William
Blake – Life & Works
William
Blake was born in 1757 in
We know, from his works, much about his opinions, which were very strongly
held. We know, for example, that he was a Christian in the Dissenting tradition
which runs back to the seventeenth century, we know that he viewed Newtonian
Science as superstitious nonsense and that he frequently had ‘visions’ of
angels and claimed to have conversed with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary
and we know that politically he was a radical, sympathetic to the American and
French revolutions and to the spirit of freedom wherever he found it. Through
most of his life, his paintings and poetry were unknown to most; but in his
sixties, he attracted a small circle of younger artists and fellow visionaries,
including Samuel Palmer, John Linnell, John Varley, Edward Calvert and Henry Fuseli, and we may surmise
that they at last began to realise the extraordinary genius of his artistic and
poetic works.
Today he is known almost as much for his large visionary water colours
illustrating the Book of Job (1820-6), his 102 illustrations of Dante and his
colour-printed drawings of biblical subjects, as he is for his poetry.
His Works:
Blake’s
poetry falls into three main categories. First, there are the lyrics. Of these,
the most important are the Songs of Innocence and of Experience themselves, but
there are also the earlier poems called Poetical Sketches (1769-78), many of
which are really experiments in which Blake partly imitates earlier writers
(Shakespeare, Thomson and others) as well as a number of other lyrics, some of
the most interesting and important of which can be found in what is known as
the Pickering Manuscript (c.1803). The student of Blake will particularly want
to read from this manuscript ‘The Mental Traveller’
and ‘The Crystal Cabinet, which are essential to an understanding of his,
developing mythology.
This mythology is further elaborated in the second group of poems, which we may
refer to as the ‘shorter prophecies’. It is important to grasp that when we
speak of ‘Blake’s mythology, as many critics do, we are using a metaphor,
individuals cannot create mythologies, but Blake’s development of a private
repertoire of characters and events often has a myth-like ring to it. These
shorter prophecies, including Tiriel (c. 1789), The
Book of The! (1789), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790-3), Visions of
the Daughters of Albion (1793) America (1793), Europe (1794) and the so-called
books of the Infernal Bible (The Book of Urizen
(1794), and The Song of Los, The Book of Ahania and
The Book of Los (all 1795)) all written, as we can see, between 1789 and 1795,
build up this mythology and provide Blake’s ‘alternative’ account of the
creation of the world and the nature of God. What they also do is keep in
remarkably close touch with the historical events unfolding around him during
the closing years of the eighteenth century and the early years of the
nineteenth, and they are thus highly complex works which need to be read at
mythological, historical and psychological levels.
The third group of poems contains Blake’s three long prophecies, Vala, or, The Four Zoas
(1795-1804),
As well as these works, the student may find helpful the short tracts called’
All Religions Are One’ and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ (c.1788),which
provide useful, if highly complex, accounts of Blake’s thinking on such crucial
questions as the nature of reason, energy and desire. Many of the poems are
‘illuminated’, and ideally they should be read in versions which reproduce the
full-colour texts which most properly represent Blake’s mixture of poetic and
visual creativity, taken together they represent British literature’s most
determined attempt to create a world system, and although they make for dense
reading there are many passages of great beauty to be found among them.