WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

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.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
His life
My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.
- born in London, the son of a hosier (a maker of stockings) –
he did not go to school, but became an engraver’s
apprentice, & later a student at the Royal Academy – in
1779 he was employed as a bookseller’s engraver

- 1782 – married Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter

of a market-gardener, & taught her to read & write – their
marriage was often very happy, although childless & at one
point Blake considered bigamy as an option

- his friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, introduced him to

progressive intellectual circles in London, & this helped him
to get financial support for publishing his own work

- 1783: he published Poetical Sketches, his first volume of

poetry, & then set up his own print shop – in 1789 he
engraved & published his Songs of Innocence & The Book
of Thel

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

- he felt the need to escape from the scientific ‘materialist‘
 philosophy (as he interpreted it) of the Enlightenment, &
also from repressive Puritanical versions of Christianity

- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his main prose work, is

a book of paradoxical sayings – he wrote & engraved it in
the early1790s

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.

- he returned to poetry in The French Revolution (1791),
America – A Prophecy (1793) & Visions of the Daughters of
Albion(1793)

- Blake had now established his poetic range: ‘the long,

flowing lines and violent energy of the verse combine with
phrases of terse and aphoristic clarity and moments of
great lyric tenderness‘ (Oxford Companion to English
Literature)

- he returned to brilliant short lyric poems in Songs of

Experience (1794)- this volume includes ‘The Tyger‘ & ‘The
Sick Rose‘ among many other powerful pieces

- he developed a remarkable personal mythology &

published no less than six astonishing ‘prophetic books‘ in
1794-97
 - 1800-03: he & his wife went to live in the Sussex
countryside with his friend & patron William Hayley,
working on his long poem Milton & being paid well for his
engravings – while there he taught himself Latin, Greek &
Hebrew, & said he found them easy

- he was charged with ‘high treason‘ at Chichester Crown

Court in Sussex for having ‘uttered seditious and
treasonable expressions, such as “Damn the King, damn all
his subjects“‘, according to a soldier who had been
trespassing in his garden, but was acquitted (found
innocent) by a sympathetic jury
Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
- on his return to London he continued working on Milton &
Jerusalem, but began to feel disappointed at his lack of
public acclaim & was no longer making much money either
– most people just didn’t understand his art (or didn’t want
to) – he quarrelled with some of his old friends & his last
 years were spent in obscurity

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.

In the universe, there are things that are known, and

things that are unknown, and in between, there are
doors.

His reputation
‘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.‘
(William Wordsworth)

- this image of a crazed visionary (who stripped naked with

his wife to read Paradise Lost in his garden, & died singing)
persisted for nearly 50 years after his death, but then
a more sympathetic interest started to grow in different
aspects of his art & writings

- ‘Blake’s hostile response to the narrow vision and

materialism (as he conceived it) of ... Reynolds, Locke and
Newton was far from demented, but ... a prophetic
warning of the dangers of a world perceived as mechanism,
with man as a mere cog in an industrial revolution.‘ (Oxford
Companion to English Literature)

A petty, sneaking knave I knew - O! Mr

Cromek, how d’ye do?
 - by the late 19th c. Blake was recognised as a great lyric
poet as well as a difficult ‘prophetic‘ one, & his
rediscovered engravings significantly influenced the
development of ‘art nouveau‘

- in 1893 the great Irish poet W.B.Yeats co-edited a 3-volume

edition of Blake’s writings with an interpretation of the
mythology, & enthusiasm for his work grew & grew in the
20th c.

- ‘Self-educated Blake ... Spoke to

Isaiah in the Strand, And heard
inside each mortal thing Its holy
emanation sing.‘ (W.H.Auden, 1941)

The time is arriv’d when Man shall again converse in

Heaven & walk with Angels.
- Blake also had a major impact on the Beat Generation of
the 1950s & 1960s in the USA, & was idolised by literary
hippies in England too

What is now proved was once only imagined.

 Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the Sun:

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller‘s journey is done. 

Where the Youth pined away with desire,

And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 

Arise from their graves and aspire, 

Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm, That flies
in the night In the howling
storm:
Has found out thy bed Of
crimson joy: And his dark
secret love Does thy life destroy.
 - Blake’s poems & drawings were not much to the taste of
his own time, & he & his wife had to print them with their
own hands – they were etched on small copper plates with
pictures in the margins, & printed & coloured one by one

- he seems to have had a preternatural sympathy with the

natural world - plants & animals - as well as with the spirit
world – see Songs Of Innocence & Of Experience

- he loathed slavery, & believed in the universal equality of

men & women – his version of Christianity involved
rejecting the Old Testament God & only accepting the God
of the New Testament

- Blake praised ‘the Naked Human form divine‘ &

worshipped sexuality as the means whereby ‘the Soul
Expands its wing‘

- at the time of his death Blake had sold only about 30

copies of Songs of Innocence & Of Experience

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
She spoke in scorn & jealousy, alternate torrents; and
So speaking she sat down on Sussex shore, singing lulling
Cadences & playing in sweet intoxication ...

Some opinions about Blake

‘Blake was a difficult man: odd and sensitive and single-minded
at the same time. He was self-taught, so that his judgments
were penetrating and childish by turns ... His visual imagination
made everything he said more than life-size, and as disturbing
as a dream which is unreal because it is too real. He never tried
in the least to fit into the world: simply, innocently, and
completely, he was a rebel. (Dr Jacob Bronowski)
‘He was naked, and saw man naked ... He approached
everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There
was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him
terrifying.‘ (T.S.Eliot)
‘What he did know – and know deep down in himself – was that
he had no public ... One obvious consequence ... of this
knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later
prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking
enough trouble.‘ (Dr F.R.Leavis)
 Jerusalem
by William Blake
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
 And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded Hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills? 
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! 
l will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant Land.