WILLIAM BLAKE

(1757-1827)

At the age of eight he is reported to have had his first vision, a tree full of angels. His work was
inspired by “spirits” who talked with him. Because of his family’s poor conditions, B. didn’t
receive any formal education, but was self-taught in all disciplines. Drawing and engraving were to
become, in combination with poetry, his most powerful means of expression. In 1783, B’s first
book Poetical Sketches was printed; it was a collection of poems rather conventional and they don’t
have the rhythm and passion of his later better known poetry. In 1789 he engraved Songs of
Innocence, a collection of poems centered around the figure of the child and focusing on the theme
of innocence. He described the state of innocence applied to the condition of man in the Garden of
Eden before the fall representing the condition of the child untouched by the evils of society. In the
second part he described the condition of man after the fall from heaven and the adulthood with its
selfishness, lack of spontaneity and injustice. The book regarded the state of childhood, its
innocence and its purity; innocence is a state of soul which is lost in maturity because attacked by
materialism, corruption and moral laws.
These works belong to the series of the so-called “Prophetic Books” whose composition was one of
B’s major efforts during his life. Blake hailed the French Revolution because of his passionate love
for freedom and justice and shared his enthusiasm with other English radical intellectuals. After
1791 B. entered a period of crisis that was political and personal. On the political side, his hopes in
the French Revolution were ended with England’s attitude towards France; on the personal side he
went through a crisis with his wife. B’s spiritual crisis can be seen in Songs of Experience that were
published in combination with his earlier Songs of Innocence. Experience is a degraded state which
destroys innocence but it is inevitable and necessary. Only the man capable of embracing
imagination, can restore his innocence and make the best out of the experience. In the “Prophetic
Books” words are difficult to be understood while the language of the Songs is simple but effective.
The two most important sonnets in the Songs are The chimney sweeper 1 and The chimney sweeper
2; i.e. children of very poor families who were sold for little money to a master who exploited them
because they were very small and could easily climb up the very narrow chimneys and clean them.
These children had their hair completely cut and soon became black for the soot.
B. was always determined to keep his art free from any kind of restriction. He was considered an
early bohemian living in a splendid isolation because of his unconventional approach to art, society
and life. He was often defined “insane” by his contemporaries; he came after a period in which
balance, reason, order and judgement were given the greatest importance. Blake was the opposite

1
because “he was ruled by instinct” and refused any kind of limit and constraint imposed upon man.
He was against the rationalism, materialism and atheism and he created a “visionary” philosophy
based on the exaltation of the spirit of the body, of intuition over education. He was also against
self-denial, which he associated with the suppression of desires, and the notion of a body distinct
from the soul. He focused on Jesus Christ as the symbol of the interrelation of the human and
divine.
For him the real man was imagination and he stated that “without contraries is not progression”. He
was enthusiastic about French Revolution because only a revolution would abolish injustice and
repression and replace them with complete freedom. Blake also believed in a world where people
loved one another in a spirit of universal brotherhood and where there weren’t racial or social
barriers. Slave trade was not the only thing that he denounced, but also the exploitation of the
children and the indifference of institutions. He had a great concern with the political and social
problems and he supported the abolition of slavery and sympathized with the victims of industrial
society. He was the first to denounce the exploitation of children by cruel families and he found in
man and in the universe the presence of good and evil, purity and corruption, innocence and
experience. He rejected the empirical approach of Locke and Newton and he was, on the contrary,
fascinated by the religious mysticism. According to the author, man’s highest faculty was
imagination, the real essence of the man that is considered divine, and so God. B. advocated the
equation: MAN = IMAGINATION = GOD. Man is not outside the man and man must not search
for him but, he must look inside himself because God is man himself. He saw his task as restoring
ideal conditions where man and imagination were one again. B. asserted that imagination meant
vision beyond materiality and only God, the child and the poet, shared this power of life.