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A teacher's pack for studying the art and poetry of William Blake. It includes information on Blake's personal mythology, his influences, and practical suggestions for teaching his work in secondary and primary schools. The pack also includes a brief biography of Blake and an exploration of his appeal to young-minded people.
Typology: Summaries
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Detail from a fragment of p.
Europe
1794/c1830-
Introduction
This teacher's pack is aimed in the first place at secondary schools, but primary school teachers may find some of the suggestions for practical work on Blake useful as a springboard for their own explorations of poetry and art.
William Blake (1757-1827) saw himself as both a poet and a painter. Students studying Blake as a poet often do this through the words alone. In doing so, they may miss some of the richer meanings of his poetry which are illuminated (in both senses of the word) by his illustrations. As an art gallery, Tate Britain usually displays the work of Blake for its artistic content, but this, too, is to see only half the picture! This exhibition aims to give a more complete view of Blake's work by displaying pages from his books. Even so, this can only give a partial experience of reading Blake by showing such pages in isolation, rather than bound as a continuous narrative. In fact, the closest we can get to viewing much of Blake's work as he intended is to study facsimile copies of his books. Having said that, this exhibition will add to an understanding of Blake by displaying his work within the context of his career, and by including contextual evidence to help our understanding of why and how Blake produced his highly individual literary and artistic images.
A very brief glossary of a few of the major characters in Blake's personal mythology is included at the end of the pack.
One of the Gothic Artists illustrates the influence on Blake of medieval art in terms of its linear style, its subject matter and its reflection of an older and ‘purer’ society. Blake saw himself more as a medieval ‘craftsman’ artist and poet rather than the ‘sophisticated’ (and to Blake's eyes, glib) history and portrait painters held up for admiration by Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy.
The Furnace of Lambeth's Vale introduces Blake's great 'prophetic' books, produced during the Revolutionary ferment after the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. This section includes contextual documentary material, and a ‘recreation’ of Blake's studio in Lambeth which gives an insight into his working methods as an artist and as a printer.
Chambers of the Imagination takes as its theme the idea of the imagination, which was central to Blake's art and poetry. This section provides a review of the various characters in Blake's personal mythology, with an exploration of their roots as well as the symbolic meaning they take on in Blake's imaginative world.
Many formidable works is intended to display the greatest achievements of Blake's poetry and painting by exhibiting the illustrated books, in some cases page by page, culminating in the two late, great works, Milton and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
Section 1:
Section 2:
Section 3
Section 4:
The exhibition follows Blake's career in a roughly chronological sequence, but the ideas and themes recur throughout the works displayed, so while students may wish to concentrate on one room at a time, they should be aware of cross-referencing both backwards and forwards in terms of the images and the issues they embody.
The exhibition is divided into four sections:
I intreat, then, that the Spectator will attend to the Hands & Feet, to the Lineaments of the Countenances; they are all descriptive of Character, & not a line is drawn without intention, & that most discriminate & particular. As Poetry admits not a Letter that is insignificant, so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass Insignificant - much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark. A Vision of the last Judgment
While the Rubenism of Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy of Arts still held sway over 18th century artistic sensibility, design was coming to the fore in the fashion for Neoclassical emphasis on line as promoted by artists like the French Revolutionary painter, Jacques Louis David, and English artists and designers like Robert Adam, Josiah Wedgwood and John Flaxman.
Flaxman, Alcestis and Admetus 1789
Blake's interest in the antique can be seen in his drawing of Charon, which seems to have been copied from an antique model, although the original has not been identified. Blake's preference for the linear forms of the Neoclassical is also evident in his writings. The Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures which Blake wrote to accompany an exhibition of his paintings in 1809 reveals his contempt for the type of paintings favoured by the artistic establishment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:
Charon , copy from the antique? c1779-80?
Drawing exercise: using line alone, without shading, explore the possibilities of creating a three-dimensional image.
This emphasis on line over colour reflects the eighteenth-century debate between the rival merits of design (represented by Poussin) and colour (represented by Rubens) which in turn had its origins in the contrast in the Renaissance between Florentine emphasis on design and Venetian emphasis on colour.
Blake trained as an engraver rather than as a painter, and the emphasis in his art is always on the line and every line is carefully placed:
Look for uses of this prone pose. What other poses does Blake re-use? You might suggest that your students explore the possibilities of using repeated and/or exaggerated poses to symbol- ise emotional or spiritual states. How might the same pose be used to represent both the posi- tive and the negative aspect of an idea?
Does Blake use recurring images in his poetry as he does in his paintings? Do the same images, metaphors and phrases get re-used to build up the significance of the ideas?
The prostrate form lying horizontally with arms outstretched, in the Crucifix position, is used to express completely opposite ideas - at best, generation and creation; at worst, spiritual death. Blake sees Christ and God as two separate entities. While Christ represents, indeed is the imagination, God the Father (or Elohim ) embodies the repression of this divine element of man. In Elohim Creating Adam Blake takes the biblical story of the creation of man and turns it into a horror story - the essential, spiritual part of Adam (his imagination) is being forced into taking solid shape as flesh. The imprisonment of the flesh is represented by the coils of the snake (also referring to Satan), and God is seen not as a benev- olent creator, but as an oppressive, blind tyrant.
Can other familiar stories be turned around like this? Can a hero become a villain? You might encourage students to consider how a narrative might change depending on whose view of the events is presented. Is this easier to show in images or in words?
It is important to remember that Blake saw himself as a poet as well as a painter. His images are nearly always related to a text, either written by himself, or by another poet (e.g. Milton or Dante). In Songs of Innocence and Experience we can see the way Blake integrates his poetry into his illustrations. The words themselves become part of the image, and the illustration often adds extra meaning to the poem.
If you are working in conjunction with the English department, you might encourage students to write and illustrate their own poems. Alternatively, they could choose a favourite poem and illus- trate that.
Literature students need to be made aware that Blake saw his poetry as incomplete without the illustrations. Note how these intertwine with the words. More importantly, look for evidence of how the illustrations add to the apparent meaning of the poem. Note how the illustrations focus on mankind - nature is seen in terms of humanity. What does this suggest about Blake's attitudes towards the visual world?
Blake believed that the creative spirit, which he links with imagination, was present in every living thing, so that all nature partakes of this divine spark. Blake's images reflect this, as in his watercolour of The River of Life , painted c1803 which loosely illustrates Revelation 22, 1-2 where The River of Life proceeding from the Throne of God is mentioned. For Blake, rivers, trees, even the mildew destroying ears of wheat that are illustrated in Europe, are seen as aspects of humanity.
The River of Life , c
God is very Man. In all the heavens there is no other idea of God than that of a Man; the Reason is, because Heaven is the Whole, and in Part, is in Form as Man. By Reason that God is a Man, All Angels and Spirits are Men in perfect Form. The Wisdom of Angels concerning Divine Love and Wisdom
This relates to Blake's interest in the Swedenborgian movement, which followed the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (who died in London, 1772). Swedenborg believed that
Songs of Innocence and Experience is the most accessible of Blake's books. The format follows that of books produced in the eighteenth century for children. Blake's book has sometimes been identified as aimed at this market. The Tyger is sometimes singled out in this connection:
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 sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven 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?
Would Blake's poems have appealed to, or been understood by children? Do they work on more than one level of sophistication? In The Tyger does the rather cuddly, stuffed-toy tiger of the illustration match the language of the poem?
How would you go about illustrating a poem or book for children? What sort of images might appeal to readers of different age groups?
Blake was a deeply religious man, although his ideas depart radically from orthodox Christianity.
What evidence for religious beliefs can you find in Blake's poetry? Is there a message behind The Tyger for instance? Do his illustrations reflect orthodox images of Christianity?
Frontispiece to Visions of the Daughters of Albion
Compare Blake's illustration of Orc in Albion Rose (sometimes called Glad Day ) with the title page of the next prophetic book, Europe****. This shows The Ancient of Days****. How do the poses reflect the characters of Orc and Urizen****? Urizen holds a pair of compasses which recur in other illustrations by Blake - keep your eyes open for them because he uses them symbolically to represent the insistence on rationality and confinement through measure as opposed to the freedom of the imagination.
Albion Rose was engraved c1793 and included the inscription
Albion rose from where he labour'd at the Mill with Slaves: Giving himself for the Nations he danc'd the dance of Eternal Death.
This sounds depressing, but remember that Blake considered life an imprisonment of the essential spirit of man, so death might be seen as a liberation.
The Prophetic Books date from the period of the 1790s, and reflect Blake's stance both as a politi- cal and as a technical revolutionary. This was the period following the American War of Independence (1778) and the French Revolution (1789) and Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) ends with the character Oothoon trapped in an eternal triangle, rejected by her true love, Theotormon, because she has been raped by Bromion. Blake's frontispiece to the book shows this clearly with the crouched figures bound together by the chains of their actions. Blake gives a ray of hope, however. In the poem, Oothoon looks towards America as the land of liberty, and Blake's next book, and the first which he entitles a 'prophecy' covers the stirrings of Revolution in Europe following the American Revolution. Like many radical thinkers in the eighteenth century, Blake at first approved of the French Revolution, seeing it as a throwing off of the ancient tyranny of despotism. The French Revolution, A poem in seven books, of which only the first was printed (in 1791) covers the early events of the Revolution and begins with a vivid description of the horrors of the Bastille. However, the later Prophetic Books deal with the revolutionary spirit of the age not historically or realistically, but metaphorically in the emergence of Orc who is the embodiment of energy.
Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.
And he wrote to his patron, Thomas Butts, in 1802:
May God us keep From Single vision and Newton's sleep!
The illustrations of both Newton and Nebuchadnezzar show Blake's debt to earlier artists, particularly through a study of engravings of their work. Newton is based on figures by Michelangelo (look at the muscles in his back!), and Nebuchadnezzar is based on an engraving by Dürer of The Penance of St. John Chrysostomus.
These large prints show another aspect of Blake's technique which Frederick Tatham (born in 1805) described:
Blake, when he wanted to make his prints in oil, took a common thick millboard, and drew in some strong ink or colour his design upon it strong and thick. He then painted upon that in such oil colours and in such a state of fusion that they would blur well. He painted roughly and quickly, so that no colour would have time to dry. He then took a print of that on paper, and this impression he coloured up in water-colours, re- painting his outline on the millboard when he wanted to take another print. This plan he had recourse to because he could vary slightly each impression; and each having a sort of accidental look, he could branch out so as to make each one different.
Tatham got some of his facts wrong - Blake never used oil, and millboard would probably have been too soft - but this gives a general idea of his technique.
Try experimenting with this method of printing using water-based colour (poster, acrylic, etc) and firm cardboard or something similar. Note how the texture of the board shows as a mottling effect in the print. What other materials might be used as a base to print the original from? Does reversing a design through printing it need to be taken into account when making the design in the first place?
[Slides can be useful in showing this because you can reverse them to make the comparison easy]
Blake made illustrated books out of Milton, the Book of Job and Dante's Divine Comedy as well as inventing his own epic, Jerusalem. The imaginative nature of his painting and poetry is obvious in his own productions, but when he illustrates the work of another writer, he rarely does anything as straightforward as simply matching his pictures to the existing text. Blake seems to see other people's poetry as a springboard for his own ideas.
What unusual readings of Milton and the Bible can you see in Blake's work? Why does he choose these particular texts to illustrate? What would appeal to him about them? What do they have in common?
Blake had an ambiguous but intimate relationship with Milton. He admired his creative inspiration, but condemned his Puritan theology. As a deeply passionate, emotion and sensual man, Blake believed Milton had allowed his creative imagination and desire to be fettered by Reason. Blake does not illus- trate Paradise Lost but uses Milton to explore poetic inspiration as a way of redemption from Reason and the tyranny of conventional morality.
As elsewhere, this oppression is embodied in the figure of Urizen, the God of the Old Testament, whom Blake sees as the real Satan. Plate 18 from Milton (1804-8) reuses the spread-armed pose of Urizen and puts into his hands the tablets of Hebraic Law. The inscription at the bottom of the plate reads
To Annihilate the Selfhood of Deceit & False Forgiveness
You can see a very similar pose in one of the large prints of c1795, The House of Death , which seems to be based on a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost where St. Michael describes to Adam 'The Lazar House' (Paradise Lost, XI, 475-493). The sightless eyes symbolise the figures’ spiritual blindness, and can also be seen in the depiction of God in Elohim Creating Adam of 1795.
The House of Death 1795
In fact, Varley probably took Blake's visions - his spiritualization of things - more literally than the artist himself.Note that Blake is still seeing nature in terms of man - the flea has the body of a man, not an insect. The dark tone is due to chemical changes in the medium.
Blake often refers to the 'eternal forms' of things. These remain the same regardless of individual variety and seem to relate to Plato's ideal forms. In Milton he states:
Whatever can be Created can be Annihilated: Forms cannot; The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife,
And Jerusalem ends:
All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth & Stone: all Human Forms identified, living, going forth & returning wearied Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing, And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.
How might you represent the 'eternal forms' of things? Is this about finding a way of represent- ing something essential about a thing, whether animal, vegetable or mineral? Blake seems to see the 'eternal forms' of everything in terms of humanity. Do you? How else might you repre- sent, or symbolise, the essence of a flea - or a tree, or a car, or a mobile phone?
There is nothing modest about Blake's claims for his poetry. In the preface To the Public of Jerusalem he writes:
When this Verse was first dictated to me, I consider'd a Monotonous Cadence, like that used by Milton & Shakespeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awk- ward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadence & number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter'd Fetters the Human Race, Nations are Destroy'd or Flourish in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy'd or Flourish! The Primeval State of Man was Wisdom, Art and Science.
In rejecting the typical smooth, regular lines of eighteenth-century Augustine poetry, Blake is showing his revolutionary spirit.
Blake stands at the pivot of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In his influence from Neoclassical linear design, and his insistence on the importance of man, he is an eighteenth-century being, reflecting Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man of 1733 which stated
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man
However, in his rejection of scientific enquiry and fact, and his emphasis on the spiritual and imagina- tive, Blake belongs in the ranks of the Romantics. In the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, published in 1800, Wordsworth wrote a Preface in which he described
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
What (if anything) does Blake have in common with other Romantics? You might look at Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, etc., in poetry, or Palmer, Fuseli, Turner, Constable, etc., in painting. Does the label 'Romantic' relate to subject matter or to style?
According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however pro- duced; and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity ... Reason is to the imagi- nation as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the imagination’ ...
and the idea of a wild, irrational emotion began to take over from the cool, controlled rationality of the Age of Reason. Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the second generation of Romantic poets, wrote an essay, In Defence of Poetry , in 1821, in which he discussed the differences between Reason and Imagination:
Imagination was to be considered as the way to explore the intangible aspects of mankind. Coleridge wrote in Biographia Literaria (1817)
The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
For many Romantics, including Blake, Imagination was linked with God, and poets like Wordsworth and painters like the German Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich, go on to link this with Nature. Romantic poets and painters often put great emphasis on Nature and on man’s relationship with it, but unlike the eighteenth century views of Nature which show the landscape as tamed by man and therefore in the service of man, the Romantics see Nature as something wild and powerful which can overwhelm man both physically (as in avalanches etc), and metaphorically (as in the imaginative contemplation of the beauty of Nature).
Poets and painters have not always accepted the label ‘Romantic’ - both the English poet Byron and the French painter Eugène Delacroix considered themselves more ‘Classical’ than ‘Romantic’ - and Blake would probably have rejected any attempts to pigeonhole his work.
Being both artist and poet, Blake appeals to those two groups of people for a start, but his influence extends even wider. The three essays that follow (and there could have been many more) show how. They are written by Anthony Dyson, who has a small printing press where he works in a manner not very different from Blake; Liz Ellis, who worked with homeless people for many years, and discovered that they admired and identified with Blake; and Malcolm Livingstone, who is a teacher, and the source of the quotation that heads this paragraph.
Quite rightly, Blake is known above all as a visionary poet and artist; but almost every day, however obliquely, I find myself pondering on Blake the practical man, a man capable of great technical ingenuity with the relatively limited means available to him.
I run a small private press where I print etchings and engravings - my own and those of other artists and engravers, living and dead. The oldest I have so far printed are the copper plates engraved during 1726 by William Hogarth, to illustrate Samuel Butler’s political satire, Hudibras. When half a century later Blake worked in the engraving trade (on which experience he was to base his unique solution to the private production of his own books), engraving and printing processes were unchanged - had been unchanged - since the fifteenth century and remain in essence the same today. Whenever I print a plate I proceed almost exactly as Blake did. In his words to a friend, I “warm the Plate a little and then fill (the etched or engraved crevices) with Ink by dabbing it all over two or three times...then with the palm of the hand...wipe the surface of the plate till it shines all over - then roll it through the Press with 3 blankets above the Plate, and pasteboards beneath it next to the Plank...”. However, I hardly ever need to warm the plate since today’s less sticky inks are easier to wipe from a cold plate; instead of Blake’s leather-covered ink dabber I have the advantage of soft plastic rollers; I remove most of the ink with a pad of stiff tarlatan before hand-wiping; and although it is still called a plank, the bed of my press is made of iron.
I find it astounding that Blake achieved such sophisticated results using a wooden rolling-press in the cramped space of the ground floor of his small terrace house (long since demolished) at 13, Hercules Buildings, Lambeth. Constructed like a washing mangle, such presses consisted of a strong framework supporting two hardwood rollers. A heavy flat bed (the “plank”) was run between the rollers, driven by the printer hauling on long spokes radiating from a spindle on the upper roller. Unaided by gearing, this was heavy work; and Blake would have needed to keep the plank moving smoothly since any interrup- tion would cause a disfiguring “bar” to spoil the impression.
Blake didn’t live quite long enough to benefit from the new iron presses that began to appear in the 1830s. My own iron press was made in about 1840. Although the bed, at 36” by 60”, must be much bigger than that of Blake’s press, the hand-cut double gearing and the fly wheel that supercedes the spokes of its predecessors makes my press much easier to operate. I have just spent the best part of four months printing eleven illustrations for each of 150 hand-printed books of poetry. Most of the illustrations were etched or engraved in either copper or zinc; one was a two-plate colour-print requiring precise registration; and one was incised in hardboard. Each of the eleven presented its own problems and needed to be printed differently. I wouldn’t - couldn’t - have dreamed of undertaking the task with Blake’s viscous inks, with plates needing to be warmed over smouldering charcoal, with seemingly intractable problems of registration and with hands blistered by long hauling at the wooden press; but the vision of his stubborn and ingenious achievement was one of the things that kept me going.
(Note: I am grateful to Michael Phillips whose paper on Blake, published in The Library , Vol. 16, No.4, December 1994, deepened my insight into the artist’s working conditions)
