Blake’s Biography, Spirituality and Verse (by David McCulloch)
William Blake, the engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, is widely recognised by scholars as one of the key figures of the Romantic movement in art and literature. The author of lyrics such as Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), as well as profound and difficult to grasp “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804-11), and Jerusalem (1804-20), Blake’s writings and art provide a symbolic commentary on his religious, political and social convictions. These works were occasionally published by others, but more commonly, Blake wrote, and with his wife Catherine, engraved, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold these books in limited editions. Blake is now widely regarded as the greatest and most original English Romantic artist and poet.
This is part one of a two-part blog on William Blake, the renowned artist, poet and dissenter. Part One provides a biography, and looks at his spirituality through his verse, whilst part 2 focusses more on the illustrations and engravings that express his religious and political dissent. This blog also makes connections between Blake’s ideas and contemporary issues.
Blake was born on November 28th 1757 over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Soho. From early age, the young William seems to have had an intense openness to spirituality. While still a child, William claimed to have seen the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Visions such as this were the source of many of his poems and art works. As he wrote in Auguries of Innocence, his purpose was:
“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.”
Blake grew up being articled as an apprentice to a printer, and continued engraving illustrations to the books of others his whole life, having this as his main income. His principal “hobby”, to put it in modern terms, was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry, and collections of verse were his earliest commercial and artistic success. However, Blake generally took very little interest in the distribution and sale of his poetical works. Around 1784, Blake started illustrating books sold by the politically radical publisher, Joseph Johnson, and Blake came into contact through Johnson with other prominent London radicals such as Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, John Fuseli, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Although there is no definite evidence that Blake and Wollstonecraft met, Blake seems to have shared many of her views regarding sexual equality (consistently defending the right of women to self-fulfilment in his writings) and the injustice of enforced chastity and arranged marriages as a common experience for many women of his time. Blake illustrated Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1791) which express many of these ideas. As an illustration of this view, Blake’s marriage to Catherine Boucher was a model of mutual empathy and support.
Blake’s poetic and artistic works are mutually supportive expressions of his artistic vision since Blake usually illustrated his poetry and longer writings with his own engravings. The earliest of his collections of verse for which he is chiefly remembered was published in 1789, the Songs of Innocence. In one of the best-known lyrics from this collection, The Lamb, a little boy teaches the lamb the same kind of catechism he would have been taught in church himself:
“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 call-ed by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are call-ed by his name.”
Songs of Innocence, particularly poems such as The Lamb and The Chimney Sweeper, effectively created the culture of the need to protect and nurture children that is widely held today. However, there is also a savage irony in these verses, which is made clear in their parallels in the later Songs of Experience, as Blake commented on the social tensions of his age.
From 1790 onwards, Blake’s work also reflected the political ferment of its time, immediately after the revolution the previous year in Paris, overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy. One of Blake’s immediate artistic responses to this crisis was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which ends with A Song of Liberty, celebrating 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 everything that lives is Holy.” His next major works America, a Prophecy (1793) and Europe, a Prophecy (1794) are even more daringly political. In the first, Albion’s Angel, representing a reactionary English government, perceives Orc, the spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon” but Orc’s apocalyptic vision eventually 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 everything that lives is holy.”
Characteristically, Blake uses and transforms Biblical imagery to illuminate the conditions of his own day, including slavery and those working in the new urban factories of industrial England.
In Europe, Blake writes about the French Revolution and its aftermath. The “traditional Christian” image of God as commonly expressed in the Old Testament, who makes laws and is the ultimate symbol of authority (an image of God which Blake clearly despised), is opposed by Orc and Los, symbols of energy and imagination. At the end of the text Blake issues a call through the words of Los to invite “all his sons to the strife of blood.” There is a clear allusion here to the contemporary arrival of the Terror and the wars following the French Revolution. Nevertheless, Blake recognised that revolution and war would not be a simple solution to the problem of tyranny, but would cause misery to many.
In the same year as Europe, Blake published Songs of Experience and combined it with his previous lyrical collection 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 satanic pits of despair. In London the speaker of the poem is shown in Blake’s illustration as blind, bearded, and “age-bent.” Blake sees people around him having “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 the earlier collection, the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The little chimney sweep who is told by an angel to do his work without complaint in Songs of Innocence ends up being helplessly crushed in a workhouse in the parallel poem in Songs of Experience. It scarcely requires commentary to expand on Blake’s concerns expressed in these verses.
The atmosphere of Songs of Experience continues in Blake’s most famous poem Jerusalem, written in 1804. Blake’s horror at aspects of contemporary life in the rapidly industrialising England of the beginning of the 19th century, “the dark satanic mills”, of the poem, is contrasted with a vision of a spiritual England which, according to the Glastonbury legend, was visited by Jesus. But this poem is no simple nostalgia for a lost Christian utopia, and Blake knows that violent struggle is opposed to his understanding of the example of love given by Jesus in the Gospels. According to Blake, a truly Christian England can only be brought about through a spiritual revolution: “I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: ‘Til we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” It is a supreme irony that, in Parry’s admittedly stirring musical setting, Jerusalem has been adopted by some nationalists as a celebration for an England that Blake would almost certainly have despised.
Blake’s most impressive later writings are his enormous prophecies 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. Blake describes his artistic purpose, his “great task,” in the last of these works:
“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.”
Milton concerns Blake’s attempt (at the request of Milton’s spirit according to Blake himself) to correct the ideas of Paradise Lost. The poem originated in Felpham in Sussex around 1807, when Blake spent a few years in the countryside. He also was subjected to a false accusation of sedition while in Felpham after getting into an altercation with a soldier and shouting abuse at him: “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.” Even outside the political ferment of London, Blake’s radicalism and rejection of contemporary political and social norms made him an outsider.
On his return to London, Blake conceived a set of illustrations to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Blake arranged for his illustrations to go on display at Broad Street, but sales of his watercolours were disastrous. For nearly a decade, Blake conducted public arguments with the artists of the previous generation, such as Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds. These arguments also included a summary of Blake’s life’s work, and justification for his artistic views, in his Descriptive Catalogue. However, in the last decade of his life, Blake began to sell more work, as it became appreciated by a younger generation of Romantic poets and artists, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Palmer. With this greater appreciation and support, Blake started his last great endeavour, a set of illustrations for a new edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. However, he was only able to complete a handful of sketches towards engraving the book before his death.
Following his death on August 12th 1827, Blake was recognised by his friends as an extraordinary but misunderstood genius. Witnesses at his deathbed reported that “I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel”. His body was buried in the Dissenting graveyard at Bunhill Fields in Islington. The original site of the grave was lost for many years after Second World War bombing. The site was rediscovered by Carol and Luis Garrido in 2018 and a new memorial laid: “Here lies William Blake 1757-1827 Poet Artist Prophet”. The following verse, taken from Jerusalem and engraved on the stone, seems to encapsulate Blake’s life and achievement.
“I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you into heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and David McCulloch. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
