William Blake (1757-1827)
Life and works
William Blake was born in 1757 in London. His origins were humble and he remained poor
all his life. He only briefly attended school, and was educated at home by his mother. From
his earliest years the Bible had a profound influence on Blake, and remained a source of
inspiration throughout his life. He was deeply aware of the great political and social issues
of his age, and he supported the French Revolution and the abolition of slavery. He
believed in revolution as purifying violence, necessary for the redemption of man.
Blake witnessed the evil effects of industrial development, which had led to poverty,
exploitation of child labour and prostitution.
Blake’s Christianity was not liturgical, he believed in the reality of a spiritual world, but
regarded Christianity and the Church as responsables for the fragmentation of
consciousness and the dualism of man’s life. To this dualistic view he substituted a vision
made up not of “contraries” but of “complementary opposites”: good and evil, male and
female, reason and imagination. The possibility of progress lies in the tension between
opposite states of mind.
He had very few friends and he was also called a “visionary poet” because at an early age
Blake began experiencing visions of his younger brother Robert, who died at the age of
twenty.
His artistic talents emerged when he was really young, he was trained as an engraver and
when he was ten, he was sent to a drawing school. He created his own method for making
prints that combinated picture and poetic text, called “illuminated printing” with which he
also illustrated the works of Milton, Dante, Shakespeare and the Bible.
Blake died in 1827, he was unappreciated in life and was forgotten for a generation after his
death. From the second half of the 19th century he won the recognition he failed to have in
his own life and was recognised as a pre-Romantic. His work has been a source of
inspiration for many writers, artists and musicians.
Blake also created his own complex mythology and symbolism: his famous symbols are
the child, the father and Christ representing the states of innocence,experience and
higher innocence.
His experience as a craftsman, visionary and radical contributed to the development of his
poetry.
He stressed the importance of imagination over reason and believed that ideal forms should
be created not from observations of nature but from inner visions.
Between 1790 and 1793 Blake wrote his most accessible works, The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell,a series of prose texts which expressed his revolutionary beliefs. This work was
followed by the publication in 1791 of The French Revolution and by America, a
Prophecy,a prophetic book published in 1793.
In 1789 he also published a set of poems called Songs of Innocence, followed in 1793 by
Songs of Experience.
The first is written from the perspective of a child in the pastoral mode: the language is
simple and musical and, the narrator is a shepherd who takes inspiration from a child and
the imagery of the poems is full of lambs, flowers and children and it deals with the childhood
symbol of innocence, a state of the soul connected with happiness, freedom and
imagination.
