123-) English Literature

123-) English Literature

William Blake 

Blake as a poet

Blake’s profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons. Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.

But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish rodomontade, but some, such as “To Winter” and “Mad Song,” are exquisite. “To the Muses,” lamenting the death of music, concludes,

How have you left the antient love

That bards of old enjoy’d in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

Eighty-five years later, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote that in these lines “The Eighteenth Century died to music.”

Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife, printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.

After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One (1788?), Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered: Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children—in “Infant Joy” only three words have as many as two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” for example,

[…]the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,

He’d have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm.

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.

In one of the best-known lyrics, called “The Lamb,” a little boy gives to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in church:

Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb

I a child, & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and lamb has the same qualities as his creation.

Most of Blake’s poetry embodies myths that he invented. Blake takes the inquiry about the nature of life a little further in The Book of Thel (1789), the first of his published myths. The melancholy shepherdess Thel asks, “Why fade these children of the spring? Born but to smile & fall.” She is answered by the Lilly of the Valley (representing water), the Cloud (air), and the Clod of Clay (earth), who tell her, “we live not for ourselves,” and say that they are nourished by “he that loves the lowly.” Thel enters the “land unknown” and hears a “voice of sorrow”:

“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?

Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile!”

The poem concludes with the frightened Thel seeing her own grave there, shrieking, and fleeing back to her valley.

Blake’s next work in Illuminated Printing, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790?), has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg, echoing the Swedish theologian’s “Memorable Relations” of things seen and heard in heaven with “Memorable Fancies” of things seen and heard in hell. The section titled “Proverbs of Hell” eulogizes energy with lines such as “Energy is Eternal Delight,” “Exuberance is Beauty,” and “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” The work ends with “A Song of Liberty,” which celebrates the values of those who stormed the Bastille in 1789: “Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer […] curse the sons of joy […] For every thing that lives is Holy.”

America, A Prophecy (1793) and Europe, A Prophecy (1794) are even more daringly political, and they are boldly acknowledged on the title pages as “Printed by William Blake.” In the first, Albion’s Angel, representing the reactionary government of England, perceives Orc, the spirit of energy, as a “Blasphemous Demon, Antichrist, hater of Dignities,” but Orc’s vision is of an apocalypse that transforms the world:

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field,

Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;

For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease

For every thing that lives is holy

The mental revolution seems to be accomplished, but the design for the triumphant concluding page shows not rejoicing and triumph but barren trees, bowed mourners, thistles, and serpents. Blake’s designs often tell a complementary story, and the two visions must be combined in the reader’s mind to comprehend the meaning of the work.

The frontispiece to Europe is one of Blake’s best-known images: sometimes called The Ancient of Days, it represents a naked, bearded old man leaning out from the sun to define the universe with golden compasses. He seems a familiar image of God, but the usual notions about this deity are challenged by an image, on the facing title page, of what the God of reason has created: a coiling serpent with open mouth and forked tongue. It seems to represent how

Thought chang’d the infinite to a serpent; that which pitieth:

To a devouring flame; and man fled from its face […]

Then was the serpent temple form’d, image of infinite

Shut up in finite revolutions, and man became an Angel;

Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown’d.

This God is opposed by Orc and by Los, the imagination, and at the end of the poem Los “call’d all his sons to the strife of blood.” The work’s last illustration, however, is not of the heroic sons of Los storming the barricades of tyrannical reason but of a naked man carrying a fainting woman and a terrified girl from the horrors of a burning city.

In the same year as Europe, Blake published Songs of Experience and combined it with his previous lyrics to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The poems of Songs of Experience centre on threatened, unprotected souls in despair. In “London” the speaker, shown in the design as blind, bearded, and “age-bent,” sees in “every face…marks of woe,” and observes that “In every voice…The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.” In “The Tyger,” which answers “The Lamb” of Innocence, the despairing speaker asks the “Tyger burning bright” about its creator: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” But in the design the “deadly terrors” of the text are depicted as a small, meek animal often coloured more like a stuffed toy than a jungle beast.

Blake’s most impressive writings are his enormous prophecies Vala or The Four Zoas (which Blake composed and revised from roughly 1796 to 1807 but never published), Milton, and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. In them, his myth expands, adding to Urizen (reason) and Los (imagination) the Zoas Tharmas and Luvah. (The word  zoa is a Greek plural meaning “living creatures.”) Their primordial harmony is destroyed when each of them attempts to fix creation in a form corresponding to his own nature and genius. Blake describes his purpose, his “great task,” in Jerusalem:

To open the immortal Eyes

Of man inwards into the worlds of thought; into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

Like the Zoa Los, Blake felt that he must “Create a System or be enslav’d by another Mans.”

Milton concerns Blake’s attempt, at Milton’s request, to correct the ideas of Paradise Lost. The poem originated in an event in Felpham, recorded in Blake’s letters, in which the spirit of Milton as a falling star entered Blake. It includes the lyric commonly called “Jerusalem” that has become a kind of alternative national anthem in Britain:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in the social order and in the minds of men. Though in his lifetime his work was largely neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and his work has only grown in popularity. In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself  ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” Yet Blake himself believed that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority of his peers. Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced his writing. In addition to being considered one of the most visionary of English poets and one of the great progenitors of English Romanticism, his visual artwork is highly regarded around the world.

Poetical Career

Blake was born on November 28, 1757. Unlike many well-known writers of his day, Blake was born into a family of moderate means. His father, James, was a hosier, and the family lived at 28 Broad Street in London in an unpretentious but “respectable” neighborhood. In all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Wright Blake, but only five survived infancy. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died young.

By all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by skipping any formal schooling. As a young boy he wandered the streets of London and could easily escape to the surrounding countryside. Even at an early age, however, his unique mental powers would prove disquieting. According to Gilchrist, on one ramble he was startled to “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His parents were not amused at such a story, and only his mother’s pleadings prevented him from receiving a beating. His parents did, however, encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at the age of 10 in Pars’ drawing school. The expense of continued formal training in art was a prohibitive, and the family decided that at the age of 14 William would be apprenticed to a master engraver. At first his father took him to William Ryland, a highly respected engraver. William, however, resisted the arrangement telling his father, “I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!” The grim prophecy was to come true 12 years later. Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver, James Basire. Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft.

At the age of 21, Blake left Basire’s apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the newly formed Royal Academy. He earned his living as a journeyman engraver. Booksellers employed him to engrave illustrations for publications ranging from novels such as Don Quixote to serials such as Ladies’ Magazine.

One incident at this time affected Blake deeply. In June of 1780 riots broke out in London incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord George Gordon and by resistance to continued war against the American colonists. Houses, churches, and prisons were burned by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. On one evening, whether by design or by accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that burned Newgate prison. These images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave Blake powerful material for works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793).

Not all of the young man’s interests were confined to art and politics. After one ill-fated romance, Blake met Catherine Boucher. After a year’s courtship the couple were married on August 18, 1782. The parish registry shows that Catherine, like many women of her class, could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and to write, and under Blake’s tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him in the execution of his designs. By all accounts the marriage was a successful one, but no children were born to the Blakes.

Blake’s friend John Flaxman introduced Blake to the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, wife of the Rev. Henry Mathew, whose drawing room was often a meeting place for artists and musicians. There Blake gained favor by reciting and even singing his early poems. Thanks to the support of Flaxman and Mrs. Mathew, a thin volume of poems was published under the title Poetical Sketches (1783). Many of these poems are imitations of classical models, much like the sketches of models of antiquity the young artist made to learn his trade. Even here, however, one sees signs of Blake’s protest against war and the tyranny of kings. Only about 50 copies of Poetical Sketches are known to have been printed. Blake’s financial enterprises also did not fare well. In 1784, after his father’s death, Blake used part of the money he inherited to set up shop as a printseller with his friend James Parker. The Blakes moved to 27 Broad Street, next door to the family home and close to Blake’s brothers. The business did not do well, however, and the Blakes soon moved out.

Of more concern to Blake was the deteriorating health of his favorite brother, Robert. Blake tended to his brother in his illness and according to Gilchrist watched the spirit of his brother escape his body in his death: “At the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heaven ward through the matter-of-fact ceiling,  ‘clapping its hands for joy.’"

Blake always felt the spirit of Robert lived with him. He even announced that it was Robert who informed him how to illustrate his poems in “illuminated writing.” Blake’s technique was to produce his text and design on a copper plate with an impervious liquid. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the text and design remained in relief. That plate could be used to print on paper, and the final copy would be then hand colored.

After experimenting with this method in a series of aphorisms entitled There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One (1788?), Blake designed the series of plates for the poems entitled Songs of Innocence and dated the title page 1789. Blake continued to experiment with the process of illuminated writing and in 1794 combined the early poems with companion poems entitled Songs of Experience. The title page of the combined set announces that the poems show “the two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”

The introductory poems to each series display Blake’s dual image of the poet as both a “piper” and a “Bard.” As man goes through various stages of innocence and experience in the poems, the poet also is in different stages of innocence and experience. The pleasant lyrical aspect of poetry is shown in the role of the “piper” while the more somber prophetic nature of poetry is displayed by the stern Bard.

The dual role played by the poet is Blake’s interpretation of the ancient dictum that poetry should both delight and instruct. More important, for Blake the poet speaks both from the personal experience of his own vision and from the “inherited” tradition of ancient Bards and prophets who carried the Holy Word to the nations.

The two states of innocence and experience are not always clearly separate in the poems, and one can see signs of both states in many poems. The companion poems titled “Holy Thursday” are on the same subject, the forced marching of poor children to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The speaker in the state of innocence approves warmly of the progression of children:

’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean

The children walking two & two in red & blue & green

Grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow

Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow[.]

The brutal irony is that in this world of truly “innocent” children there are evil men who repress the children, round them up like herd of cattle, and force them to show their piety. In this state of innocence, experience is very much present.

If experience has a way of creeping into the world of innocence, innocence also has a way of creeping into experience. The golden land where the “sun does shine” and the “rain does fall” is a land of bountiful goodness and innocence. But even here in this blessed land, there are children starving. The sharp contrast between the two conditions makes the social commentary all the more striking and supplies the energy of the poem.

The storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the agonies of the French Revolution sent shock waves through England. Some hoped for a corresponding outbreak of liberty in England while others feared a breakdown of the social order. In much of his writing Blake argues against the monarchy. In his early Tiriel (written circa 1789) Blake traces the fall of a tyrannical king.

Politics was surely often the topic of conversation at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s house, where Blake was often invited. There Blake met important literary and political figures such as William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. According to one legend Blake is even said to have saved Paine’s life by warning him of his impending arrest. Whether or not that is true, it is clear that Blake was familiar with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day.

In The French Revolution Blake celebrates the rise of democracy in France and the fall of the monarchy. King Louis represents a monarchy that is old and dying. The sick king is lethargic and unable to act: “From my window I see the old mountains of France, like aged men, fading away.” The “voice of the people” demands the removal of the king’s troops from Paris, and their departure at the end of the first book signals the triumph of democracy.

On the title page for book one of The French Revolution Blake announces that it is “A Poem in Seven Books,” but none of the other books has been found. Johnson never published the poem, perhaps because of fear of prosecution, or perhaps because Blake himself withdrew it from publication. Johnson did have cause to be nervous. Erdman points out that in the same year booksellers were thrown in jail for selling the works of Thomas Paine.

In America (1793) Blake also addresses the idea of revolution–less as a commentary on the actual revolution in America as a commentary on universal principles that are at work in any revolution. The figure of Orc represents all revolutions:

The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,

What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness,

That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad

To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves.

The same force that causes the colonists to rebel against King George is the force that overthrows the perverted rules and restrictions of established religions.

The revolution in America suggests to Blake a similar revolution in England. In the poem the king, like the ancient pharaohs of Egypt, sends pestilence to America to punish the rebels, but the colonists are able to redirect the forces of destruction to England. Erdman suggests that Blake is thinking of the riots in England during the war and the chaotic condition of the English troops, many of whom deserted. Writing this poem in the 1790s, Blake also surely imagined the possible effect of the French Revolution on England.

Another product of the radical 1790s is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Written and etched between 1790 and 1793, Blake’s poem brutally satirizes oppressive authority in church and state.

The powerful opening of the poem suggests a world of violence: “Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden’d air / Hungry clouds swag on the deep.” The fire and smoke suggest a battlefield and the chaos of revolution. The cause of that chaos is analyzed at the beginning of the poem. The world has been turned upside down. The “just man” has been turned away from the institutions of church and state, and in his place are fools and hypocrites who preach law and order but create chaos. Those who proclaim restrictive moral rules and oppressive laws as “goodness” are in themselves evil. Hence to counteract this repression, Blake announces that he is of the “Devil’s Party” that will advocate freedom and energy and gratified desire.

The “Proverbs of Hell” are clearly designed to shock the reader out of his commonplace notion of what is good and what is evil:

Prisons are built with stones of Law,

Brothels with bricks of Religion.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

It is the oppressive nature of church and state that has created the repulsive prisons and brothels. Sexual energy is not an inherent evil, but the repression of that energy is. The preachers of morality fail to understand that God is in all things, including the sexual nature of men and women.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains many of the basic religious ideas developed in the major prophecies. Blake analyzes the development of organized religion as a perversion of ancient visions: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & Numerous senses could perceive.” Ancient man created those gods to express his vision of the spiritual properties that he perceived in the physical world. The gods began to take on a life of their own separate from man: “Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.” The “system” or organized religion keeps man from perceiving the spiritual in the physical. The gods are seen as separate from man, and an elite race of priests is developed to approach the gods: “Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” Instead of looking for God on remote altars, Blake warns, man should look within.

In August of 1790 Blake moved from his house on Poland Street across the Thames to the area known as Lambeth. The Blakes lived in the house for 10 years, and the surrounding neighborhood often becomes mythologized in his poetry. Felpham was a “lovely vale,” a place of trees and open meadows, but it also contained signs of human cruelty, such as the house for orphans. At his home Blake kept busy not only with his illuminated poetry but also with the daily chore of making money. During the 1790s Blake earned fame as an engraver and was glad to receive numerous commissions.

One story told by Blake’s friend Thomas Butts shows how much the Blakes enjoyed the pastoral surroundings of Lambeth. At the end of Blake’s garden was a small summer house, and coming to call on the Blakes one day Butts was shocked to find the couple stark naked: “Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” The Blakes were reciting passages from Paradise Lost, apparently “in character."Sexual freedom is addressed in Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), also written during the Lambeth period.

Between 1793 and 1795 Blake produced a remarkable collection of illuminated works that have come to be known as the “Minor Prophecies.” In Europe (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Song of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania (1795) Blake develops the major outlines of his universal mythology. In these poems Blake examines the fall of man. In Blake’s mythology man and God were once united, but man separated himself from God and became weaker and weaker as he became further divided.

The narrative of the universal mythology is interwoven with the historical events of Blake’s own time. The execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 led to an inevitable reaction, and England soon declared war on France. England’s participation in the war against France and its attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit is addressed in Europe. The very force of that repression, however, will cause its opposite to appear in the revolutionary figure of Orc: “And in the vineyards of reds France appear’d the light of his fury.”

The causes of that repression are examined in The First Book of Urizen. The word Urizen suggests “your reason” and also “horizon.” He represents that part of the mind that constantly defines and limits human thought and action. In the frontispiece to the poem he is pictured as an aged man hunched over a massive book writing with both hands in other books. Behind him stand the tablets of the 10 commandments, and Urizen is surely writing other “thou shalt nots” for others to follow. His twisted anatomical position shows the perversity of what should be the “human form divine."

The poem traces the birth of Urizen as a separate part of the human mind. He insists on laws for all to follow:

One command, one joy, one desire

One curse, one weight, one measure,

One King, one God, one Law.

Urizen’s repressive laws bring only further chaos and destruction. Appalled by the chaos he himself created, Urizen fashions a world apart.

The process of separation continues as the character of Los is divided from Urizen. Los, the “Eternal Prophet,” represents another power of the human mind. Los forges the creative aspects of the mind into works of art. Like Urizen he is a limiter, but the limitations he creates are productive and necessary. In the poem Los forms “nets and gins” to bring an end to Urizen’s continual chaotic separation.

Los is horrified by the figure of the bound Urizen and is separated by his pity, “for Pity divides the Soul.” Los undergoes a separation into a male and female form. His female form is called Enitharmon, and her creation is viewed with horror:

Eternity shudder’d when they saw

Man begetting his likeness

On his own divided image.

This separation into separate sexual identities is yet another sign of man’s fall. The “Eternals” contain both male and female forms within themselves, but man is divided and weak.

Enitharmon gives birth to the fiery Orc, whose violent birth gives some hope for radical change in a fallen world, but Orc is bound in chains by Los, now a victim of jealousy. Enitharmon bears an “enormous race,” but it is a race of men and women who are weak and divided and who have lost sight of eternity.

In his fallen state man has limited senses and fails to perceive the infinite. Divided from God and caught by the narrow traps of religion, he sees God only as a crude lawgiver who must be obeyed.

The Book of Los also examines man’s fall and the binding of Urizen, but from the perspective of Los, whose task it is to place a limit on the chaotic separation begun by Urizen. The decayed world is again one of ignorance where there is “no light from the fires.” From this chaos the bare outlines of the human form begin to appear:

Many ages of groans, till there grew

Branchy forms organizing the Human

Into finite inflexible organs.

The human senses are pale imitations of the true senses that allow one to perceive eternity. Urizen’s world where man now lives is spoken of as an “illusion” because it masks the spiritual world that is everywhere present.

In The Song of Los, Los sings of the decayed state of man, where the arbitrary laws of Urizen have become institutionalized:

Thus the terrible race of Los & Enitharmon gave

Laws & Religions to the sons of Har, binding them more

And more to Earth, closing and restraining,

Till a Philosophy of five Senses was complete.

Urizen wept & gave it into the hands of Newton & Locke.

The “philosophy of the five senses” espoused by scientists and philosophers argues that the world and the mind are like industrial machines operating by fixed laws but devoid of imagination, creativity, or any spiritual life. Blake condemns this materialistic view of the world espoused in the writings of Newton and Locke.

Although man is in a fallen state, the end of the poem points to the regeneration that is to come:

Orc, raging in European darkness,

Arose like a pillar of fire above the Alps,

Like a serpent of fiery flame!

The coming of Orc is likened not only to the fires of revolution sweeping Europe, but also to the final apocalypse when the “Grave shrieks with delight."

The separation of man is also examined in The Book of Ahania, which Blake later incorporated in Vala, or The Four Zoas. In The Book of Ahania Urizen is further divided into male and female forms. Urizen is repulsed by his feminine shadow that is called Ahania:

He groan’d anguish’d, & called her Sin,

Kissing her and weeping over her;

Then hid her in darkness, in silence,

Jealous, tho’ she was invisible.

“Ahania” is only a “sin” in that she is given that name. Urizen, the lawgiver, can not accept the liberating aspects of sexual pleasure. At the end of the poem, Ahania laments the lost pleasures of eternity:

Where is my golden palace?

Where my ivory bed?

Where the joy of my morning hour?

Where the sons of eternity singing.

The physical pleasures of sexual union are celebrated as an entrance to a spiritual state. The physical union of man and woman is sign of the spiritual union that is to come.

The Four Zoas is subtitled “The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgement of Albion the Ancient Man,” and the poem develops Blake’s myth of Albion, who represents both the country of England and the unification of all men. Albion is composed of “Four Mighty Ones": Tharmas, Urthona, Urizen, and Luvah. Originally, in Eden, these four exist in the unity of “The Universal Brotherhood.” At this early time all parts of man lived in perfect harmony, but now they are fallen into warring camps. The poem traces the changes in Albion:

His fall into Division & his Resurrection to Unity:

His fall into the Generation of decay & death, & his

Regeneration by the Resurrection from the dead .

The poem begins with Tharmas and examines the fall of each aspect of man’s identity. The poem progresses from disunity toward unity as each Zoa moves toward final unification.

In the apocalyptic “Night the Ninth,” the evils of oppression are overturned in the turmoil of the Last Judgment: “The thrones of Kings are shaken, they have lost their robes & crowns/ The poor smite their oppressors, they awake up to the harvest.”

As dead men are rejuvenated, Christ, the “Lamb of God,” is brought back to life and sheds the evils of institutionalized religions:

Thus shall the male & female live the life of Eternity,

Because the Lamb of God Creates himself a bride & wife

That we his Children evermore may live in Jerusalem

Which now descendeth out of heaven, a City, yet a Woman

Mother of myriads redeem’d & born in her spiritual palaces,

By a New Spiritual birth Regenerated from Death.

Very little of Blake’s poetry of the 1790s was known to the general public. His reputation as an artist was mixed. Response to his art ranged from praise to derision, but he did gain some fame as an engraver. His commissions did not produce much in the way of income, but Blake never seems to have been discouraged. In 1799 Blake wrote to George Cumberland, “I laugh at Fortune & Go on & on."

Because of his monetary woes, Blake often had to depend on the benevolence of patrons of the arts. This sometimes led to heated exchanges between the independent artist and the wealthy patron. Dr. John Trusler was one such patron whom Blake failed to please. Dr. Trusler was a clergyman, a student of medicine, a bookseller, and the author of such works as Hogarth Moralized (1768), The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1750?), and A Sure Way to Lengthen Life with Vigor (circa 1819). Blake found himself unable to follow the clergyman’s wishes: “I attempted every morning for a fortnight together to follow your Dictate, but when I found my attempts were in vain, resolv’d to shew an independence which I know will please an Author better than slavishly following the track of another, however admirable that track may be. At any rate, my Excuse must be: I could not do otherwise; it was out of my power!” Dr. Trusler was not convinced and replied that he found Blake’s “Fancy” to be located in the “World of Spirits” and not in this world. Dr. Trusler was not the only patron that tried to make Blake conform to popular tastes; for example, Blake’s stormy relation to his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley directly affected the writing of the epics Milton and Jerusalem.

Blake left Felpham in 1803 and returned to London. In April of that year he wrote to Butts that he was overjoyed to return to the city: “That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & Prophecy & Speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals.” In the same letter Blake refers to his epic poem Milton, composed while at Felpham: “But none can know the Spiritual Acts of my three years  ‘Slumber on the banks of the Ocean, unless he has seen them in the Spirit, or unless he should read My long Poem descriptive of those Acts."

In his “slumber on the banks of the Ocean,” Blake, surrounded by financial worries and hounded by a patron who could not appreciate his art, reflected on the value of visionary poetry. Milton, which Blake started to engrave in 1804 (probably finishing in 1808) , is a poem that constantly draws attention to itself as a work of literature. Its ostensible subject is the poet John Milton, but the author, William Blake, also creates a character for himself in his own poem. Blake examines the entire range of mental activity involved in the art of poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to the reception of his vision by the reader of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject the very nature of poetry: what it means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be a reader of poetry.

In the preface to the poem, Blake issues a battle cry to his readers to reject what is merely fashionable in art:

Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works; believe Christ & his Apostles that there is a Class of men whose whole delight is in Destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.

In attacking the “ignorant Hirelings” in the “Camp, the Court & the University,” Blake repeats a familiar dissenting cry against established figures in English society. Blake’s insistence on being “just & true to our own Imaginations” places a special burden on the reader of his poem. For as he makes clear, Blake demands the exercise of the creative imagination from his own readers .

In the well-known lyric that follows, Blake asks for a continuation of Christ’s vision in modern-day England:

I 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 .

The poet-prophet must lead the reader away from man’s fallen state and toward a revitalized state where man can perceive eternity.

"Book the First” contains a poem-within-a-poem, a “Bard’s Prophetic Song.” The Bard’s Song describes man’s fall from a state of vision. We see man’s fall in the ruined form of Albion as a representative of all men and in the fall of Palamabron from his proper position as prophet to a nation. Interwoven into this narrative are the Bard’s addresses to the reader, challenges to the reader’s senses, descriptions of contemporary events and locations in England, and references to the life of William Blake. Blake is at pains to show us that his mythology is not something far removed from us but is part of our day to day life. Blake describes the reader’s own fall from vision and the possibility of regaining those faculties necessary for vision.

The climax of the Bard’s Song is the Bard’s sudden vision of the “Holy Lamb of God": “Glory! Glory! to the Holy lamb of God: / I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord.” At the end of the Bard’s Song, his spirit is incorporated into that of the poet Milton. Blake portrays Milton as a great but flawed poet who must unify the separated elements of his own identity before he can reclaim his powers of vision and become a true poet, casting off “all that is not inspiration."

As Milton is presented as a man in the process of becoming a poet, Blake presents himself as a character in the poem undergoing the transformation necessary to become a poet. Only Milton believes in the vision of the Bard’s Song, and the Bard takes “refuge in Milton’s bosom.” As Blake realizes the insignificance of this “Vegetable World,” Los merges with Blake, and he arises in “fury and strength.” This ongoing belief in the hidden powers of the mind heals divisions and increases powers of perception. The Bard, Milton, Los, and Blake begin to merge into a powerful bardic union. Yet it is but one stage in a greater drive toward the unification of all men in a “Universal Brotherhood."

In the second book of Milton Blake initiates the reader into the order of poets and prophets. Blake continues the process begun in book one of taking the reader through different stages in the growth of a poet.

Turning the outside world upside down is a preliminary stage in an extensive examination of man’s internal world. A searching inquiry into the self is a necessary stage in the development of the poet. Milton is told he must first look within: “Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal Lineaments explore, / What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable.”  Central to the process of judging the self is a confrontation with that destructive part of man’s identity Blake calls the Selfhood, which blocks “the human center of creativity.” Only by annihilating the Selfhood, Blake believes, can one hope to participate in the visionary experience of the poem.

The Selfhood places two powerful forces to block our path: the socially accepted values of “love” and “reason.” In its purest state love is given freely with no restrictions and no thought of return. In its fallen state love is reduced to a form of trade: “Thy love depends on him thou lovest, & on his dear loves / Depend thy pleasures, which thou hast cut off by jealousy.” “Female love” is given only in exchange for love received. It is bartering in human emotions and is not love at all. When Milton denounces his own Selfhood, he gives up “Female love” and loves freely and openly.

As Blake attacks accepted notions of love, he also forces the reader to question the value society places on reason. In his struggle with Urizen, who represents man’s limited power of reason, Milton seeks to cast off the deadening effect of the reasoning power and free the mind for the power of the imagination.

Destroying the Selfhood allows Milton to unite with others. He descends upon Blake’s path and continues the process of uniting with Blake that had begun in book one. This union is also a reflection of Blake’s encounter with Los that is described in book one and illustrated in book two.

The apex of Blake’s vision is the brief image of the Throne of God. In Revelation, John’s vision of the Throne of God is a prelude to the apocalypse itself. Similarly Blake’s vision of the throne is also a prelude to the coming apocalypse. Blake’s vision is abruptly cut off as the Four Zoas sound the Four Trumpets, signaling the call to judgment of the peoples of the earth. The trumpets bring to a halt Blake’s vision, as he falls to the ground and returns to his mortal state. The apocalypse is still to come.

The author falls before the vision of the Throne of God and the awful sound of the coming apocalypse. However, the author’s vision does not fall with him to the ground. In the very next line after Blake describes his faint, we see his vision soar: “Immediately the lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham’s Vale.” We have seen the lark as the messenger of Los and the carrier of inspiration. Its sudden flight here demonstrates that the vision of the poem continues. It is up to the reader to follow the flight of the lark to the Gate of Los and continue the vision of Milton.

Before Blake could leave Felpham and return to London, an incident occurred that was very disturbing to him and possibly even dangerous. Without Blake’s knowledge, his gardener had invited a soldier by the name of John Scofield into his garden to help with the work. Blake seeing the soldier and thinking he had no business being there promptly tossed him out.

What made this incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake had said “Damn the King” and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he was forced to post bail and appear in court. Blake left Felpham at the end of September 1803 and settled in a new residence on South Molton Street in London. His trial was set for the following January at Chichester. The soldier’s testimony was shown to be false, and the jury acquitted Blake.

Blake’s radical political views made him fear persecution, and he wondered if Scofield had been a government agent sent to entrap him. In any event Blake forever damned the soldier by attacking him in the epic poem Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is in many ways Blake’s major achievement. It is an epic poem consisting of 100 illuminated plates. Blake dated the title page 1804, but he seems to have worked on the poem for a considerable length of time after that date. In Jerusalem he develops his mythology to explore man’s fall and redemption. As the narrative begins, man is apart from God and split into separate identities. As the poem progresses man’s split identities are unified, and man is reunited with the divinity that is within him.

In chapter one Blake announces the purpose of his “great task":

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination .

It is sometimes easy to get lost in the complex mythology of Blake’s poetry and forget that he is describing not outside events but a “Mental Fight” that takes place in the mind. Much of Jerusalem is devoted to the idea of awakening the human senses, so that the reader can perceive the spiritual world that is everywhere present.

At the beginning of the poem, Jesus addresses the fallen Albion: “’I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;  ‘Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me.’” In his fallen state Albion rejects this close union with God and dismisses Jesus as the “Phantom of the overheated brain!” Driven by jealousy Albion hides his emanation, Jerusalem. Separation from God leads to further separation into countless male and female forms creating endless division and dispute.

Blake describes the fallen state of man by describing the present day. Interwoven into the mythology are references to present-day London. In chapter two the “disease of Albion” leads to further separation and decay. As the human body is a limited form of its divine origin, the cities of England are limited representations of the Universal Brotherhood of Man. Fortunately for man, there is “a limit of contraction,” and the fall must come to an end.

Caught by the errors of sin and vengeance, Albion gives up hope and dies. The flawed religions of moral law cannot save him: “The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed perceptions, / Are become weak Visions of Time & Space, fix’d into furrows of death.” Our limited senses make us think of our lives as bounded by time and space apart from eternity. In such a framework physical death marks the end of existence. But there is also a limit to death, and Albion’s body is preserved by the Savior.

Felpham

In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham, in Sussex (now West Sussex), to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake began Milton (the title page is dated 1804, but Blake continued to work on it until 1808). The preface to this work includes a poem beginning "And did those feet in ancient time", which became the words for the anthem "Jerusalem". Over time, Blake began to resent his new patron, believing that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry, and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" (E724). Blake's disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton: a Poem, in which Blake wrote that "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies". (4:26, E98)

Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier, John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the king. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake was cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "[T]he invented character of [the evidence] was ... so obvious that an acquittal resulted". Schofield was later depicted wearing "mind forged manacles" in an illustration to Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.

Charged with sedition

When the peace established in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens broke down in 1803, Napoleon massed his army along the English Channel. British troops were rushed to the Sussex coast, with a troop of dragoons billeted in the pub at Felpham. On Aug. 12, 1803, Blake found one of the dragoons, named John Schofield, lounging in his garden and perhaps tipsy. Blake asked him to leave and, on his refusal, took him by the elbows and marched him down the street to the Fox Inn, 50 yards (46 metres) away. In revenge, Schofield went to his officer with his comrade Private John Cock, and they swore that Blake had “Damned the King of England.” The complaint was taken to the magistrate, a charge was laid, and Blake was forced to find bail and was bound over for trial for sedition and assault first at the quarter sessions in Petworth (Oct. 4, 1803), where a True Bill was found against Blake, and then at Chichester (Jan. 11, 1804). (The words “True Bill” are written on a bill of indictment when a grand jury, after hearing the government witnesses, finds that there is sufficient cause to put a defendent on trial.) Despite the fact that the magistrates were all country gentlemen—one of them, the duke of Richmond, who commanded all troops in the south of England, was, Hayley wrote, “bitterly prejudiced against Blake”—with the support of Hayley as a character witness and of the lawyer whom Hayley had hired, Blake was, according to The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, “by the Jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.” He later incorporated his accusers and judges into his poems Milton and Jerusalem.

Return to London

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804–20), his most ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an engraving. Knowing Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly commissioned Blake's friend Thomas Stothard to execute the concept. When Blake learned he had been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard. He set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in Soho. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a result, he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt called a "brilliant analysis" of Chaucer and is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. It also contained detailed explanations of his other paintings. The exhibition was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile.

Also around this time (circa 1808), Blake gave vigorous expression of his views on art in an extensive series of polemical annotations to the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, denouncing the Royal Academy as a fraud and proclaiming, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot".

In 1818, he was introduced by George Cumberland's son to a young artist named John Linnell. A blue plaque commemorates Blake and Linnell at Old Wyldes' at North End, Hampstead. Through Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. The group shared Blake's rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic New Age. Aged 65, Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job, later admired by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan Williams, who based his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations.

In later life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit; this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 cut short the enterprise, and only a handful of watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Even so, they have earned praise:

[T]he Dante watercolours are among Blake's richest achievements, engaging fully with the problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of being in the poem.

Blake's illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works, but rather seem to critically revise, or furnish commentary on, certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.

Because the project was never completed, Blake's intent may be obscured. Some indicators bolster the impression that Blake's illustrations in their totality would take issue with the text they accompany: in the margin of Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions, Blake notes, "Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost." Blake seems to dissent from Dante's admiration of the poetic works of ancient Greece, and from the apparent glee with which Dante allots punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).

At the same time, Blake shared Dante's distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of power, and clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante's work pictorially. Even as he seemed to be near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante's Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.

Blake’s exhibition (1809–10)

There were few opportunities for a wider public to view Blake’s watercolours and his temperas. He showed work at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water-Colours (1812) and exhibited some pictures at the Royal Academy of Arts, but these works were greeted with silence.

Blake’s most determined effort to reach a wider public was his retrospective exhibition of 16 watercolours and temperas, held above the Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810. The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. The painting, now lost, was said to have been 14 feet (4.3 metres) wide by 10 feet (3 metres) tall—the largest picture Blake ever made, with what an advertisement for the exhibition described as “Figures full as large as Life.” The young art student Seymour Kirkup said it was Blake’s “masterpiece,” and Henry Crabb Robinson called it “his greatest and most perfect work.”

The first three pictures listed in the exhibition catalogue—The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (c. 1805–09), The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805?), and Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury (1808)—defined the style of the pictures and the expectations of the viewers. In his Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures (1809), Blake said that he “appeals to the Public,” but he scarcely attempted to accommodate his rhetoric to his audience. The works on display, he wrote, were “copies from some stupendous originals now lost…[which] The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen.” Blake also inveighed against fashionable styles and artists, such as the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens—whom he called “a most outrageous demon” (i.e., villain)—and “that infernal machine called Chiaro Oscura” (a technique of shading, see chiaroscuro).

Only a few persons saw the exhibition, perhaps no more than a couple dozen, but they included Robinson, the essayist and critic Charles Lamb and his sister, Mary, and Robert Hunt, brother of the journalist and poet Leigh Hunt. Robert Hunt wrote the only printed notice (in the radical family weekly The Examiner) of the exhibition and its Descriptive Catalogue, and through his vilification they became much more widely known than Blake had been able to make them. Hunt described the pictures as “wretched,” the Descriptive Catalogue as “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity,” and Blake himself as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.” Few more destructive reviews have appeared in print, and Blake was devastated. He riposted by incorporating the Hunt brothers into his poems Milton and Jerusalem, but the harm was done, and Blake withdrew more and more into obscurity. From 1809 to 1818 he engraved few plates, his commissions for designs were mostly private, and he sank deeper into poverty.

Opinions

Politics

Blake was not active in any well-established political party. His poetry consistently embodies an attitude of rebellion against the abuse of class power as documented in David Erdman's major study Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (1954). Blake was concerned about senseless wars and the blighting effects of the Industrial Revolution. Much of his poetry recounts in symbolic allegory the effects of the French and American revolutions. Erdman claims Blake was disillusioned with the political outcomes of the conflicts, believing they had simply replaced monarchy with irresponsible mercantilism. Erdman also notes Blake was deeply opposed to slavery and believes some of his poems, read primarily as championing "free love", had their anti-slavery implications short-changed. A more recent study, William Blake: Visionary Anarchist by Peter Marshall (1988), classified Blake and his contemporary William Godwin as forerunners of modern anarchism. British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson's last finished work, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993), claims to show how far he was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English Civil War.

Development of views

Because Blake's later poetry contains a private mythology with complex symbolism, his late work has been less published than his earlier more accessible work. The Vintage anthology of Blake edited by Patti Smith focuses heavily on the earlier work, as do many critical studies such as William Blake by D. G. Gillham.

The earlier work is primarily rebellious in character and can be seen as a protest against dogmatic religion especially notable in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which the figure represented by the "Devil" is virtually a hero rebelling against an imposter authoritarian deity. In later works, such as Milton and Jerusalem, Blake carves a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while retaining his earlier negative attitude towards what he felt was the rigid and morbid authoritarianism of traditional religion. Not all readers of Blake agree upon how much continuity exists between Blake's earlier and later works.

Psychoanalyst June Singer has written that Blake's late work displayed a development of the ideas first introduced in his earlier works, namely, the humanitarian goal of achieving personal wholeness of body and spirit. The final section of the expanded edition of her Blake study The Unholy Bible suggests the later works are the "Bible of Hell" promised in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Regarding Blake's final poem, Jerusalem, she writes: "The promise of the divine in man, made in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is at last fulfilled."

John Middleton Murry notes discontinuity between Marriage and the late works, in that while the early Blake focused on a "sheer negative opposition between Energy and Reason", the later Blake emphasised the notions of self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the road to interior wholeness. This renunciation of the sharper dualism of Marriage of Heaven and Hell is evidenced in particular by the humanisation of the character of Urizen in the later works. Murry characterises the later Blake as having found "mutual understanding" and "mutual forgiveness".

Blake’s religion

Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” (c. 1818):

The Vision of Christ that thou dost See

Is my Visions Greatest Enemy

…

Both read the Bible day & night

But thou readst black where I read White.

But some of the orthodox not only tolerated but also encouraged Blake. Two of his most important patrons, the Rev. A.S. Mathew and the Rev. Joseph Thomas, were clergymen of the Church of England.

Blake was a religious seeker but not a joiner. He was profoundly influenced by some of the ideas of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the New Church (which had been recently founded by followers of Swedenborg) in London. Blake’s poem “The Divine Image” (from Songs of Innocence) is implicitly Swedenborgian, and he said that he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on the theologian’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that Swedenborg was a “Spiritual Predestinarian,” as he wrote in his copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence (1790), and that the New Church was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England.

Blake loved the world of the spirit and abominated institutionalized religion, especially when it was allied with government; he wrote in his annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), “all […] codes given under pretence [sic] of divine command were what Christ pronounced them, The Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion” and later in the same text, “The Beast & the Whore rule without control.” According to his longtime friend John Thomas Smith, “He did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine worship.” For Blake, true worship was private communion with the spirit.

Religious views

Regarding conventional religion, Blake was a satirist and ironist in his viewpoints which are illustrated and summarized in his poem Vala, or The Four Zoas, one of his uncompleted prophetic books begun in 1797. The demi-mythological and demi-religious main characters of the book are the Four Zoas (Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas), who were created by the fall of Albion in Blake's mythology. It consists of nine books, referred to as "nights". These outline the interactions of the Zoas, their fallen forms and their Emanations. Blake intended the book to be a summation of his mythic universe. Blake's Four Zoas, which represent four aspects of the Almighty God and Vala is the first work to mention them. In particular, Blake's God/Man union is broken down into the bodily components of Urizen (head), Urthona (loins), Luvah (heart), and Tharmas (unity of the body) with paired Emanations being Ahania (wisdom, from the head), Enitharmon (what can't be attained in nature, from the loins), Vala (nature, from the heart), and Enion (earth mother, from the separation of unity). As connected to Blake's understanding of the divine, the Zoas are the God the Father (Tharmas, sense), the Son of God (Luvah, love), the Holy Ghost (Urthona, imagination), and Satan who was originally of the divine substance (Urizen, reason) and their Emanations represent Sexual Urges (Enion), Nature (Vala), Inspiration (Enitharmon), and Pleasure (Ahania).

Blake believed that each person had a twofold identity with one half being good and the other evil. In Vala, both the character Orc and The Eternal Man discuss their selves as divided. By the time he was working on his later works, including Vala, Blake felt that he was able to overcome his inner battle but he was concerned about losing his artistic abilities. These thoughts carried over into Vala as the character Los (imagination) is connected to the image of Christ, and he added a Christian element to his mythic world. In the revised version of Vala, Blake added Christian and Hebrew images and describes how Los experiences a vision of the Lamb of God that regenerates Los's spirit. In opposition to Christ is Urizen and the Synagogue of Satan, who later crucifies Christ. It is from them that Deism is born.

Blake did not subscribe to the notion of a body distinct from the soul that must submit to the rule of the soul, but sees the body as an extension of the soul, derived from the "discernment" of the senses. Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul. Elsewhere, he describes Satan as the "state of error", and as beyond salvation.

Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly sexual repression:

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence. (7.4–5, E35)

He saw the concept of "sin" as a trap to bind men's desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life:

Abstinence sows sand all over

The ruddy limbs & flaming hair

But Desire Gratified

Plants fruits & beauty there. (E474)

He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: "He is the only God ... and so am I, and so are you." A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is "men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast".

Enlightenment philosophy

Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. His championing of the imagination as the most important element of human existence ran contrary to Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and empiricism. Due to his visionary religious beliefs, he opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in an excerpt from Blake's Jerusalem:

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe

And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire

Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton . black the cloth

In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works

Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic

Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which

Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace. (15.14–20, E159)

Blake believed the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds, which depict the naturalistic fall of light upon objects, were products entirely of the "vegetative eye", and he saw Locke and Newton as "the true progenitors of Sir Joshua Reynolds' aesthetic". The popular taste in the England of that time for such paintings was satisfied with mezzotints, prints produced by a process that created an image from thousands of tiny dots upon the page. Blake saw an analogy between this and Newton's particle theory of light. Accordingly, Blake never used the technique, opting rather to develop a method of engraving purely in fluid line, insisting that:

a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job. (E784)

It has been supposed that, despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles, Blake arrived at a linear aesthetic that was in many ways more similar to the Neoclassical engravings of John Flaxman than to the works of the Romantics, with whom he is often classified. However, Blake's relationship with Flaxman seems to have grown more distant after Blake's return from Felpham, and there are surviving letters between Flaxman and Hayley wherein Flaxman speaks ill of Blake's theories of art. Blake further criticized Flaxman's styles and theories of art in his responses to criticism made against his print of Chaucer's Caunterbury Pilgrims in 1810.

Sexuality

"Free Love"

Since his death, Blake has been claimed by those of various movements who apply his complex and often elusive use of symbolism and allegory to the issues that concern them. In particular, Blake is sometimes considered (along with Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin) a forerunner of the 19th-century "free love" movement, a broad reform tradition starting in the 1820s that held that marriage is slavery, and advocated the removal of all state restrictions on sexual activity such as homosexuality, prostitution, and adultery, culminating in the birth control movement of the early 20th century. Blake scholarship was more focused on this theme in the earlier 20th century than today, although it is still mentioned notably by the Blake scholar Magnus Ankarsjö who moderately challenges this interpretation. The 19th-century "free love" movement was not particularly focused on the idea of multiple partners, but did agree with Wollstonecraft that state-sanctioned marriage was "legal prostitution" and monopolistic in character. It has somewhat more in common with early feminist movements (particularly with regard to the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Blake admired).

Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue. At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine's apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house. His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws . Poems such as "Why should I be bound to thee , O my lovely Myrtle-tree? " and "Earth's Answer" seem to advocate multiple sexual partners. In his poem "London" he speaks of "the Marriage -Hearse" plagued by "the youthful Harlot's curse", the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry. Visions of the Daughters of Albion is widely (though not universally) read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love. For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the "frozen marriage-bed". In Visions, Blake writes:

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound

In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain

Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)

In the 19th century, poet and free love advocate Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote a book on Blake drawing attention to the above motifs in which Blake praises "sacred natural love" that is not bound by another's possessive jealousy, the latter characterised by Blake as a "creeping skeleton". Swinburne notes how Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell condemns the hypocrisy of the "pale religious letchery" of advocates of traditional norms. Another 19th-century free love advocate, Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), was influenced by Blake's mystical emphasis on energy free from external restrictions.

In the early 20th century, Pierre Berger described how Blake's views echo Mary Wollstonecraft's celebration of joyful authentic love rather than love born of duty, the former being the true measure of purity. Irene Langridge notes that "in Blake's mysterious and unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was something Blake wanted for the edification of 'the soul'." Michael Davis' 1977 book William Blake a New Kind of Man suggests that Blake thought jealousy separates man from the divine unity, condemning him to a frozen death.

As a theological writer, Blake has a sense of human "fallenness". S. Foster Damon noted that for Blake the major impediments to a free love society were corrupt human nature, not merely the intolerance of society and the jealousy of men, but the inauthentic hypocritical nature of human communication. Thomas Wright's 1928 book Life of William Blake (entirely devoted to Blake's doctrine of free love) notes that Blake thinks marriage should in practice afford the joy of love, but notes that in reality it often does not , as a couple's knowledge of being chained often diminishes their joy. Pierre Berger also analyses Blake's early mythological poems such as Ahania as declaring marriage laws to be a consequence of the fallenness of humanity, as these are born from pride and jealousy.

Some scholars have noted that Blake's views on "free love" are both qualified and may have undergone shifts and modifications in his late years. Some poems from this period warn of dangers of predatory sexuality such as The Sick Rose. Magnus Ankarsjö notes that while the hero of Visions of the Daughters of Albion is a strong advocate of free love, by the end of the poem she has become more circumspect as her awareness of the dark side of sexuality has grown, crying "Can this be love which drinks another as a sponge drinks water?" Ankarsjö also notes that a major inspiration to Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, similarly developed more circumspect views of sexual freedom late in life. In light of Blake's aforementioned sense of human 'fallenness' Ankarsjö thinks Blake does not fully approve of sensual indulgence merely in defiance of law as exemplified by the female character of Leutha , since in the fallen world of experience all love is enchained. Ankarsjö records Blake as having supported a commune with some sharing of partners, though David Worrall read The Book of Thel as a rejection of the proposal to take concubines espoused by some members of the Swedenborgian church.

Blake's later writings show a renewed interest in Christianity, and although he radically reinterprets Christian morality in a way that embraces sensual pleasure, there is little of the emphasis on sexual libertarianism found in several of his early poems, and there is advocacy of "self-denial", though such abnegation must be inspired by love rather than through authoritarian compulsion. Berger (more so than Swinburne) is especially sensitive to a shift in sensibility between the early Blake and the later Blake. Berger believes the young Blake placed too much emphasis on following impulses, and that the older Blake had a better formed ideal of a true love that sacrifices self. Some celebration of mystical sensuality remains in the late poems (most notably in Blake's denial of the virginity of Jesus's mother). However, the late poems also place a greater emphasis on forgiveness, redemption, and emotional authenticity as a foundation for relationships.

Legacy

Creativity

Northrop Frye, commenting on Blake's consistency in strongly held views, notes Blake "himself says that his notes on [Joshua] Reynolds, written at fifty, are 'exactly Similar' to those on Locke and Bacon, written when he was 'very Young'. Even phrases and lines of verse will reappear as much as forty years later. Consistency in maintaining what he believed to be true was itself one of his leading principles ... Consistency, then, foolish or otherwise, is one of Blake's chief preoccupations, just as 'self-contradiction' is always one of his most contemptuous comments".

Blake abhorred slavery, and believed in racial and sexual equality. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: "As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various)". In one poem, narrated by a black child, white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds, which exist only until one learns "to bear the beams of love":

When I from black and he from white cloud free,

And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,

To lean in joy upon our fathers knee .

And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,

And be like him and he will then love me. (23-8, E9)

Blake retained an active interest in social and political events throughout his life, and social and political statements are often present in his mystical symbolism. His views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of rightful freedom extended to the Church. His spiritual beliefs are evident in Songs of Experience (1794), in which he distinguishes between the Old Testament God, whose restrictions he rejected, and the New Testament God whom he saw as a positive influence.

Visions of eternity

Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote:

I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

Blake wrote to his patron William Hayley in 1802, “I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.” These visions were the source of many of his poems and drawings. As he wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence,” his purpose was

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.

He was, he wrote in 1804, “really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” Blake’s wife once said to his young friend Seymour Kirkup, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”

Some of this stress on visions may have been fostered by his mother, who, with her first husband, had become a Moravian when the group was in its most intensely emotional and visionary phase. In her letter of 1750 applying to join the Moravians, she wrote that “last Friday at the love feast Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds.”

Visions

From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The first may have occurred as early as the age of four when, according to one anecdote, the young artist "saw God" when God "put his head to the window", causing Blake to break into screaming. At the age of eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and reported the vision and only escaped being thrashed by his father for telling a lie through the intervention of his mother. Though all evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber.[128] On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them.

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual centre of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. Blake believed he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by the same Archangels. In a letter of condolence to William Hayley, dated 6 May 1800, four days after the death of Hayley's son,[130] Blake wrote:

I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.

In a letter to John Flaxman, dated 21 September 1800, Blake wrote:

[The town of] Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen; & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses. My Wife & Sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace... I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filled with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & those works are the delight & Study of Archangels. (E710)

In a letter to Thomas Butts, dated 25 April 1803, Blake wrote:

Now I may say to you, what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else: That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals; perhaps Doubts proceeding from Kindness, but Doubts are always pernicious, Especially when we Doubt our Friends.

In A Vision of the Last Judgement Blake wrote:

Error is Created Truth is Eternal Error or Creation will be Burned Up & then & not till then Truth or Eternity will appear It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action it is as the Dirt upon my feet No part of Me. What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it. (E565-6)

Despite seeing angels and God, Blake has also claimed to see Satan on the staircase of his South Molton Street home in London.

Aware of Blake's visions, William Wordsworth commented, "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." In a more deferential vein, John William Cousins wrote in A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature that Blake was "a truly pious and loving soul, neglected and misunderstood by the world, but appreciated by an elect few", who "led a cheerful and contented life of poverty illumined by visions and celestial inspirations". Blake's sanity was called into question as recently as the publication of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, whose entry on Blake comments that "the question whether Blake was or was not mad seems likely to remain in dispute, but there can be no doubt whatever that he was at different periods of his life under the influence of illusions for which there are no outward facts to account, and that much of what he wrote is so far wanting in the quality of sanity as to be without a logical coherence".

Cultural influence

Blake's work was neglected for a generation after his death and almost forgotten by the time Alexander Gilchrist began work on his biography in the 1860s. The publication of the Life of William Blake rapidly transformed Blake's reputation, in particular as he was taken up by Pre-Raphaelites and associated figures, in particular Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. In the 20th century, however, Blake's work was fully appreciated and his influence increased. Important early and mid-20th-century scholars involved in enhancing Blake's standing in literary and artistic circles included S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman.

While Blake had a significant role in the art and poetry of figures such as Rossetti, it was during the Modernist period that this work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists. William Butler Yeats, who edited an edition of Blake's collected works in 1893, drew on him for poetic and philosophical ideas, while British surrealist art in particular drew on Blake's conceptions of non-mimetic, visionary practice in the painting of artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

His poetry came into use by a number of British classical composers, who set his works. The earliest such work now known is Doyne Bell's setting of the poem Can I see another's woe, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, published in 1876. Notable settings are by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and John Tavener set several of Blake's poems, including The Lamb (as the 1982 work "The Lamb") and The Tyger.

Many such as June Singer have argued that Blake's thoughts on human nature greatly anticipate and parallel the thinking of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. In Jung's own words: "Blake [is] a tantalizing study, since he compiled a lot of half or undigested knowledge in his fantasies. According to my ideas they are an artistic production rather than an authentic representation of unconscious processes." Similarly, Diana Hume George claimed that Blake can be seen as a precursor to the ideas of Sigmund Freud.

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Van Morrison, and English writer Aldous Huxley. The Pulitzer-winning composer William Bolcom set Songs of Innocence and of Experience to music, with different poems set to different styles of music, "from modern techniques to Broadway to Country/Western" and reggae.

Much of the central conceit of Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is rooted in the world of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake also features as a relatively significant character in Brian Catling's fantasy novel The Erstwhile, where his visions of angelic beings are figured into the story. Canadian music composer Kathleen Yearwood is one of many contemporary musicians that have set Blake's poems to music. After World War II, Blake's role in popular culture came to the fore in a variety of areas such as popular music, film, and the graphic novel, leading Edward Larrissy to assert that "Blake is the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century."

Later life

Blake's marriage to Catherine was close and devoted until his death. Blake taught Catherine to write, and she helped him colour his printed poems. Gilchrist refers to "stormy times" in the early years of the marriage. Some biographers have suggested that Blake tried to bring a concubine into the marriage bed in accordance with the beliefs of the more radical branches of the Swedenborgian Society, but other scholars have dismissed these theories as conjecture. In his Dictionary, Samuel Foster Damon suggests that Catherine may have had a stillborn daughter for which The Book of Thel is an elegy. That is how he rationalizes the Book's unusual ending, but notes that he is speculating.

Final years

Blake's last years were spent at Fountain Court off the Strand (the property was demolished in the 1880s, when the Savoy Hotel was built). On the day of his death (12 August 1827), Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:

He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ – Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.

Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. Blake's body was buried in a plot shared with others, five days after his death – on the eve of his 45th wedding anniversary – at the Dissenter's burial ground in Bunhill Fields, in what is today the London Borough of Islington. His parents' bodies were buried in the same graveyard. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine moved into Tatham's house as a housekeeper. She believed she was regularly visited by Blake's spirit. She continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but entertained no business transaction without first "consulting Mr. Blake". On the day of her death, in October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as her husband, and called out to him "as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to him, and it would not be long now".

On her death, longtime acquaintance Frederick Tatham took possession of Blake's works and continued selling them. Tatham later joined the fundamentalist Irvingite church and under the influence of conservative members of that church burned manuscripts that he deemed heretical.[73] The exact number of destroyed manuscripts is unknown, but shortly before his death Blake told a friend he had written "twenty tragedies as long as Macbeth", none of which survive. Another acquaintance, William Michael Rossetti, also burned works by Blake that he considered lacking in quality, and John Linnell erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake's drawings. At the same time, some works not intended for publication were preserved by friends, such as his notebook and An Island in the Moon.

Blake's grave is commemorated by two stones. The first was a stone that reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757–1827 and his wife Catherine Sophia 1762–1831". The memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres (66 ft) away from the actual grave, which was not marked until 12 August 2018. For years since 1965, the exact location of William Blake's grave had been lost and forgotten. The area had been damaged in the Second World War; gravestones were removed and a garden was created. The memorial stone, indicating that the burial sites are "nearby", was listed as a Grade II listed structure in 2011. A Portuguese couple, Carol and Luís Garrido, rediscovered the exact burial location after 14 years of investigatory work, and the Blake Society organised a permanent memorial slab, which was unveiled at a public ceremony at the site on 12 August 2018. The new stone is inscribed "Here lies William Blake 1757–1827 Poet Artist Prophet" above a verse from his poem Jerusalem.

The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial to Blake and his wife was erected in Westminster Abbey. Another memorial lies in St James's Church, Piccadilly, where he was baptised.

At the time of Blake's death, he had sold fewer than 30 copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

Last years of William Blake

Blake’s last years, from 1818 to 1827, were made comfortable and productive as a result of his friendship with the artist John Linnell. Through Linnell, Blake met the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton, who commissioned Blake’s woodcuts for a school text of Virgil (1821). He also met the young painters George Richmond, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert, who became his disciples, called themselves “the Ancients,” and reflected Blake’s inspiration in their art. Linnell also supported Blake with his commissions for the drawings and engravings of the Book of Job (published 1826) and Dante (1838), Blake’s greatest achievements as a line engraver. In these last years Blake gained a new serenity. Once, when he met a fashionably dressed little girl at a party, he put his hand on her head and said, “May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me.”

Blake died in his cramped rooms in Fountain Court, the Strand, London, on Aug. 12, 1827. His disciple Richmond wrote,

Just before he died His Countenance became fair—His eyes brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he Saw in Heaven. In truth He Died like a saint[,] as a person who was standing by Him Observed.

He was buried in Bunhill Fields, a burial ground for Nonconformists, but he was given the beautiful funeral service of the Church of England. For a list of Blake’s principal works, see Sidebar: William Blake’s principal writings, series of drawings, and series of engravings.

Reputation and influence

Blake was scarcely noticed in his own lifetime. No contemporary reviewed any of his works in Illuminated Printing, but his designs for Blair’s The Grave and his Descriptive Catalogue of his exhibition were reviewed savagely and at length in The Antijacobin Review (1808) and The Examiner (1808, 1809)—in the latter publication he was called “an unfortunate lunatic.” After a flurry of obituaries in 1827 and brief lives of him in books by John Thomas Smith (1828) and Allan Cunningham (1830), the first important book on Blake was Alexander Gilchrist’s two-volume Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863). Volume 1 was the biography, concentrating on Blake as an unknown artist, and volume 2 printed many of Blake’s poems and designs, most of them for the first time in conventional typography. Gilchrist’s work was completed after his death in 1861 by a coterie of Pre-Raphaelites, chiefly the artist-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his brother, William Michael Rossetti. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was so carried away by Blake that he published an exclamatory and influential study William Blake: A Critical Essay (1868). Gilchrist’s book opened the floodgates of criticism, and since 1863 Blake has been considered a major figure in English poetry and art.

In the 1890s Blake was taken up by William Butler Yeats and Edwin John Ellis. They collaborated on a massive three-volume, extensively illustrated edition of Blake (1893), which introduced much of Blake’s prophetic poetry to the public for the first time—in texts that are often seriously corrupt: words misread, parts omitted, and “facts” invented. Their work was continued with other editions by Ellis and by Yeats and with a biography by Ellis called The Real Blake (1907), in which he claimed, with no shadow of justification, that Blake’s father was a renegade Irishman named John O’Neil, a fiction with which Yeats agreed..

Among the most influential works on Blake have been an essay by poet T.S. Eliot (1920) and the books of Northrop Frye (Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, 1947), David V. Erdman (Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, 1954), and Joseph Viscomi (Blake and the Idea of the Book, 1993). Blake’s appeal is now worldwide, and it is not just his poetry that has attracted international attention. There have been major exhibitions of Blake’s art in London (1927); Philadelphia (1939); London, Paris, Antwerp (Belg.), and Zürich (1947); Hamburg (1975); London (1978); New Haven (Conn., U.S.) and Toronto (1982–83); Tokyo (1990); Barcelona and Madrid (1996); and London and New York City (2000–01). Blake has come to be regarded as a major poet, as one of the most fascinating British artists, as an original thinker, and as a conundrum of endless fascination.

Blake’s influence has been traced in the works of authors as diverse as Yeats, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and American writer and monk Thomas Merton. His ideas have been included in detective stories and in formidable novels such as The Horse’s Mouth (1944) by English author Joyce Cary and Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! (2002; originally published in Japanese, 1983) by the Japanese Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe. Blake, who set his own poems to music and died singing them, has had an impact on the world of music as well. His works have been set as operas, and he has served as inspiration for an enormous number of musical composers, including Hubert Parry and pop musicians.

Each copy of Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing differs in important ways from all others, and a clear idea of the power and delicacy of his books and drawings can be obtained only by seeing the originals. The most extensive collection of Blake’s drawings and temperas is in the Tate Britain (London); important collections of his books are held by the British Museum Print Room (London), the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge, Eng.), Harvard University libraries (Cambridge, Mass., U.S.), the Huntington Library (San Marino, Calif., U.S.), the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Morgan Library and Museum (New York City), the Yale University Library (New Haven), and the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven).

William Blake

POEMS BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Ah! Sun-flower

Auguries of Innocence

The Book of Thel

See All Poems by William Blake

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