William Blake was born in London in 1757.
His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son’s artistic talents
and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years
old. At 14, William asked to be apprenticed
to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed
his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator,
and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John
Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style
he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time
as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather
derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared
in 1783. Songs of Innocence was
published in 1789, followed by Songs
of Experience in 1793 and a combined
edition the next year bearing the title Songs of Innocence
and Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years
leading up to the French
Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the Revolution,
in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only
the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism,
of institutionalized religion, and of the tradition of marriage
in its conventional legal and social form (though he was married
himself). His unorthodox religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish
philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772),
whose influence is particularly evident in Blake’s The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s
and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic
mode, and wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem. Linked
together by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake’s own
creation, these books propound a revolutionary new social, intellectual,
and ethical order.
Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an
original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with
illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates
were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with
paint. This expensive and labor-intensive production method resulted
in a quite limited circulation of Blake’s poetry during his life.
It has also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake’s
work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians.
Most students of Blake find it necessary to consider his graphic
art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them
as inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced
failure, and he harbored a good deal of resentment and anxiety about
the public’s apathy toward his work and about the financial straits
in which he so regularly found himself. When his self-curated exhibition
of his works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake
sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated
for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something
of an eccentric—as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism
of the 18th century and the early phases
of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only
in the 20th century did wide audiences begin
to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.
