William Blake (1757-1827)

David Punter (University of Bristol)

Engraver/ Printmaker; Essayist; Illustrator; Painter; Poet.

Active 1783-1818 in England

William Blake was born in 1757 near Golden Square, London, into a skilled working-class family, his father an
artisan. In 1767 or 1768 he began to attend a drawing school in the Strand, run by Henry Parr, and this was the
only formal schooling he was to receive; in 1772 he was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver of some note,
in order to begin a career in engraving, a difficult and complex skill which was to provide him with such limited
financial security as he was ever able to obtain for the rest of his life. During the years of his apprenticeship he
wrote his first poems, later known as the Poetical Sketches, some of which were conventionally eighteenth-
century in topic and tone, others showing early evidence of the unique path his later painting and poetry were to
follow. He also carried out various drawing and engraving commissions for Basire, discovering in the process the
work of Michelangelo, which was to exercise a profound aesthetic influence over him. In 1779 he was admitted
to the Royal Academy as a student, and also began to receive engraving commissions from booksellers on his
own behalf, including some from the well-known radical, Joseph Johnson.

In 1780 his burgeoning social and political concerns were fostered by his (probably) first-hand experience of the
Gordon Riots. Two years later he married Catherine née Boucher, an unlettered woman with whom he
nevertheless had a close and enduring relationship, and they moved to Leicester Square. The Poetical Sketches
were printed, though – in a pattern which was to endure throughout his life – not published, through the help of
his friend, the artist John Flaxman. During these years he exhibited several times at the Royal Academy and
became interested in the millenarian thinking of Emanuel Swedenborg. He was also writing and engraving copies
of his own poetry, including Tiriel and the Songs of Innocence; it is a major feature of Blake's work that he made
a practice of engraving and colouring each separate copy, thus ensuring firstly that every version was different,
and secondly (and more regrettably) that commercial sales of his work became virtually impossible. During this
period he also produced illustrations to works, including Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life;
the extent of the personal knowledge Blake and Wollstonecraft may have had of each other has since been a
matter of considerable scholarly dispute.

In 1791 he moved to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, the location which we probably now regard as the most
evocative of the arch-Londoner Blake. While at Lambeth he had perhaps the most poetically productive period
of his life. He wrote most of the works now known as the minor Prophetic Books – the first volume of his
French Revolution had been printed but, again, not published by Johnson in 1791 – including America, Visions of
the Daughters of Albion and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The French Revolution had been an attempt to
represent the events of the revolution, as they unfolded, in terms of the developing 'mythological' structure
within which he was to continue to interpret the events of human history. America extends this scheme back to
the American Revolution of 1776, while Visions has much to say about Blake's general view of oppression and
empire in terms of both gender and slavery, and the Marriage constitutes the first elaborated statement of his
radical philosophy, in which he sets about revaluing energy, desire and rebellion at the expense of what he took
to be the deathly impositions of reason.

The years 1793-4 saw the completion of his next major set of lyrics, the Songs of Experience, and their first
publication in a combined volume with the Songs of Innocence, a work which was Blake's best-known throughout
the nineteenth century and has in many ways continued to be so down to the present day. There followed a series
of poems known as the books of the Infernal Bible, including The First Book of Urizen, The Song of Los and The
Book of Los, which attempt to set Blake's key mythological constructs in a framework that ranges the events of
contemporary history against the accounts of human genesis and cosmic evolution given in the Bible. Blake's
concern here is always to resist the authoritative – and authoritarian – account of religion given out by the
institutions of State and Church, and to substitute for it a version based on human potential and on resistance to
the restrictions of 'God, priest and king'.

In 1796 he began a long series of engravings in illustration of Edward Young's Night Thoughts, which were
completed in the following year and clearly show the idiosyncratic terms in which Blake felt compelled to
reinterpret the work of earlier writers. In or around 1797 he began work on the first of his three longer Prophetic
Books, Vala, or, The Four Zoas, a work which never achieved final form but on which he continued to be
engaged for at least the next decade. Vala offers the reader the first fully developed view of what Blake took to
be the underlying conflicts behind human history, but the difficulty of matching his cosmological concerns with
the provision of a coherent narrative continued – as they still do – to haunt the text and to prevent it from settling
into a fixed structure. All of this time Blake had been living a hand-to-mouth existence; engraving was a trade in
decline as other reproductive techniques opened up in the field of the arts, and his increasingly well-known
political opinions as well as his unusually time-consuming technical procedures made it difficult for him to
secure the kind of patronage he would have needed to feel secure about his professional future.

In or around 1800 Flaxman again tried to help by recommending him to the wealthy patron William Hayley, who
suggested that Blake leave London to join him in Felpham on the south coast, where he provided him with a
cottage. By 1803, however, this situation had broken down. From Blake's point of view this was partly because
of what he perceived as Hayley's interference with his work, partly because of an illness of Catherine's, all of
which made him uneasy about the future and particularly about how he and his family would manage when they
returned – as Blake was always sure they would – to London. We might also, however, see in these events
evidence of Blake's continuing unwillingness to place his vision at the service of another, his insistence that
behind the material forms of the world – which a conventional artist might be expected to represent in
recognisable form – there lay another, spiritual or imaginative world, to which, as Blake saw it, the artist was
under a far greater compulsion to pay allegiance. It was also about this time that he became involved in an
ambiguous incident, the truth of which has never been fully established, but which centred upon an altercation
with a soldier that resulted in a warrant for Blake's arrest on sedition charges.

Under these circumstances he returned to London, to South Molton Street, where he began to make plans for his
two other major Prophetic Books, Milton and Jerusalem; the charges against him were eventually dropped. It
may well be that Milton was even completed at this time, although it was not engraved until around 1809; at all
events, it constitutes a narrative in which Blake is in some way reincarnated from the 'old revolutionary' Milton,
and includes some of his most beautiful and startling poetry. He was also commissioned to do a series of
engravings for Blair's The Grave, but a number of financial setbacks ensued, with commissions originally
promised to him being given to more commercially-minded engravers. Blake had always been anxious about his
monetary security; these setbacks, combined with the fear he had clearly felt over the business of the potential
sedition trial, added to his difficulties.
 In 1809 he held an exhibition of his art, which was to prove the only one ever to take place during his lifetime. It
included a number of large – and these days we would say major – paintings, including for example The
Canterbury Pilgrims, but achieved no public success. To the contrary, it was at about this time that rumours
started to circulate about his mental condition, rumours which in one form or another continued to dog – or
stimulate – his reputation throughout the nineteenth century. During the following years he continued work on
Jerusalem, and probably on further revisions of Vala, or, The Four Zoas, but the end of the European wars in
1815 produced a general economic depression which in turn saw Blake suffering even more financial hardship
than before.

In 1819 he produced a series of Visionary Heads for the scientist and mystic John Varley, and in 1820 the first
copy of the master-work Jerusalem was printed, but again to no critical acclaim. Jerusalem is now probably
regarded as his most extraordinary and achieved poem, a lengthy masterpiece which recasts biblical and other
myth into a wholly original account of psychology, history and cosmology. This, however, went entirely
unnoticed at the time. His later years, beginning perhaps in 1824, were marked by illness, but also at around this
time his achievements in the visual arts began to achieve some limited recognition and he began to be an object
of admiration for various younger, visionary artists, including Samuel Palmer. Drawings and engravings
produced during this later period include water-colours and engravings to The Book of Job and a long series of
drawings and engravings to Dante. A number of artists whom he admired, including Henry Fuseli, and some who
were close friends, including Flaxman, died in the mid-1820s, and Blake himself died in 1827, a little less
obscure than he had been but nevertheless a man without considerable recognition or reputation.

The life of Blake cannot however, for these very reasons, be fully told without going a little beyond its corporeal
limits. Very little known at the time of his death, he was 'rediscovered' later in the nineteenth century, partly
through the work of D. G. Rossetti, more strikingly through an essay by the poet Swinburne. Once rediscovered,
his work was subjected to multiple reinterpretations, notably in the edition of the Prophetic Books prepared by
Yeats and his fellow 'magician' E. J. Ellis. Throughout the twentieth century his reputation has grown
continuously. His poetry has sometimes been seen as mystical, sometimes as providing the most stringent social
criticism of the cultural assumptions of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His visual art has
been hailed as unique and inspirational, and has been built into the canon of British art history. He has been
taken as an epitome of 'Englishness', even while his major poems speak loudly and stridently against the venality
of art and the corruptions of empire.

In life, however, his work was little noticed, and the conditions of his age – in particular, the decline of the crafts
as an increasingly industrialised economy threatened the wellbeing of the individual craftsman – are crucially
replicated in the themes of his poetry as well as in the unique means he developed in his continuing attempts to
make that poetry public. Perhaps the most fitting testimony to the complexity and endurance of his appeal lies in
the status of the short lyric known as 'Jerusalem' (not connected to the 'epic' poem Jerusalem), which constitutes
a powerful indictment of the increasing mechanisation of art and empire, and has yet been taken up as an anthem
to a certain notion of 'Britishness'; of which, in a curious way, Blake's stubborn adherence to his own ideas and
principles has been seen as evidence, and yet of which also he remained a most stubborn critic throughout his
life.

Citation: Punter, David. "William Blake". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 July 2001
[https://www.litencyc.com, accessed 28 October 2022.]

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