WILLIAM BLAKE (1757 – 1827)
Blake was the “prophet” of imagination and symbolism. He is often seen as the earliest of the Romantics.
His conception of imagination, his use of symbolism, his contemplation of nature , his interest in the
medieval and Gothic and his democratic ideas are Romantic in substance. Yet his poetry was so unique,
that it is difficult to classify him within any precise literary movement. What is certain is that Blake gave the
final blow to the Age of Reason and showed the way for the return to the supremacy of the spirit.
FEATURES
Blake was a great mystical and visionary poet. He hated the rationalism and materialism of Locke and
Newton; he hated the reductive atheism of the Enlightenment philosophers, the moralism of the
contemporary Church, the conformity of respectable middle-class society, the commercial system that
underlay the prosperity of the period, the realistic art and literature of the 18th century (which considered
art as “imitation”).
Since he hated all these things, he found it necessary to create a philosophy of his own: a visionary
exaltation of the spirit over the body, of instinct and intuition over education, and of spiritual vision over
the impressions of the physical senses. He asserted that it was possible to see the infinite and the eternal
beyond the material appearances of the finite world.
Blake expressed his ideas mainly in two kinds of poems. The poems of the first type are usually short,
written in simple and popular metres (usually the ballad stanza); they tend to make use of uncomplicated
language , and their symbols and images affect the reader’s imagination strongly and directly. Of this kind
are the poems in The Songs of Innocence and Experience. The poems of the second type are long, complex
and obscure works, full of allegory and difficult to interpret. They are usually written in blank verse, and
Blake himself regarded them as his “prophetic works”, in which he expounded his philosophy on great
detail.
THEMES
Blake’s lyrical poems deal with both the realities of the contemporary world and the potentiality of
the spiritual world. They alternate between realistic and satirical descriptions of the squalor of the
contemporary world and visions of the spiritual world which is the ultimate reality, and is infinite
and eternal.
Blake anticipates the themes of Romanticism, for example by his exaltation of art, in which he
anticipated the Aesthetic movement; in his social conscience and sympathy with the sufferings of
the poor, with social justice and reform; in his belief that art is creative vision and in his attack on
the values of the 18th century.
Another theme was freedom. Like Rousseau he believed that “man is born free and everywhere he
is in chains”; he therefore hailed the American and French revolutions and rebelled against any
form of oppression and slavery. His love for justice and democracy led him to oppose any type of
