William Blake (1757-1827)

British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th-century. He joined for a time the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem in London and considered Newtonian science to be superstitious nonsense. Mocking criticism and misunderstanding shadowed Blake's career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour. 
(from 'Auguries of Innocence')

William Blake's first biographer, Frederick Tatham, wrote that Blake "depised restraints & rules, so much that his Father dare not send him to School." 

From his early years, Blake had experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures. 

Blake's parents encouraged him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and his father gave him engravings and plaster casts. Gothic art and architecture influenced him, and the work of Adam Ghisi and Albert Dürer.

Blake wrote his early poems  at the age of 12. However, being early apprenticed to a manual occupation, journalistic-social career was not open to him. His first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783 and was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794). 

Each copy of Songs of Innocence was unique and the poems were never in the same order. The book was not a commercial or critical success. Blake's most famous poem, 'The Tyger', was part of his Songs of Experience. 

Typical for Blake's poems were long, flowing lines and violent energy, combined with aphoristic clarity and moments of lyric tenderness. Blake was not blinded by conventions, but approached his subjects sincerely with "a mind unclouded by current opinions";  this made him an outsider. 

He approved of free love, and sympathized with the actions of the French revolutionaries but the Reign of Terror sickened him. In 1790 Blake engraved "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", his principal prose work, in which he expressed his revolt against the established values of his time: 

"Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of Religion." 

Radically Blake sided with the Satan in Milton's Paradises Lost and attacked the conventional religious views in a series of paradoxical aphorisms. But the poet's life in the realms of images did not please his wife who once remarked: "I have very little of  Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise".  Some of Blake's contemporaries called him a harmless lunatic.

Henry Fuseli, who was sixteen years Blake's senior, recognized also a debt to him, and Fuseli was the only contemporary artist, whose "superiority"  Blake seems to have acknowledged.  Blake was not an easy person to get along with, especially in a subordinate role, and although they worked together on a number of designs, by 1803 their paths had separated.  Fuseli is said to have admitted that "Blake is d—good to steal from."

In 1774 Blake opened with his wife and younger brother Robert a print shop at 27 Broad Street, but the venture failed after the death of Robert in 1787, probably of consumption. Immediately upon his death Blake slept for three days and nights. 

The Blakes moved south of the Thames to Lambeth in 1790, where they had more room. During this time Blake began to work on his "prophetic books",  where he recorded his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. 

Although Blake first accepted Swedenborg's ideas, he eventually rejected him. His mythical and visionary world he recorded in "The Visions of the Daughters of Albion" (1793), in which the motto is, "The Eye sees more than the Heart knows",  "America: A Prophesy" (1793), about the rebellion of American colonies and the British response, "The Book of  Urizen" (1794), an introduction to his cosmogony, "The Song of Los"(1795), and "Europe" (1794), which contains one of his most extraordinary images, God measuring the abyss below him with a pair of compasses. 

Blake hated the effects of the Industrial Revolution in England and looked forward to the establishment of a New Jerusalem "in England's green and pleasant land".  Between 1804 and 1818 he produced an edition of his own poem Jerusalem with 100 engravings.

"Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire." 


(from 'Jerusalem' in Milton, 1804-1808)

In 1800 Blake was taken up by the wealthy William Hayley, poet and patron of poets, who had a house in Felpham, Sussex, and whose writings he began to illustrate, executing also other commissions. The Blakes rented a cottage at Felpham, staying there for three years.  In a letter to a friend he wrote: "Meat is cheaper than in London, but the sweet air, the voices of winds, trees, birds, the odours of the happy ground, makes it a dwelling for immortals."

In this period, his attention was again drawn to Milton:  "Milton: A Poem in Two Books,  To Justify the Ways of God to Men"  was finished and engraved between 1803 and 1808. 

After exchanging some heated words in argument with Private John Scofield, Blake was charged in 1803 at Chichester with high treason for having uttered such expressions as "D-n the King, d-n all his subjects..." Blake was acquitted, and as the Sussex Advertiser later reported, the verdict "so gratified the auditory that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations". 

Blake's exhibition in 1809 at the shop once owned by his brother was commercially unsuccessful.  However, economic problems did not diminish his creativity, but he continued to produce energetically poems, aphorisms, and engravings. "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction," he wrote. 

While working on his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims, Blake produced "The Four Zoals'.  The long epic poem was rediscovered in 1889, and published in "The Writings of William Blake" (1893).  Many of its drawings are erotic; the central motif is the erect penis.

In his old age, Blake enjoyed the admiration of a group of young artist, known as "The Ancients". One of them called him "Divine Blake", who "had seen God, sir, and had talked with angels".  Moreover, he was many times helped by John Linnell, an younger artist. 

Blake's last years were passed in obscurity, quarreling even with some of the circle of friends who supported him. Among Blake's later works are drawings and engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy and the illustrations to the book of Job, which were completed when he was almost 70 years old. 

Blake never managed to get out of poverty, in large part due to his inability to compete with fast engravers and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time.

Wordsworth's verdict after Blake's death reflected many opinions of the time: "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." 

T.S. Eliot wrote in his essay on Blake that "the concentration resulting from a framework of mythology, theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic and Blake only a poet of  genius." (from Selected Essays, 1960)

Blake's most famous poem, 'The Tyger', was part of his Songs of Experience.

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
in the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?


In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?


And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?


What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dead grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?


When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaved with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?


Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?