William Blake – Literary
Background
Literary Background:
Blake was a self-taught man (an autodidact) and as such
relied very heavily in literary terms on those texts most readily available to
him. First and foremost among these was the Bible, the influence of which can
be seen throughout his works.
Second in importance is Milton, who published the epic poem
‘Paradise Lost’ in 1667. ‘Paradise Lost’ sought to ‘justify the ways of God to
man’, by charting the history of the universe starting with the fall of the
Devil from Heaven and the fall of man from the Garden of Eden (both of which
can be seen as a fall from Innocence to Experience) in an attempt to explain
the existence of sin, death and pain in the world despite the fact that an
all-powerful God could easily obliterate this suffering if he wished. However,
Blake argues that in fact
In some ways Blake seems to be a mystic enraptured with
incommunicable visions, standing apart, a lonely and isolated figure, out of
touch with his own age and without influence on the following one. He is an
interruption in cultural history, a separable phenomenon. Partly this is an
exaggeration. As the only major Romantic poet poor enough to have had to work
for his living, Blake experienced real city life in a way that many of his
artistic contemporaries did not, giving him a clear insight into the issues of
his time. Nonetheless, Blake is an incongruity, an anachronistic oddity whose
out-of-placeness is no doubt partly a result of the
fact that his individualism, resistance to authority and stubborn commonsense
attitude are values more typical of modern