The Doctor (1834–37).

Blake’s final years, spent in great poverty, were cheered by the admiring friendship of a group of younger artists who called themselves “the Ancients.” In 1818, he met John Linnell, a young artist who helped him financially and also helped to create new interest in his work. It was Linnell who, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante ’s Divine Comedy , the cycle of drawings that Blake worked on until his death in 1827.

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William Blake

British Poet, Painter, and Printmaker

Summary of William Blake

Though he is perhaps still better-known as a poet than an artist, in many ways William Blake's life and work provide the template for our contemporary understanding of what a modern artist is and does. Overlooked by his peers, and sidelined by the academic institutions of his day, his work was championed by a small, zealous group of supporters. His lack of commercial success meant that Blake lived his life in relative poverty, a life in thrall to a highly individual, sometimes iconoclastic, imaginative vision. Through his prints, paintings, and poems, Blake constructed a mythical universe of an intricacy and depth to match Dante's Divine Comedy , but which, liked Dante's, bore the imprint of contemporary culture and politics. When Blake died, in a small house in London in 1827, he was poor and somewhat anonymous; today, we can recognize him as a prototype for the avant-garde artists of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose creative spirit stands at odds with the prevailing mood of their culture.

Accomplishments

• Blake was perhaps the quintessential Romantic artist. Like his peers in the world of Romantic literature - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelly - Blake stressed the primacy of individual imagination and inspiration to the creative process, rejecting the Neoclassical emphasis on formal precision which had defined much 18th-century painting and poetry. Above all else, Blake scorned the contemporary culture of Enlightenment and industrialization, which stood for a mechanization and intellectual reductivism which he deplored. Blake felt that imaginative insight was the only way to cast off the veil thrown over reality by rational thought, claiming that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
• Blake is unique amongst the artists of his day, and rare amongst artists of any era, in his integration of writing and painting into a single creative process, and in his use of innovative production techniques to combine image and text in single compositions. Celebrated for his visual output, Blake is also recognized as one of the most radical poets of the early Romantic period, combining a highly wrought, Miltonic style with grand, Gothic themes. Moreover, through original techniques such as his "illuminated printing" Blake was able to adapt his craft to meet the demands of his creativity.
• Blake's spiritual vision was central to his creativity, and was crucially and uniquely informed by a complex, imaginative pantheon of his own making, populated by deities such as Urizen, Los, Enitharmion, and Orc. Grand allegorical narratives illustrated with Blake's own designs, were played out in this universe, which might seem to have existed in a space apart from reality. However, in his epic poem sequences, Blake imagined the fate of the human world, in the era of the French and American Revolutions, as hinging on these sequences, determined by the battles between reason and imagination, lust and piety, order and revolution, which his protagonists represented.

Important Art by William Blake

Songs of Innocence and Experience

Songs of Innocence and Experience , a collection of poems written and illustrated by Blake, demonstrates his equal mastery of poetry and art. Blake printed the collection himself, using an innovative technique which he called 'illuminated printing: first, printing plates were produced by adding text and image - back-to-front, and simultaneously - to copper sheets, using an ink impervious to the nitric acid which was then used to erode the spaces between the lines. After an initial printing, detail was added to individual editions of the book using watercolors. Prone as he was to visions, Blake claimed that this method had been suggested to him by the spirit of his dead brother, Robert. Songs of Innocence was initially published on its own in 1789. Its partner-work, Songs of Experience , followed in 1794 in the wake of the French Revolution, the more worldly and troubling themes of this second volume reflecting Blake's increasing engagement with the politically turbulent era. The cover of Songs of Innocence and Experience includes the subtitle "The Two Contrary States of the Human Soul," a reference to the opposing essences which Blake took to animate the universe, depicted throughout the collection through a range of contrasting images and tropes. Beneath this caption are a man and woman, presumably Adam and Eve, whose bodies mirror each other, but are connected by Adam's leg, another indication of the dualities at work in the book. The use of vibrant color, and the intensity and fluidity of Blake's lines, creates a sense of drama complemented by the figures' anguished appearance. At the same time, the dance-like orientation of their bodies creates an almost childlike sense of play, which jars with the lofty nature of the project. Unappreciated during his lifetime, Blake's illuminated books are now ranked amongst the greatest achievements of Romantic art. They indicate his artisanal approach to his craft - influential on the 'cottage industries' of subsequent printer-poets such as William Morris - and his hatred of the printing press and mechanization in general. The question underlying this collection is how a benevolent God could allow space for both good and evil - or rather, innocence and experience - in the universe, these two necessary and opposing forces summed up by the contrasting images of the lamb and "the tyger", the subjects of the two best-known poems in the sequence. The influence of Blake's "tyger", in particular, its eyes "burning bright,/ In the forests of the night", echoes down through literary and artistic history, seeping into popular culture in a myriad of ways.

Pen and watercolor - Various editions

The Ancient of Days

The Ancient of Days , one of Blake's most recognizable works, portrays a bearded, godlike figure kneeling on a flaming disk, measuring out a dark void with a golden compass. This figure is Urizen, a fictional deity invented by Blake who forms parts of the artist's complex mythology, embodying the spirit of reason and law: two concepts with a very vexed position in Blake's moral universe. Urizen features as a character in several of Blake's illuminated long poems, including Europe: A Prophecy , for which this illustration was created. There, and here, Urizen is a repressive force, impeding the positive power of imagination. This piece can thus be read in light of a famous line from another of Blake's long works, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." In many ways, Blake is the exemplar for our modern conception of the Romantic artist. He prized imagination above all else, describing it not as "a state" but as the essence of "human existence itself." Thus, as The Ancient of Days implies, he disdained attempts to rationally curtail or control the power of imagination. This is also clear from the annotated version of Sir Joshua Reynold's Discourses on Art (1769-91) which he produced around this time. Blake was highly critical of Reynolds, an older and more established artist who, as President of the Royal Academy of Arts, embodied what Blake saw as the formulaic and stultifying ideals of the academy; his teeming marginalia to Reynold's treatise serves in some ways as a conscious affront to these ideals. But if The Ancient of Days also encapsulates the rational spirit Blake was wary of, the undeniable majesty of the figure also reflects his belief in human beings' visionary power, just as his famous and beautiful line from Auguries of Innocence compels the reader "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour". With his oppositional critiques of the art establishment, Blake set the stage for artists later in the nineteenth century, like the French painters Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, who deliberately set about to challenge academic paradigms. The Ancient of Days sums up something of the spirit Blake was opposing, but also of the spirit he was endorsing. It is also known to have been one of his favorite images, an example of his early work, but also one of his last works, as he painted a copy of it in bed shortly before his death.

Watercolor etching - Private Collection

This piece, like Songs of Innocence and Experience , was made using Blake's illuminated printing technique. It seems to portray two cherubim, one of whom holds a baby, on white horses in a darkened sky, jumping over a prostrated female figure. The image is generally understood as an interpretation of a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth : "And pity, like a naked new-born babe,/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air,/ Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye". Blake's use of blues and greens, contrasting with the whites of the figures, grants the work a nocturnal, dreamlike quality. Indeed, some scholars have questioned the extent to which the piece draws on Shakespeare's verse, suggesting instead that it might depict figures from Blake's own imaginative pantheon, as its visionary intensity seems to imply. The figure turning away from the viewer might be the god Urizen, for example, the face leaning down from the horse that of Los, an oppositional force to Urizen but also his prophet on earth, who has taken on the female form of Pity - often embodied in the character of his partner, Enitharmion - to enact Urizen's will. The woman below might be Eve, fulfilling the biblical prophecy that "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children" by generating the miniaturized male figure cradled in Los's arms. By this reading, Pity represents the fall of man, in particular the moment when he becomes aware of his sexuality, and his subjugation to God. Through mythological and literary-inspired works such as Pity , Blake would exert an immense influence on the course of post-Romantic art, including on the Pre-Raphaelites, who often drew on literary and Shakespearean themes, as in John Everett Millais's Ophelia (1851) and John William Waterhouse's Miranda (1916). The hallucinatory quality of works such as Pity , meanwhile, along with their apparent deep allegorical significance, would have a profound effect on movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism.

Relief etching, printed in color and finished with pen and ink and watercolor - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Isaac Newton

In this, perhaps Blake's most famous visual artwork, the mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton is shown drawing on a scroll on the ground with a large compass. He sits on a rock surrounded by darkness, hunched over and entirely consumed by his thoughts. This engraving was developed from the tenth plate of Blake's early illustrated treatise There is No Natural Religion , which shows a man kneeling on the floor with a compass and features the caption "He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only". For Blake, Newton was the living embodiment of rationality and scientific enquiry, a mode of intelligence which he saw as reductive, sterile, and ultimately blinding. Isaac Newton is clearly a critical visual allegory, therefore, the sharp angles and straight lines used to mark out Newton's body emphasizing the repressive spirit of reason, while the organic textures of the rock, apparently covered in algae and living organisms, represent the world of nature, where the spirit of human imagination finds its true mirror. The deep, consuming black surrounding Newton, generally taken to represent the bottom of the sea or outer space, indicates his ignorance of this world, his distance from the Platonic light of truth. The compass is a symbol of geometry and rational order, a tool and emblem of the stultifying materialism of the Enlightenment. Blake's scorn for the scientific worldview, which also gave rise to his famous depiction of the god Urizen in The Ancient of Days - another figure who tries to measure out the universe with a compass - is summed up by his assertion that "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death". Blake's Isaac Newton has been the subject of numerous reproductions, homages, and reinterpretations, and the figure of Newton himself is probably Blake's best-known visual image, perhaps because it sums up his creative credo so perfectly. The image is also famous because it has proved so fascinating to subsequent artists. In 1995, the British pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi created a large number of bronze sculptures inspired by Blake's work, including a huge sculptural homage to Blake's Newton - though both curvier and more machine-like than its predecessor - which now sits outside the British Library in London.

Engraving - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

The painting, finished in pen and ink, illustrates a passage from the Bible, a prophecy described in the Gospel of Matthew as having been used by Jesus to advise the faithful on spiritual vigilance, describing how "A trumpeting angel flying overhead signifies that the moment of judgment has arrived". Blake contrasts the elegant and wise virgins on the left, prepared for the trumpet's call from the angel above, with the foolish virgins on the right, who fall over their feet in agitation and fear. The Parable was commissioned by Blake's patron and friend Thomas Butts, one of a huge number of tempera and watercolor paintings completed by Blake at Butt's behest between 1800 and 1806, all depicting Biblical scenes. Though his own faith was anything but conformist, Blake had a profound respect for the Bible, considering it to be the greatest work of poetry in human history, and the basis of all true art. He often used it as a source of inspiration, and believed that its allegories and parables could serve as a wellspring for creative spirit opposing the rational, Neoclassical principles of the 18th century. The message of Matthew's passage is enhanced here by strong tonal contrasts, the graceful luminosity of the wise women contrasted with the ignominious darkness surrounding them. Works such as The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins were influenced by various Renaissance artists who had explored similar, Biblical themes, and whose work Blake had devoured as a child. Leonardo da Vinci's The Adoration of the Magi (1481-82), The Annunciation (c. 1474), and The Last Supper (c. 1495-98) are good examples of such works, as are Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes (c. 1508-12), and Fra Angelico's The Madonna of Humility (1430). By not only entering into dialogue with these pieces, but by putting his own gloss on the moral and emotional dynamics of the scene, Blake expressed the ambition of his religious vision.

Watercolor, pen and black ink over graphite - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Great Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed in Sun

This ink and watercolor work depicts a hybrid creature, half human half dragon, spreading its wings over a woman enveloped in sunlight. It belongs to a body of works known as "The Great Red Dragon Paintings", created during 1805-10, a period when Thomas Butts commissioned Blake to create over a hundred Biblical illustrations. The Dragon paintings represent scenes from the Book of Revelation, inspired mainly by the book's apocalyptic description of "a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads". The Great Red Dragon is an example of Blake's mature artistic style, expressing the vividness of his mythological imagination in its dramatic use of color, and its sinuously expressive lines. The poet Kathleen Raine explains that Blake's linear style is characteristic of religious art: "Blake insists that the 'spirits', whether of men or gods, should be 'organized', within a 'determinate and bounding form'." This work also bears out Blake's claim that "Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd". Even in the portrayal of a destructive and aggressive subject, beauty, in particular the beauty of the human body, always plays a fundamental and central role in Blake's art: indeed, there is something of the human vigor and strength of Milton's Satan in the central, winged form. Like Blake's Newton, his Great Red Dragon is an image which has permeated artistic and popular culture, particularly during the 20th century. Famously, the main character of Thomas Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon obsesses over Blake's beast, believing that he can become the dragon himself by emulating its brutal power. The sequels to Harris's novel, Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Hannibal (1999) - adapted, like Red Dragon , into successful films - ensured the cultural resonance of Blake's monstrous but enticingly human creation.

Ink, watercolor and graphite on paper - The Brooklyn Museum, New York

The Angels Hovering Over the Body of Christ in the Sepulchre

This watercolor and ink work, commissioned like The Great Red Dragon and The Wise and Foolish Virgin by Blake's great patron Thomas Butts, depicts a scene from the Biblical story of Jesus's death and rebirth. Following his crucifixion, Jesus's body was buried in a cave or tomb. As described in the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene visited the tomb to find two angels sitting "where the body of Jesus had lain". Upset at the body's absence, she began to weep, only to find Jesus standing beside her. Adapting the details of this scene, Blake places the two angels hovering above Jesus's body, probably portraying the moment just before his resurrection. Though Blake's alteration of the details of the Gospel story are minor, they express his unorthodox, irreverently creative approach to faith and scripture. His depiction of the angels, for example, is said to be inspired by a passage from the Old Testament's Book of Exodus: "the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high... and their faces shall look one to another". The angelic forms also seem to allude to the wings which Blake claimed to have seen appearing on trees and stars as a child. As such, the image is testament to his belief in the central role of individual imagination in the interpretation of faith. In compositional terms, the darkness of the sepulchre, and the delicate whites and yellows of the aureoles around the angels' heads, give the painting an almost monochromatic quality, while the symmetry of the composition grants it a visual harmony in keeping with its spiritual significance. In his imaginative adaptations of Biblical and religious scenes, Blake not only responded to a tradition of religious paintings extending back to the Renaissance, but also predicted the post-Romantic, imaginative adaptation of religious iconography in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists, and other proto-modernist movements. As such, the vision expressed in works such as The Angels is both historically aware and subtly radical.

Pen, ink and watercolor on paper - Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Ghost of a Flea

This delicate tempera painting, finished in gold leaf, depicts the ghost of a flea, represented as a combination of man and animal, staring into an empty bowl or cup. The figure appears to be pacing the boards of a stage, set against a backdrop adorned with painted stars, flanked by the heavy patterned curtains of a theater. His pose is suitably melodramatic, while the awkward weight of his body dwarfs his small, half-human head. This work was composed on a miniature scale, on a wooden board measuring roughly 21 by 16 cm. Whereas much of Blake's earlier work draws on Biblical or literary themes, this painting is the expression of a macabre, darkly comic inner vision, and is considered amongst the most 'Gothic' of his works. According to John Varley, an astrologer, artist, and close friend of Blake's, who made notes on his practice, the painting was created after one of Blake's séances, during which he claimed to have been visited by the ghost of a flea who explained to him that fleas were the resurrected souls of men prone to excess. In this sense, the cup is a symbol for "blood-drinking", for overindulgence and intemperance. That interpretation is complemented by the half-human form of the spirit, suggesting a man in thrall to his animal instincts, while the stage might be a metaphor for society - the horror or scorn of the crowd - or for the vanity bound up with compulsive behavior. The Ghost of A Flea is a singular manifestation of Blake's unique spiritual and imaginative temperament. Its late composition suggests that his visions became more idiosyncratic, more untethered from the collective, social view of reality, as he aged.

Tempera and gold leaf on mahogany - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

The Lovers Whirlwind

The Lovers Whirlwind illustrates a scene from the fifth canto of The Inferno , the first book of The Divine Comedy (c. 1308-20), by the medieval Florentine poet Dante. As the poem's protagonist, Dante himself, descends into the outer circles of hell, he comes across a number of people caught up in a whirlwind, shrieking with pain. Dante's guide, the Roman poet Virgil, explains that these are lovers "whom love bereav'd of life", punished for the illicit nature of their desire. They include Francesca, the daughter of a lord of Ravenna, who fell in love with her husband's brother Paolo, and was sentenced to die alongside him. Profoundly moved by their story, Dante faints, as portrayed in the painting to the right of the bearded Virgil. Above Virgil's head, Blake seems to depict Paolo and Francesca in a sphere of light, while the surrounding whirlwind of lovers ascends to heaven. This painting belongs to a series of works commissioned by John Linnell, Blake's friend and second great patron, after the success of the illustrations for The Book of Job which Blake was already composing for Linnell. There was an established tradition of creating illustrations for the Divine Comedy , stretching back to the early Renaissance period, and to artists such as Premio della Quercia, Vechietta, and Sandro Botticelli. Blake was probably inspired by their work, but with typical immodesty he spoke of his superiority to many Renaissance masters in his handling of color, seen to be at its most accomplished in the Divine Comedy sequence. Blake believed that the effective use of color depended on control of form and outline, claiming that "it is always wrong in Titian and Correggio, Rubens and Rembrandt." As for his response to Dante, it is typical of Blake's critical stance on religious orthodoxy, and his belief in the sanctity of love, that he chooses to deliver the condemned lovers from their torment. The Divine Comedy commission was left incomplete as Blake died in 1827, having produced only a few of the paintings. However, those that survive are noted for their exquisite use of color, and for their complex, proto-Symbolist, visionary motifs. Linnell's commission is also said to have filled Blake with energy despite his age and ill health; he reputedly spent the last of his money on a pencil to continue his drawings.

Pen and watercolor - City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham

Satan Before the Throne of God: When the Almighty was yet with me

This engraving depicts the Old Testament character of Job surrounded by his children, while Satan sits above him in heaven, in front of a large sun, encircled by angels. The scene is an illustration of Job 29.5, which is written below the plate: "When the Almighty was yet with me, When my Children were about me". Satan Before the Throne of God is one of 22 engraved prints created towards the end of Blake's life, known as the Illustrations of the Book of Job . In the passage above, God has allowed Satan to kill Job's family and take away his wealth in order to test his faith. Though his relationship with God ultimately endures, at this point Job is lamenting his lost happiness, and questioning the creator's wisdom. The Book of Job had preoccupied Blake since 1785, and was the subject of two previous watercolor paintings, created for Thomas Butts in 1805 and John Linnell in 1821. When he began the engravings Blake was therefore able to adapt various existing images, but the engravings became his most virtuosic response to the theme. The whole series expresses his fascination with the figure of Job who, like Blake, had lived a life of penury coupled with intense religious devotion. In compositional terms, the Job illustrations are Blake's most technically complex engravings, rendered with an extraordinary degree of tonal and figurative detail. A marvelous final expression of Blake's imaginative and religious vision, Kathleen Raine describes the Illustrations of the Book of Job as "more than an illustration of the Bible; they are in themselves a prophetic vision, a spiritual revelation, at once a personal testimony and replete with Blake's knowledge of Christian Cabbala, Neoplatonism, and the mystical theology of the Western Esoteric tradition as a whole". She calls them as "a complete statement of Blake's vision of man's spiritual drama."

Engraving - Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow

Biography of William Blake

William Blake was born in Soho, London, into a respectable working-class family. His father James sold stockings and gloves for a living, while his mother, Catherine Hermitage, looked after the couple's seven children, two of whom died in infancy. William, a strong-willed boy and an evident prodigy from a young age, often absconded from school to wander through the streets of London, or spent his time copying drawings of Greek antiquities; moreover, inspired by the work of Raphael and Michelangelo, he also developed an early fascination with poetry. Though his childhood was peaceful and pleasant, William began experiencing visions at the age of eight, claiming to see angels on trees, or wings that looked like stars. Though troubled by his stories, Blake's parents supported his artistic ambitions, enrolling him when he was ten at the Henry Par drawing academy, then a well-regarded preparatory school for young artists.

Early Training

The drawing academy turned out to be too expensive, and Blake was forced to quit after four years. It was intended that he would become apprentice to a master engraver but - so the story goes - when his father took him to meet his prospective employer William Ryland, the young Blake refused, declaring that "it looks as if he will live to be hanged!", a prophecy which, strangely enough, came true years later. In the end, William was apprenticed for five years to James Basire, an engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. Blake came to value his training with Basire, which had a great impact on his work: especially his various on-site drawings of Gothic monuments. In his spare time, the young engraver studied medieval and Renaissance art, especially Raphael , Michelangelo , and Dürer , who in Blake's view - as paraphrased by art historian Elizabeth E. Barker - had produced a "timeless, 'Gothic' art, infused with Christian spirituality and created with poetic genius".

When he was 21, Blake left his apprenticeship and enrolled at the Royal Academy. His time there was brief, however, reputedly because he questioned the aesthetic doctrines of the president Sir Joshua Reynolds , describing the Academy as a 'cramped imaginative environment'. Blake began earning a living as an commercial engraver for various publications, including popular books such as Don Quixote . At this time, in 1799, according to the poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, Blake wrote to his friend George Cumberland - one of the founders of the National Gallery - "that his 'Genius or Angel' was guiding his inspiration to the fulfillment of the 'purpose for which alone I live, which is [...] to renew the lost Art of the Greeks'". Such a statement already makes clear not only Blake's admiration for Ancient Greek art, but also his sense of the interconnectedness of art and spirituality. Importantly, however, the spiritual guides who he claimed governed his artistic vision never steered him into the confines of organized religion: he never attended church.

In August 1782, at the age of 25, Blake met, courted and married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a local grocer. Partly because the couple had no children, Blake devoted much time to teaching Catherine how to read, write, and draw, while Catherine helped her husband with his designs. In 1783, Blake published his first volume of poetry, Poetical Sketches ; though sales were poor, the Blakes' finances were stable due to William's increasing popularity as an engraver. With his father's inheritance, Blake opened a shop with his friend James Parker.

In 1788, he used his method of "illuminated printing" for the first time in There is No Natural Religion , a small pamphlet containing his illustrated poetic and religious credo. Around this time, Blake's brother Robert died, probably of tuberculosis, after a long and grueling illness. His death had a profound impact on Blake, who began believing that Robert's spirit lived within him, inspiring him through visions and apparitions.

Mature Period

In 1795, Blake began a series known as the Large Colour Prints , depicting subjects from the Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare. Though Blake was never an isolated figure - he socialized widely, and attached himself to various cultural circles in London, through friends such as Henry Fuseli and James Barry - Raine notes that he was not an "easy man socially", being "proud, argumentative and violently opposed to current fashion, in his art and his philosophic and religious ideas alike". Certainly, Blake was radical in his political and religious views, and had no interest in conforming to social type. A kind of Platonist, he believed that the scientific view of the universe propagated by the Enlightenment was the "enemy of life", though, as the journalist Peter Blake adds, he was also an "artist with public ambitions", not yet the solitary hermit of his later years.

The same year he began work on the Large Colour Prints , Blake was introduced to Thomas Butts, who would become his main patron for several years, commissioning a large number of works. Loyal and supportive, Butts left Blake to pursue his private visions and impulses, "promising", as Raine puts it, "only to buy from him whatever he should paint." During this time Blake wrote: "I think I foresee better things than I have ever seen. My work pleases my employer, and I have an order for fifty small pictures at one guinea each, which is something better than mere copying after another artist."

The poet William Haley also became Blake's patron for a while, hiring him to undertake a commission in 1800, but Blake quickly became disillusioned with his assigned task, and, based at Haley's country estate at Felpham, sank into a depression, finding it impossible to "sacrifice his integrity as an artist for profit". The relationship between the two poets ended in acrimony, Haley describing Blake as his "spiritual enemy", and from around this time on, Blake found it increasingly hard to make a living, with engraving work drying up despite his connections with the London art world, and his ongoing commissions from Butts. Unlike his friends Fuseli and Barry, who held positions at the Royal Academy, Blake was not a member of the art 'establishment', and was never given the opportunity to undertake large-scale public works. In 1809, he lamented his lack of public commissions in England, writing in "The Invention of a Portable Fresco", a catalogue for his only public exhibition, that creating portable frescoes might be a good way to convince "visionless" patrons of the quality of his work.

Compounding his troubles, Blake's hallucinations and reveries increasingly led to him being perceived as insane: perhaps with some justification, as he is known to have publicly claimed that he revised Michelangelo's and Dürer's work on the artists' advice after communicating with them in visions. Coupled with his proud conduct and strongly-held beliefs - never humble about his craft, he once wrote to Butts that "The works I have done for you are equal to Carrache or Rafael" - Blake's mysticism drew him into ever more solitary patterns of existence. Nonetheless, he continued to generate a prodigious body of work, inspired by a deep faith in the power of imagination, and by his attentiveness to what he called "miracles". Blake once stated: "I know that this world is a world of imagination & vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike". Throughout his mature period, he often claimed to be encouraged in his work by Archangels, or to be in communication with historical and mythical figures such as the Virgin Mary.

For Kathleen Raine, "the bitterest irony in the story of Blake's failures and humiliations is that he was never unknown; on the contrary, he was in the heart of London's art world, and knew all the most famous artists and engravers of his day. And yet he failed where they succeeded, ousted by men of inferior talents and passed over by lifelong friends."

Blake lived in Soho, the neighborhood of his birth, for almost his entire life, very rarely travelling. But despite this lack of worldliness, he made himself a highly cultured man, acquiring a large collection of classical art prints, for example. After years of poverty, he was forced to sell his print collection, but in 1818 Blake's financial fortunes turned once again when he met John Linnell, the man who would become his second great patron. Linnell provided Blake with financial stability in the later years of his life through his commissions and purchases, and also introduced Blake to a group of artists known as The Ancients, or The Shoreham Ancients, who had been brought together by their collective admiration for Blake's work. Like Blake, this group spurned 'modern' approaches to art and aesthetics, and held a broadly Platonic view of the universe. Towards the end of his life, then, Blake suddenly found himself a revered 'teacher' and leader. Indeed, the most talented of the Ancients, Samuel Palmer, is generally considered an inheritor of Blake's vision and technique.

Around 1820, Blake moved into a house near the Strand, spending his days engraving in a small bedroom. In 1821, at the age of 65, he embarked on a commission from Linnell to illustrate The Book of Job. Writing of Blake around this time, Samuel Palmer described Blake as "moving apart, in a sphere above the attraction of worldly honors". "He did not accept genius", Palmer added, "but confer it. He ennobled poverty, and by his conversation and the influence of his genius, made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the threshold of princes." The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, another friend from this period, wrote in a letter of 1826 that anyone who met Blake saw in him as "at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion of Dante". Robinson described Blake as embodying "energy" itself, shedding an atmosphere "full of the ideal" all around him, despite his age and relative penury.

William Blake died in August 1827, at the age of 70. At the time of his death he was working on a set of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy which are now considered amongst his best work. It is said that on the day of his death, as he worked frantically on these images, he proclaimed to his wife: "Stay! Keep as you are! You have ever been an angel to me: I will draw you!". A few hours later he passed away: the drawings are now lost.

Art critic Richard Holmes claims that when Blake died, "he was already a forgotten man", with sales for his engravings and painted poems scarcely reaching 20 copies over 30 years. Yet, for George Richmond, an artist associated with The Ancients, Blake "died like a saint...singing of the things he saw in heaven".

The Legacy of William Blake

William Blake is generally considered one of the great artistic polymaths, not just one of the finest poets in the English language, but also one of Britain's most revolutionary visual artists: the critic Jonathan Jones describes him as "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Blake is also remembered for the intricate and unique philosophical and religious schemas which sustained his work: whereas Romantic contemporaries such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable drew inspiration from the landscape, Blake turned inwards, to an imaginative world based on the Bible and other religious and literary texts, taking his viewers on what Elizabeth E. Barker calls "journeys of the mind." Kathleen Raine explains that to the artist himself, Blake's works represented "'portions of eternity' seen in imaginative vision". She compares him to Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo, Dürer, Dante, and Fra Angelico (Blake's favorite artist) in his ability to create all-enveloping imaginative realms seemingly ex nihilo , offering us "fragments of worlds whose bounds extend beyond any of those portions their work embodied".

It is all the more ironic, then, that Blake was disregarded by artistic and literary society during his lifetime. Since it was common knowledge that he claimed to work from visions, he was generally categorized as eccentric or insane; only when the art critic Alexander Gilchrist, born a year after Blake's death, took to the concerted study of his art and legacy - resulting in the publication of The Life of William Blake in 1863 - was the full scope and significance of Blake's visions realised. Gilchrist described Blake's hallucinations as encoding a "special faculty" of the imagination, his avowed connection to the spiritual world evidence not of madness but of a form of "mysticism". Gilchrist's writing created a new context for the study of Blake's practice, just as Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti were responding afresh to the clarion call of Blake's spiritual intensity.

More generally, Blake's visionary and mystical works exerted an enormous influence on the later development of Romanticism in art, and, subsequently, on Pre-Raphaelitism , Symbolism , and even modernism. Blake's influence on literature has also been profound: Walt Whitman , W. B. Yeats , and Allen Ginsberg are amongst the poets profoundly inspired by him, while Blakean visions also had an afterlife in the abstract and psychedelic pop lyrics of the sixties, especially in Bob Dylan's post-beat dream sequences. In the present day, Blake's legacy extends all over high and popular culture, including art, literature, music, and film. It is believed, for example, that the illustrations for Lord of Rings and other movies on mythological themes were inspired by his imagery.

Art critic Alexander Gilchrist claims that Blake made his work for "children and angels; himself 'a divine child,' whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth". In proclaiming the values of creative freedom, imaginative play, religious tolerance, and all forms of love, Blake created work of an enduring and profoundly positive value.

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on William Blake

• Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Our Pick By Leo Damrosch
• William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books Our Pick By William Blake
• The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem By Eric Robert Dalrymple Maclagan
• William Blake Our Pick By Kathleen Raine
• William Blake: The Critical Heritage By G.E. Bentley Jnr.
• Life of William Blake By Alexander Gilchrist
• William Blake Archive Our Pick
• List of William Blake's artworks WikiArt
• How William Blake keeps our eye on The Tyger By Jonathan Jones / The Guardian / November 18, 2014
• Saving Blake Our Pick By Richard Holmes / The Guardian / November 29, 2004
• William Blake Our Pick By Elizabeth E. Barker / MET Museum
• A (Self?) Portrait of William Blake By Robert N. Essick / Winter 2005
• William Blake: The Art of a Lunatic? Our Pick By Peter Blake / April 26, 2009 / The Independent
• Various articles on Blake Our Pick Full list of articles written by Blake experts for the Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly
• William Blake Documentary (2005) Our Pick By Academy Media (UK)
• Lecture: William Blake On Religion Our Pick By Neville Goddard who talks about the mystical William Blake and his spiritual revelation about the Imagination, States, Vision, Manifesting.
• Red Dragon By Thomas Harris
• Taming the Tyger (album and song) By Joni Mitchell

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Content compiled and written by Sarah Frances Dias

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

William blake (1757–1827).

Songs of Experience: The Tyger

William Blake

The Angel Appearing to Zacharias

The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

Angel of the Revelation (Book of Revelation, chapter 10)

Elizabeth E. Barker Department of Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

William Blake (1757–1827), one of the greatest poets in the English language, also ranks among the most original visual artists of the Romantic era . Born in London in 1757 into a working-class family with strong nonconformist religious beliefs, Blake first studied art as a boy, at the drawing academy of Henry Pars. He served a five-year apprenticeship with the commercial engraver James Basire before entering the Royal Academy Schools as an engraver at the age of twenty-two. This conventional training was tempered by private study of medieval and Renaissance art; as revealed by his early designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts ( Nature revolves, but Man advances ), Blake sought to emulate the example of artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Dürer in producing timeless, “Gothic” art, infused with Christian spirituality and created with poetic genius.

In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher (1762–1831), an impoverished grocer’s daughter who would become his studio assistant. Blake now threw his energies into developing his career as an engraver, opening a short-lived print shop with a fellow Basire apprentice (James Parker) in 1784, before striking out on his own ( Job, a Historical Engraving ). The great advance in Blake’s printmaking occurred in 1787, following the untimely death, probably from tuberculosis, of the artist’s beloved younger brother Robert, who had been living with William and Catherine since 1784. Blake reported discovering his wholly original method of “relief etching”—which creates a single, raised printing surface for both text and image—in a vision of Robert soon after his death. Relief etching allowed Blake to control all aspects of a book’s production: he composed the verses, designed the illustrations (preparing word and image almost simultaneously on the same copper printing plate), printed the plates, colored each sheet by hand (where necessary), and bound the pages together in covers. The resulting “illuminated books” were written in a range of forms—prophecies, emblems, pastoral verses, biblical satire, and children’s books—and addressed various timely subjects—poverty, child exploitation, racial inequality, tyranny, religious hypocrisy. Not surprisingly, these works rank among Blake’s most celebrated achievements ( 17.10.42 ; The Ancient of Days ; Los, his Spectre; and Enitharmon before a Druid Temple ).

Blake’s technical experiments of the 1790s culminated in a series of large color prints notable for their massive size and iconic designs. Unaccompanied by any text, they comprise his most ambitious work as a visual artist. No commission or public exhibition is recorded, and the intended program of the group remains uncertain: of the twelve known designs, many of the subjects—drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare ( 58.603 ), Milton, and other sources ( Newton )—function as pairs.

Blake described his technique as “fresco.” It appears to be a form of monotype: using oil and tempera paints mixed with chalks, Blake painted the design onto a flat surface (a copperplate or piece of millboard), from which he pulled the prints simply by pressing a sheet of paper against the damp paint. He finished the designs in ink and watercolor , making each—rare—impression unique.

For Blake, the Bible was the greatest work of poetry ever written, and comprised the basis of true art, as opposed to the false, pagan ideal of classicism. He found a sympathetic patron in Thomas Butts (1757–1845), a prosperous Swedenborgian (a member of the Protestant sect founded by the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian, and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg). Butts amassed a small fortune as a clerk in the office of the Muster Master General, and became Blake’s most loyal patron and closest friend. During the decade 1799–1809, Butts commissioned from Blake a series of illustrations to the Bible that included about fifty tempera paintings ( 51.30.1 ) and more than eighty watercolors ( 14.81.2 ). These focus on Old Testament prefigurations of Christ, the life of Christ , and apocalyptic subjects from the Book of Revelation, although the series’ exact program and its intended display remain unclear.

For the rest of his life, Blake continued to develop his art on an inward-looking, imaginative trajectory. Whereas notable contemporaries such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable found the subjects of their art in the landscape, Blake sought his (primarily figural) subjects in journeys of the mind. (Indeed, he never traveled outside of Britain and, aside from a brief period on the southern coast of England—where he worked for the poet William Hayley in Felpham from 1800 to 1803—spent his entire life in London.) In addition to the Bible and his own writings, Blake drew on other texts—most notably, Dante ( Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car )—and found a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration in his own fertile mind ( The Ghost of a Flea ).

Barker, Elizabeth E. . “William Blake (1757–1827).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/blke/hd_blke.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Bindman, David. William Blake: His Art and Times . Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1982.

Butlin, Martin. William Blake . Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery, 1978.

Hamlyn, Robin, and Michael Phillips. William Blake . Exhibition catalogue. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Additional Essays by Elizabeth E. Barker

• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ The Printed Image in the West: Mezzotint .” (October 2003)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) .” (October 2004)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ John Constable (1776–1837) .” (October 2004)
• Barker, Elizabeth E.. “ Watercolor Painting in Britain, 1750–1850 .” (October 2004)

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William Blake

British, 1757 - 1827

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The third son of the five children of James Blake and his wife, Catherine, Blake was born near Golden Square, Soho, in London, on 28 November 1757. He entered Henry Pars' drawing school in the Strand at the age of ten, was writing poetry by the age of twelve, and by the time he was twenty had produced some of the finest lyrical poetry in the English language. In 1772 he was apprenticed for seven years to the successful engraver James Basire, who employed him between about 1774 and 1775 on drawing medieval tomb sculpture in Westminster Abbey for Richard Gough's Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain . In 1779 Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools as an engraver, and he first exhibited there in 1780 a painting of an historical subject.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Butcher or Boucher; there were no children. After the death of his father in 1784 he set up a print shop next door to his birthplace with James Parker, a fellow apprentice of Basire. Blake was obliged for long periods of his life to make his living as a reproductive engraver, and he was regarded as such by most of his contemporaries.

In 1788 Blake developed a process of etching in relief that enabled him to combine illustrations and text on the same page and to print them himself, thus ensuring complete independence of thought and expression. Four illuminated books appeared between 1789 and 1794. Many of his large independent color prints, or monotypes, were done in 1795. From 1795 to 1797 he produced over five hundred watercolors for an edition of Edward Young's Night Thoughts , of which only one volume was published.

In 1799 Blake was commissioned by Thomas Butts, a minor civil servant, to paint fifty small Biblical subjects, which he executed in tempera. Butts, his single most important patron, seems to have bought the bulk of his output until at least 1810. In 1800, mentally exhausted, Blake moved to Felpham, near Chichester, at the invitation of the poet William Hayley, who offered him inconsequential employment for three years; there he regained a spiritual calm and was deeply affected by the study of Milton. Returning to London he began Jerusalem in 1804, a project he worked on continually until his death, and executed for Butts a large number of watercolors of Biblical subjects, including illustrations to the Book of Job. Between 1809 and 1810, enraged at being cheated by the publisher Cromek, Blake held an exhibition of his work, predictably a total failure with the critics and the public, at his brother's house in Soho, his birthplace.

Neglected and in poverty, Blake was introduced in 1818 to John Linnell, who became his second major patron, commissioning a succession of works--including the engravings to the Book of Job (1823-1826), Blake's most popular work, and a set of illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy (1824-1827)--and who made regular payments to him until his death. In spite of Linnell's patronage, Blake was in considerable financial distress during his later years, and was obliged in 1821 to sell his entire collection of prints to Colnaghi's. In 1822, at Linnell's insistance, he was the recipient of a grant from the Royal Academy. He died of gallstones at his home in Fountain Court, Strand, London, on 12 August 1827. [Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries . The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 12-14.]

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Biography of William Blake, English Poet and Artist

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William Blake (November 28, 1757–August 12, 1827) was an English poet, engraver, printmaker, and painter. He is mostly known for his lyric poems Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which combine simple language with complex subject matters, and for his epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, that contrasted the canon of classical epic.

Fast Facts: William Blake

• Known For: Poet and engraver known for his seemingly simple poems containing complex themes and their companion illustrations and prints. As an artist, he is known for devising an innovative technique for colored engravings called illuminated printing.
• Born​: November 28, 1757 in Soho, London, England
• Parents: James Blake, Catherine Wright
• Died​: August 12, 1827 in London, England
• Education​: Largely homeschooled, apprenticed with engraver James Basire
• Selected Works: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), Jerusalem (1804–1820),  Milton (1804-1810)
• Spouse: Catherine Boucher
• Notable Quote​: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” And "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend."

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757. His parents were Henry and Catherine Wright Blake. His family worked in the hosiery business and as small tradesmen, and money was tight but they weren’t poor. Ideologically, his parents were dissenters who challenged the teachings of the church, but they used the Bible and religious passages to interpret events of the world around them. Blake was raised with a sense that the righteous would triumph over the privileged.

Growing up, Blake was considered "different" and he was homeschooled. At age 8 or 10, he reported seeing angels and spangled stars, but it was a world where having visions wasn’t so peculiar. His parents recognized his artistic talent and his father bought him plaster casts and gave him small change to buy prints at auction houses. That’s where he was first exposed to the works of Michelangelo and Raffaello. From age 10 to 14, he went to drawing school, and after that, he started his apprenticeship with an engraver, where he stayed for the next seven years.

The engreaver's name was James Basire and he was the official engraver of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society. He never had more than two apprentices. Near the end of his apprenticeship, Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to draw the tombs of the ancient kings and queens of England. This “gothicized” Blake’s imaginary, as he acquired a feeling of the medieval, which proved to be lasting influence throughout his career.

The Engraver (1760-1789)

Blake finished his apprenticeship at age 21 and became a professional engraver. For some time, he was enrolled in the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Four years later, in 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate woman who is said to have signed her marriage contract with an X. Blake soon taught her to read, write, and etch.

In 1783, he published Poetical Sketches, and opened his own print shop with fellow apprentice James Parker in 1784. It was a turbulent time in history: the American revolution was coming to a close, and the French revolution was approaching. It was a period marked by instability, which affected him enormously. 

Innocence and Experience (1790-1799)

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

In 1790, Blake and his wife moved to North Lambeth and he had a decade of success, where he made enough money to produce his best known works. These include Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) which are the two states of the soul. These were first written separately and then published together in 1795. Songs of Innocence is a collection of lyric poems, and superficially they appear to be written for children. Their form, however, sets them apart: they’re hand printed and hand colored works of art. The poems do have a nursery-rhyme quality about them.

Songs of Experience presents the same themes as Songs of Innocence, but examined from the opposite perspective. “The Tyger” is one of the most notable examples; it’s a poem that's seen in dialogue with “The Lamb of Innocence” where the speaker asks the lamb about the Creator who made it. The second stanza answers the question. “The Tyger” consists of a series of questions that are not answered, and is a source of energy and fire, something uncontrollable. God made both “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” and by stating this, Blake defied the idea of moral opposites.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), a prose work containing paradoxical aphorisms, presents the devil as a heroic figure; while Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) combines radicalism with ecstatic religious imagery. For these works, Blake invented the style of "illuminated printing," in which he reduced the need of two different workshops that were till then needed to make an illustrated book. He was in charge of every single stage of production, and he also had freedom and could avoid censorship. In this period he produced Jerusalem and what is known as “Minor Prophecies.”

Later Life (1800-1827)

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Blake's success did not last forever. By 1800, his lucrative period was over and he took a job in Felpham, Sussex, to illustrate the works of William Hailey. While in Sussex, he had a fight with a drunk soldier who accused him of speaking treasonable words against the king. He went to trial and was acquitted. 

After Sussex, Blake returned to London and started working on Milton (1804–1808) and Jerusalem (1804–20), his two epic poems, the latter of which has its premise in a poem contained in the preface of the former. In Milton, Blake turned away from the classical epics—while typically this format deals with war, Milton was about poetic inspiration, featuring Milton coming back to Earth trying to explain what had gone wrong. He wants to set mankind against the movement towards war, which he identifies in the celebration of the classics, and wants to rectify with a celebration of christianity.

In Jerusalem, Blake portrayed the “sleep of Albion,” a figure for the nation, and it encouraged people to think beyond their limits. Jerusalem is a utopian idea on how mankind can live. Around 1818, he wrote the poem “The Universal Gospel.” In parallel to his poetic activity, his illustration business thrived. His Bible illustrations were popular objects, and in 1826, he was commissioned to illustrate Dante’s  Divine Comedy . While this work was cut short by his death, the existing illustrations show that they’re not just decorative pieces, but are actually a commentary on the source material. 

William Blake died on August 12, 1827, and was buried in a ground for dissenters. On the day of his death, he still worked on his Dante illustrations. 

Themes and Literary Style

Blake's style is easy to recognize, both in poetry and in his visual art. There’s something askew that makes him stand out among late-18th-century poets. His language is straightforward and unaffected, yet powerful in its directness. His work contains Blake’s own private mythology, where he rejects moral absolutes that mark the authoritarianism of organized religion. It draws from the Bible as well as Greek and Norse mythology. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793) for example, the Devil is actually a hero rebelling against the authoritarianism of an impostor, a worldview that is mitigated in his later works; in Milton and Jerusalem, for instance, self-sacrifice and forgiveness are portrayed as redeeming qualities. 

Not a fan of organized religion, Blake only went to Church three times in his life: when he was christened, when he married, and when he died. He espoused the ideas of enlightenment, but he placed himself in a critical position towards it. He talked about Newton , Bacon, and Locke as the “Satanic Trinity” who had restricted it, leaving no place for art. 

Blake was a fierce critic of colonialism and enslavement, and was critical of the church because he claimed the clergy used their power to keep people down with the promise of the afterlife. The poem in which he expresses his vision of enslavement is “Visions of the Daughters Albion,” which features an enslaved girl who is raped by her enslaver and is jilted by her lover because she is not virtuous anymore. As a consequence, she launches in a crusade for social, political, and religious freedom, but her story ends in chains. This poem equates rape with colonialism, and also sheds light on the fact that rape was actually a common occurrence in plantations. The Daughters of Albion are the English women who wanted to end enslavement. 

There is a complex mythology surrounding Blake, which makes every generation find something in his work that appeals to their specific time. In our time, one of the greatest threats is sovereignty, which manifests itself in Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump, and Blake notably spoke of similar regimes as “great evil.”

William Blake remained neglected for one generation after his death, until Alexander Gilchrist wrote his Life of William Blake in 1863, which led to a newfound appreciation for Blake among the pre-Raphaelites, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who illustrated the Divine Comedy, too) and Algernon Swinburne. Yet, he labelled him a pictor ignotus, which means “unknown painter,” which hinted at the obscurity he had died in.

The modernists deserve credit for fully bringing Blake into the canon. W.B. Yeats resonated with Blake’s philosophical ideas, and also edited an edition of his collected works. Huxley cites Blake in his work The Doors of Perception, while beat poet Allen Ginsberg , as well as songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison all found inspiration in Blake’s work.

• Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes.  The Complete Writings of William Blake; with Variant Readings . Oxford U.P., 1966.
• Bloom, Harold.  William Blake . Blooms Literary Criticism, 2008.
• Eaves, Morris.  The Cambridge Companion to William Blake . Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• “The Forum, The Life and Works of William Blake.”  BBC World Service , BBC, 26 June 2018, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cswps4.
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Blake’s profession was engraving , and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry . In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches , with the attribution on the title page reading simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons. Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.

But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish rodomontade, but some, such as “To Winter” and “Mad Song,” are exquisite . “ To the Muses,” lamenting the death of music, concludes,

How have you left the antient love That bards of old enjoy’d in you! The languid strings do scarcely move! The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

Eighty-five years later, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote that in these lines “The Eighteenth Century died to music.”

Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife, printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.

After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One (1788?), Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered: Songs of Innocence , with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children—in “ Infant Joy” only three words have as many as two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable , from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In “ The Chimney Sweeper,” for example,

[…]the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm. So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.

In one of the best-known lyrics, called “ The Lamb,” a little boy gives to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in church:

Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? … Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee, Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee: He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb … I a child, & thou a lamb, We are called by his name.

The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and lamb has the same qualities as his creation.

Most of Blake’s poetry embodies myths that he invented. Blake takes the inquiry about the nature of life a little further in The Book of Thel (1789), the first of his published myths. The melancholy shepherdess Thel asks, “Why fade these children of the spring? Born but to smile & fall.” She is answered by the Lilly of the Valley (representing water), the Cloud (air), and the Clod of Clay (earth), who tell her, “we live not for ourselves,” and say that they are nourished by “he that loves the lowly.” Thel enters the “land unknown” and hears a “voice of sorrow”:

“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction? Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!”

The poem concludes with the frightened Thel seeing her own grave there, shrieking, and fleeing back to her valley.

Blake’s next work in Illuminated Printing, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?), has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg , echoing the Swedish theologian’s “Memorable Relations” of things seen and heard in heaven with “Memorable Fancies” of things seen and heard in hell. The section titled “Proverbs of Hell” eulogizes energy with lines such as “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “Exuberance is Beauty,” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The work ends with “A Song of Liberty,” which celebrates the values of those who stormed the Bastille in 1789: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer […] curse the sons of joy […] For every thing that lives is Holy.”

America, A Prophecy (1793) and Europe, A Prophecy (1794) are even more daringly political, and they are boldly acknowledged on the title pages as “Printed by William Blake.” In the first, Albion’s Angel, representing the reactionary government of England , perceives Orc, the spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities,” but Orc’s vision is of an apocalypse that transforms the world:

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field, Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; … For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease … For every thing that lives is holy

The mental revolution seems to be accomplished, but the design for the triumphant concluding page shows not rejoicing and triumph but barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents. Blake’s designs often tell a complementary story, and the two visions must be combined in the reader’s mind to comprehend the meaning of the work.

The frontispiece to Europe is one of Blake’s best-known images: sometimes called The Ancient of Days , it represents a naked, bearded old man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden compasses. He seems a familiar image of God, but the usual notions about this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and forked tongue. It seems to represent how

Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth: To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face […] … Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel; Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.

This God is opposed by Orc and by Los, the imagination, and at the end of the poem Los “call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” The work’s last illustration, however, is not of the heroic sons of Los storming the barricades of tyrannical reason but of a naked man carrying a fainting woman and a terrified girl from the horrors of a burning city.

In the same year as Europe , Blake published Songs of Experience and combined it with his previous lyrics to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul . The poems of Songs of Experience centre on threatened, unprotected souls in despair. In “ London” the speaker, shown in the design as blind, bearded, and “age-bent,” sees in “every face…marks of woe,” and observes that “In every voice…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” In “ The Tyger ,” which answers “The Lamb” of Innocence , the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” But in the design the “deadly terrors” of the text are depicted as a small, meek animal often coloured more like a stuffed toy than a jungle beast.

Blake’s most impressive writings are his enormous prophecies Vala or The Four Zoas (which Blake composed and revised from roughly 1796 to 1807 but never published), Milton , and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion . In them, his myth expands, adding to Urizen (reason) and Los (imagination) the Zoas Tharmas and Luvah. (The word zoa is a Greek plural meaning “living creatures.”) Their primordial harmony is destroyed when each of them attempts to fix creation in a form corresponding to his own nature and genius. Blake describes his purpose, his “great task,” in Jerusalem :

To open the immortal Eyes Of man inwards into the worlds of thought; into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

Like the Zoa Los, Blake felt that he must “Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans.”

Milton concerns Blake’s attempt, at Milton’s request, to correct the ideas of Paradise Lost . The poem originated in an event in Felpham, recorded in Blake’s letters, in which the spirit of Milton as a falling star entered Blake. It includes the lyric commonly called “Jerusalem” that has become a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain:

I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.

British Literature Wiki

William Blake

William blake (1757-1827).

Background Information

William Blake was a Romantic poet in the late Seventeenth, early Eighteenth Century. His only formal education was in Art. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, and eventually became an apprentice to an engraver at the age of fourteen. In his freetime, Blake honed in on his poetry writing skills. He married Catherine Boucher at the age of 24, though he never had children with her. When he met her she was illiterate, however he taught her to read, and she eventually began to help him with his work engraving and illustrating.

In 1803 there was an event that sparked his career as a writer (though he would not be widely recognized until long after his death). It was in 1803 that Blake was accused of vocally disrespecting the King, a violation which was a hanging offense at the time. Blake ended up being acquitted of the charges, which caused quite the uproar. This event inspired blake to begin writing. From the ages of 26-60, Blake wrote many works, notably “Jerusalem” and “Songs of Innocence and Experience”. At the age of sixty, Blake narrowed his work to just pictoral art. He produced hundreds of paintings and engravings.

He was not greatly recognized until the 19th century, long after his death. During his lifetime Blake was sometimes viewed as insane or demented, though he was still accepted as a part of London’s literary circle. “Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner”( http://www.online-literature.com/blake/). Blake believed in equality for all of the human race despite gender or skin color, and he reveals this within his poems, specifically his works of “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”. These poems are reflected upon and annotated to give an in depth look into the meaning of his poetry.

Songs of Innocence & Experience

William Blake was an illustrator and often included his art in correlation with his poems. The YouTube video below includes some of his many illustrations.

Video by Brendafohio

References Brendafohio Information from: http://www.online-literature.com/blake/ Norton Anthology: Eighth Edition: Volume 2. Website: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/18century/welcome.htm

By: Elisa Lala, Danielle Allen and Natalie Johnson

Poet Biographies

William Blake: The Visionary Artist

William Blake was an 18th-century English poet, artist, and visionary. He is considered a seminal figure in the Romantic movement, with his works exploring themes such as spirituality, nature, and the human condition.

William Blake was unrecognized during his lifetime, but since his death, he has become known as one of the greatest artistic and literary geniuses of the 18th and 19th centuries. Blake was multi-talented, working as a poet, engraver, painter, and illustrator. He was renowned for his creativity and ability to push the envelope of what was possible with poetry. He combined illustration and the written word to create pieces of visual artistry. His works would often have philosophical and mystical undercurrents.

His emphasis on visual arts separated him from his peers, who focused only on the written verse . Unlike some of his contemporaries, Blake did not find literary success for his entire life. Tragically, he only garnered his reputation as one of the greatest creatives to come out of Britain posthumously. Later critics, such as 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones, cement this notion and have gone as far as to say that Blake is the greatest artist Britain has ever produced.

About William Blake

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 7 Writing Career and Relationships
• 8 Later Life
• 10 Influence from other Poets
• William Blake was born in Soho, London, England, in November 1757.
• He was apprenticed to a printmaker for seven years.
• Blake married Catherine Sophia Boucher.
• In 1785, Blake co-opened a print shop.
• William Blake died in August of 1827.

Interesting Facts

• Blake was charged with assault and sedition.
• He saw visions at Westminster Abbey.
• He was called “an unfortunate lunatic” after an exhibition of his prints.
• Blake remained unrecognized during his lifetime.
• He believed his brother instructed him, from the afterlife, in the method of “illuminated printing.”

Famous Poems

• ‘The Tyger’ was published in 1794 in ‘ Songs of Experience.’  It is widely anthologized alongside  ‘The Lamb.’  The poem questions the cruel elements of God’s creation, the tiger being the main example. Throughout, the child tries to reconcile the tiger with the kinder, softer elements to be found in the world.
• ‘The Lamb’ is the companion piece to Blake’s ‘ The Tyger.’ It uses the lamb as an image of God’s goodness and his overarching will. A child is addressing the title animal throughout the poem. They speak to the creature and take note of its soft wool and the simple noises it makes.
• ‘A Poison Tree’ was also published in 1794 in William Blake’s ‘ Songs of Experience.’  Blake’s speaker considers what anger is and two different ways of confronting it. One might move past it by speaking about its cause. Alternatively, the anger takes root through the image of a tree that, unfortunately, bears poisoned apples.
• ‘The Sick Rose’  should be read with an eye on the way that the extended metaphor at the heart of the poem works. The speaker compares the rose, a symbol of nature, beauty, and fragility, to a woman’s innocence or chastity. The value of a relationship with a woman was defined by whether or not that woman has had sex. When the rose is ‘sick, ‘ it has lost its purity or its virginity. 
• ‘London’ was published in ‘ Songs of Experience’ in 1794. It describes the difficulties of London life while the speaker moves through the city. He travels to the River Thames and takes note of the solemn and resigned faces of his fellow Londoners. There is genuine pain in the hearts of men, women, and children.

Explore more William Blake poems .

William Blake was born in Soho, London, England, in November 1757. He was the third of seven children (two of whom died in infancy) born to his parents, James and Catherine, who were part of the Church of England. His father, James, was a hosier by trade, which allowed Blake an upbringing of sufficient means. The family resided at 28 Broad Street in London.

Blake only attended school for a few years, managing to learn to read and write, before he left at the age of ten. He was educated by his mother for the rest of his childhood. It was during this same period of time that Blake claimed to have had his first vision (a tree full of angels), an experience that would become a reoccurring theme in his life.

As he aged, he began to study engraving and developed a love for  Gothic  art. These elements would prove influential in his later paintings and drawings. He was enrolled by his parents in drawing classes at Pars’s drawing school in the Strand. In this institution, he was able to freely read any  subject  he chose as well as explore his poetry. Blake’s poetry work from this period showed the influence of poets such as  Edmund Spenser  as well as elements of scripture and the Psalms.

In 1772, Blake began an apprenticeship with an engraver known as James Basire. He remained in these circumstances for the duration of the term, a total of seven years. At one point, the young artist was sent to Westminster Abbey. He would later tell of experiencing a number of visions there. These included: Christ and his Apostles, as well as chanting and religious processions. After completing his apprenticeship, Blake was still at the ripe age of 21. He moved on to the Royal Academy.

Literary Career

Blake’s ‘ Poetical Sketches’  was published in 1783. This was a collection he had been working on for over 14 years. Following his father’s death, Blake inherited a sum of money, which he put towards starting a new enterprise. Blake took the money and co-opened a print shop with his friend James Parker and began working with the publisher Joseph Johnson, who was seen as a radical.

The association between himself and Johnson allowed Blake to build and cultivate a prominent circle of people in the literary and political spheres. He most notably met with Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, and Thomas Paine. Many of these associates were considered some of the most radical thinkers of his day. Soon after, in the same year, Blake began the manuscript,  An Island on the Moon , a work that was never completed.

In the late 1790s, Blake published a number of his “prophetic” books. These works were illuminated in his characteristic  style  and contained poetic and narrative texts. Some of these volumes include ‘ Visions of the Daughters of Albion,’ ‘The First Book of Urizen,’  and the continental prophecies : ‘America a Prophecy,’ ‘Europe a Prophecy,’  and ‘ The Song of Los.’ 

In 1819, Blake began a series of sketches that were referred to as “visionary heads.” These works depicted historical and imaginary figures Blake claimed came and sat for him. By the mid-1800s, he had completed more than 100 individual works. They included King Solomon, the magician Merlin, Owen Glendower, and William Wallace.

The mid-1800s also saw Blake create engravings for an illustrated edition of the Book of Job and Dante’s ‘ Inferno. ‘

To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. William Blake Quote

In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher. He taught the young woman how to read, write, and draw. She remained his steadfast supporter throughout his life. They moved to Felpham together in 1803, a place that would become prominent within his work.

Writing Career and Relationships

In the later years of the 18th century, Blake suffered great trauma when his brother, Robert, died from tuberculosis at only 24. The poet claimed to have seen his brother’s spirit rise from his body and pass through the ceiling. This experience was deeply influential, especially after Robert reappeared to Blake and instructed him in a new method of printing his works. A process that would come to be called “illuminated printing.” For some of his works, Blake would use copper plates to print, then watercolors to finish the piece. This way of working would be utilized in his best-known collection ‘ Songs of Innocence and Experience. ‘

In the early 1800s, Blake moved to work alongside William Hayley. Their relationship did not last long— souring around the same time Blake ran into legal trouble. In an incident involving a soldier on his property, Blake was charged with assault and sedition. He was forced to take on a lawyer and was luckily acquitted in 1804.

Soon after his troubles, Blake and Catherine moved back to London. It was here he began to write and illustrate ‘ Jerusalem .’  This work would take a number of years to complete, spanning from 1804 to 1820 and beyond, as later edited versions were released.

It was also during this period that Blake began showing his work at exhibitions. The pieces were met with either silence or negative criticism. At one point, he was even referred to as “an unfortunate lunatic.” The reviews hit Blake hard, impacting his mental health and keeping him from showing any further illustrative works.

During his later years, William Blake was struck with poverty, never gaining any wealth from his works. However, in 1818, Blake was still involving himself within literary circles, befriending a group of young writers called “the Ancients.” One of these was John Linnell, who became close to Blake and not only offered him work but aided him in financial matters. It was Linnell who later offered Blake the chance to produce illustrations for Dante’s ‘ Divine Comedy .’ Blake was initially commissioned to complete this task in 1825 but could only work on them until his death in 1827.

Blake’s death came after repeating occurrences of an undiagnosed illness. He died in August of 1827, leaving behind a number of unfinished collections. These included illustrations for John Bunyan ’s ‘ Pilgrim’s Progresses,’ and Dante’s ‘ Inferno,’ as well as an illustrated manuscript of the Book of Genesis.

Influence from other Poets

William Blake was notably influenced by writers such as Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare , and John Milton . Since his death, he has inspired countless other poets throughout the centuries.

William Blake is known for his poetry, which combined excellent illustration and well-executed verse . He is considered by modern critics as arguably the greatest artist to come out of Britain. He created famous works such as; ‘ Songs of Innocence and Experience ,’ ‘ The Tyger ,’ and ‘ The Lamb .’

William Blake can most certainly be considered a romantic poet, alongside other pioneers such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Blake’s work had all the characteristics of Romanticism , with lyrical , song-like verses and a focus on beauty, nature, and human emotion.

William Blake was not only unique in his style but in his presentation of poetry. He chose to write in a lyrical , song-like manner, whereas others would write in a more traditional story form. Alongside this, he would illustrate his poems, creating prints to supplement them. This separated him from poets that would focus purely on the written word.

William Blake was consistently against the way society was run during his time period. He took the stance that society was more punishing in adulthood than it needed to be due to the rise of institutions and corruption that came with that. He also saw childhood and innocence as something that was quickly lost.

William Blake used a wide array of imagery and symbolism to portray the romantic ideas of his poems. He focused on the human experience, emotion, nature, and beauty. These are all typical features of Romantic poetry .

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• General Knowledge /

Biography of William Blake: Early Life, Career, and Work

• Updated on  
• Aug 1, 2024

Biography of William Blake: An all-rounder artist and painter, has contributed towards revolutionising both society and the human mind through his poetry and artwork. Despite being largely overlooked during his lifetime, he is now well-praised as an important figure in English literature. Although his work was often deemed inaccessible to the general public, Blake himself believed in its widespread significance. Scroll to learn everything about his works and how he became so well known. 

Table of Contents

• 1 About William Blake 
• 2.1 Early Years and Poetic Beginnings
• 2.2 The Innovative Art of Relief Etching
• 2.3 Mastery of Traditional Engraving
• 3.1 William Blake Poems
• 3.2 William Blake Artwork

About William Blake 

He was brought up in London and he took inspiration from the political and social situation of the place. William Blake continued transforming his experiences into a unique body of work that continues to captivate audiences today.

Also Read- Famous Painters of India: Life, Work, Style

Career of William Blake

William Blake’s artistic journey began in his youth with the publication of his first poetry collection, Poetical Sketches, around 1783. 

Early Years and Poetic Beginnings

Following his father’s death, Blake stepped into the world of printmaking, establishing a print shop with someone he knew before. This one step of his life brought him into contact with a circle of influential intellectuals, including Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Priestley, who were active in the political and social debates of the time. 

Inspired by the ideals of the French and American revolutions, Blake became a vocal critic of oppression and injustice, as evidenced in works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

The Innovative Art of Relief Etching

Blake is an artistic genius who truly prospered with his invention of relief etching, a revolutionary technique that allowed him to effortlessly merge his text and art together. 

This method, distinct from traditional, enabled him to create his all-time iconic books, such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 

These works showcased Blake’s unique vision, blending poetry, art, and philosophy into a powerful and personal expression.

Mastery of Traditional Engraving

While relief etching became Blake’s signature style, his commercial success was largely built on traditional intaglio engraving. 

His work on commissions, such as the illustrations for John Gabriel Stedman’s ‘The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition,’ demonstrates his technical proficiency in this demanding art form. However, Blake’s innovative spirit extended even to this established technique. 

He employed unconventional methods like repoussage to correct errors, showcasing his constant experimentation and pursuit of artistic perfection.

Also Read- Amrita Pritam: Life, Poems & Awards

William Blake’s Complete Works

William Blake has contributed significantly to society, from his works to everything. So here are William Blakes’s complete works. 

William Blake Poems

Songs of Innocence and Experience Book

It is a collection of poems by William Blake that explores the contrasting states of the human soul. Originally published separately, the two volumes (Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience) were later combined to contrast the opposing states of the human soul. 

While Songs of Innocence portrays a world of childlike purity and optimism, Songs of Experience reveals the true and harsh realities of life and the corrupting influence of society. So basically it is like the yin and yan of a book series. 

• The Lamb: A gentle, childlike poem presenting Jesus as a symbol of innocence and divine love. 

• The Chimney Sweeper: A poignant critique of child labour and the loss of innocence amidst societal oppression.
• The Tyger: A powerful exploration of the duality of existence, questioning the creation of both beauty and terror.
• London: A bleak depiction of urban life, revealing the suffering and despair hidden beneath the city’s facade.

Total Poems in Songs of Innocence

Total Poems in Songs of Experience

Other Notable Poems

• Auguries of Innocence: A collection of short poems offering profound insights into the human condition and the natural world.
• Holy Thursday: Contrasts the innocence of children with the harsh realities of their lives, criticising societal indifference.

Other Not-so-notable Poems 

• Nurse’s song
• A poison tree
• The school boy
• The little black boy
• The garden of love
• The echoing green
• The book of Urizen
• The marriage of Heaven and hell

William Blake Artwork

William Blake’s artwork is a unique blend of poetry, painting, and printmaking. He is best known for his illuminated handwritten books.

Blake’s work is often characterized by its use of symbolism, mythology, and religious imagery. He was also a visionary who believed in the power of imagination and the spiritual world. 

Blake’s paintings have had a great influence on the subsequent generations of artists and writers.

He was best known for his revolutionary poetry and intricate artwork, often combined in illuminated books.

Yes, William Blake is considered a Romantic poet, though his style diverges significantly from other Romantics.

William Blake’s writing style is characterised by vivid imagery, symbolism, and a profound exploration of the human soul and the spiritual world.

Find Other Related Reads Here!

This was everything about the biography of William Blake, his notable works and related information in a nutshell. If you want to know more about other Famous Personalities then visit our General Knowledge page!

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