William Blake - Historical
Background
Blake lived through a crucial phase of Western history. Among the major events
with which he grapples is the American revolution of 1776, which secured
American independence from British rule. Blake reads this, in
He was, we might say, an instinctive radical, with a natural opposition to
tyranny wherever he found it and a distrust of authority whether it be
represented in kings, priests or even in the very idea of a monolithic deity
who rules human affairs. Perhaps the best-known episode of his life was the
occasion when he was put on trial for treason, on an apparently trumped up
charge caused by his swearing at a soldier who had strayed into his garden;
unimportant as this event may sound (he was not convicted), nevertheless it
played a decisive part both in confirming his opposition to the forces of order
and also in convincing him that ideas such as his could only in the end be put
forth in cryptic, symbolic form.
It is also important to bear in mind that the years in which Blake was writing
were ones of enormous change in
He saw this, like many other tendencies of his time, as an attempt to restrict
human capacity and the freedom of the imagination, and saw his role as
contributing to the reinstatement of the imagination as the guiding principle
of human affairs. To that extent, certainly, we may see him in terms of the
larger movement we refer to as Romanticism; but his class background and his
immersion in the