William Blake

William Blake was a poet, painter, engraver and visionary who worked in obscurity and poverty in London and died almost unknown, but is now recognised as one of the greatest and most original figures in English art and poetry. He printed his own books by a method of “relief etching” he invented, combining words and coloured images on the same copper plate and hand-colouring each copy with his wife, Catherine — so that each of his “illuminated books” exists in only a few copies, every one different. His Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–94) contain some of the best-known poems in English — “The Lamb”, “The Tyger”, “London”, “The Chimney Sweeper”, “Holy Thursday”, “The Sick Rose”. His prophetic books, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to Milton and Jerusalem, build a vast personal mythology of fallen and redeemed humanity. His lyric “And did those feet in ancient time” is sung as the hymn “Jerusalem”.

Blake was a radical: an enemy of kings, priests, slavery, the oppression of women and children, the “dark Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution, and above all of the abstract, mechanistic reason he associated with Bacon, Newton and Locke. Against them he set the imagination, which he identified with the divine in man.

Life

Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street, Soho, London, the third of seven children of James Blake, a hosier, and Catherine Wright, who belonged to a radical Dissenting sect. He never went to school; his mother taught him at home. He had visions from childhood — at four he saw God’s face at the window; at eight or ten he saw a tree on Peckham Rye “filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”. His parents sent him to drawing school and, at fourteen, apprenticed him to the engraver James Basire, who sent him to draw the tombs in Westminster Abbey, giving him a lasting love of Gothic art.

After his apprenticeship he studied briefly at the Royal Academy, quarrelling with its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classical ideals he despised (“This Man was Hired to Depress Art”). He worked as a commercial engraver, illustrating other people’s books. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a market gardener, whom he taught to read, write and help him print and colour his books; their marriage of forty-five years was devoted. In 1787 his beloved younger brother Robert died; Blake said he saw his spirit rise through the ceiling “clapping its hands for joy”, and later that Robert revealed to him in a dream the method of printing his books.

He was a supporter of the American and French Revolutions; with the radical circle of the publisher Joseph Johnson he met Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and William Godwin, and is said to have worn the red cap of liberty in the streets. From 1790 to 1800 he lived in Lambeth, producing the great illuminated books of his early maturity. From 1800 to 1803 he lived at Felpham on the Sussex coast under the patronage of the poet William Hayley, whose kind but limiting patronage he came to resent. There, in 1803, he threw a drunken soldier, John Scofield, out of his garden; the soldier accused him of saying “Damn the King” and seditious words, and Blake was tried for sedition at Chichester in 1804 and acquitted.

Back in London, he lived in growing poverty and neglect. His only exhibition, in 1809, was a failure; a reviewer called him “an unfortunate lunatic”. He worked on his vast prophetic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, of which few copies were made. In his last years a group of young artists who called themselves “the Ancients” — Samuel Palmer, John Linnell, George Richmond — revered him; Linnell commissioned his engravings for the Book of Job (1826), his supreme achievement as an engraver, and illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, unfinished at his death. He died on 12 August 1827, singing hymns, it was said, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Bunhill Fields.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence (1789) seems at first a book of children’s poems — simple lyrics of lambs, shepherds, children at play, guardian angels, a mother’s care. “Little Lamb, who made thee? / Dost thou know who made thee?” — and the child answers that the Lamb’s maker “calls himself a Lamb”, Christ. In 1794 Blake added Songs of Experience, and the combined book carried the subtitle Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Many poems have paired “contraries”.

“The Tyger”, the counterpart of “The Lamb”, is the most famous poem Blake wrote:

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

It asks, in a series of unanswered hammer-blow questions, what kind of creator could forge such beauty and terror — whether the energy of the tiger is divine or demonic.

The poems of Experience expose the cruelty and hypocrisy of a society that claims to be Christian. Both books contain a “Chimney Sweeper”: in Innocence a small boy sold by his father to climb chimneys dreams of an angel releasing the sweeps from their “coffins of black”; in Experience, a sweep left in the snow says his parents “are gone to praise God & his Priest & King / Who make up a heaven of our misery”. “Holy Thursday” in Innocence describes charity children singing in St Paul’s; in Experience, the poet asks: “Is this a holy thing to see, / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduc’d to misery, / Fed with cold and usurous hand?”

“London” walks through the “charter’d” streets of the city:

And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

The chimney-sweeper’s cry blackens the church; the soldier’s sigh runs in blood down palace walls; the “youthful Harlot’s curse” blasts the newborn infant’s tear “And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”. “The Sick Rose”, “A Poison Tree” (“I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was angry with my foe: / I told it not, my wrath did grow”), “The Garden of Love” (where chapels now stand on the green and “Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, / And binding with briars, my joys & desires”) complete the vision of repression.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–93) is Blake’s most exhilarating work, a satirical, aphoristic attack on conventional morality, written partly as a parody of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whom he had admired. Blake reverses the terms of orthodox religion: “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.” He sides with “Hell” — energy, desire, creativity: “Energy is Eternal Delight.” He writes that “Without Contraries is no progression”, and that Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The “Proverbs of Hell” are among the most quoted lines in English:

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. Exuberance is Beauty. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

And: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” (Aldous Huxley took his book title The Doors of Perception, and Jim Morrison the band name The Doors, from this.)

The prophetic books and the myth

From the 1790s Blake wrote long “prophecies” — America, Europe, The Book of Urizen, The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem — in long unrhymed lines, creating a cosmic mythology. Its central figure is Albion, the primeval Universal Man (and England), who has fallen into division. His four aspects, the Zoas — Urizen (reason, law, the tyrannical old sky-father, “your reason”), Luvah (passion and love), Tharmas (the body and senses) and Urthona/Los (imagination, the eternal prophet and blacksmith) — have broken apart and warred with one another, and each has separated from his female “Emanation”. History is the story of this fall; redemption comes through Los, the imagination, and through Jesus, who for Blake is the divine imagination in every human being, and through forgiveness of sins. Orc, the fiery spirit of revolution, rises against Urizen’s laws.

Milton (1804–10) imagines the dead poet returning to earth to correct his errors, entering Blake’s own foot. Its preface contains the lyric now known as “Jerusalem”:

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 was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?… 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.

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–20), a hundred plates, is his longest and most complex work, a vision of Albion’s fall and awakening. “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s,” says Los.

Ideas

Imagination. For Blake, imagination is not fantasy but the faculty that sees truly — the “Divine Body” of man. “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,” begins “Auguries of Innocence”. He attacked the “single vision and Newton’s sleep” — the reduction of the world to measurable matter by the empiricism of Bacon, Newton and Locke, which he saw as the philosophy of tyranny.

Contraries. Opposites are necessary and creative: reason and energy, innocence and experience, love and hate. The aim is not to destroy one but to hold them in vital tension.

Liberty. Blake opposed every form of tyranny: monarchy, the Church’s sexual morality, slavery (“The Little Black Boy”, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, his engravings for John Stedman’s account of Surinam), the subjection of women, child labour, war, and the factory system.

Religion. Intensely religious but violently anti-clerical, Blake believed that “All Religions are One” and that God exists only in men: “God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men.” He mocked the God of conventional religion as “Nobodaddy”, a jealous old tyrant.

Legacy

Blake was almost unknown at his death. Alexander Gilchrist’s biography (1863), completed by the Rossettis, began his rediscovery; Swinburne and W. B. Yeats (who co-edited his works) championed him. In the twentieth century he became a hero of radical, mystical and countercultural movements — the Beat poets, Allen Ginsberg (who had a vision of Blake reading “Ah! Sun-flower”), 1960s rock — and his art is shown in the Tate. Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947) made sense of his mythology. “Jerusalem”, set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916, is sung at rugby matches, party conferences and the Last Night of the Proms.

In conversation

• “Mind-forg’d manacles” — the chains we impose on our own minds.
• “Tyger Tyger, burning bright” — awe at a beautiful, terrifying force.
• “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “the doors of perception” — Blake’s anthem for experience over caution.