William Blake, English poet and artist

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in London. His father James was a dealer in hosiery (stockings). William was the third son of four (one of whom died young) and he also had a younger sister.

Early life

Little is known about his early life, except for his own later accounts of seeing strange things as a child, such as angels in trees. He was clearly interested in drawing pictures, and the only school he appears to have attended was one devoted to drawing. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver and printmaker, and he spent seven years learning this craft. Through this apprenticeship, in researching the subjects for engravings and talking with clients, Blake acquired an education of sorts in such things as science and archaeology.

On completing his apprenticeship, Blake became a freelance copy engraver, mainly working on book illustrations. However, he was more interested in doing original work and he enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he stayed for six years. He specialised in creating drawings and paintings of historical subjects.

He made several friends among the artistic community, and on one occasion was arrested as a suspected spy when, with two other friends, he was caught sketching near the Chatham naval base.

He was married to Catherine Boucher in 1782. Although they had no children, it was a happy, lifelong marriage, and Catherine proved to be a great support to William in later life.

Poetry and printing

Blake had written poetry from an early age, alongside his interest in drawing, and his first collection of poems, “Poetical Sketches” was published privately in 1783.

In 1784 he started a printing business partnership, but this was short-lived. However, three years later he invented a new method of printing, relief etching, that allowed an engraved image to be printed on the same plate as written text, which proved to be a faster and cheaper method than what had gone before, because both image and text could be applied directly to a copper plate without the need for a separate engraving process. The only drawback was that the words had to be written in mirror-image so that they would print the right way round.

Blake produced “Songs of Innocence” in 1789, his first illuminated book of poems. With his wife’s help, he was able to control the whole process of creation, production and distribution of his work, especially as he sold directly to collectors rather than through any middlemen.

His first longer poems, “Tiriel” and “The Book of Thel” were also produced at this time. These combined themes from ancient Greece and Israel with British history and mythology, and contained allegorical meanings that were a foretaste of the “prophetic” works that were to follow.

As well as his own work, Blake continued to take commissions from booksellers for copy engravings, which paid well. Joseph Johnson was a bookseller/publisher who brought a lot of work Blake’s way, as well as publishing some of Blake’s own work and introducing him to important literary and artistic figures.

Blake became acquainted with the religious ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, but soon rejected them as he developed his own religious philosophy. This is apparent in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” published in 1790, which ends with a revolutionary outburst calling for the end of tyranny.

The revolutionary theme was continued in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793), and his “continental prophecies” of 1793-5 (“America — a Prophecy”, “Europe” and “The Song of Los”). In all of these he sought to place contemporary people and events within a context that stretched from Biblical times through to the Apocalypse.

1794 also saw the publication of “Songs of Experience”, which were soon combined with “Songs of Innocence” to form a single volume. This is probably Blake’s best-known work (apart from “Jerusalem”), but it is still much misunderstood by those who see experience as being a less desirable state than innocence. Blake’s concern was to recognise each as being dependent on the other. Innocence has no value unless it is completed by experience.

The “Songs” are therefore in the same league as the rest of Blake’s work in pointing to the human condition as being in suspense between the past and the future. However, Blake was also very much concerned with the miseries of the present, as evidenced by the social protest of such poems as “The Chimney Sweeper”.  Perhaps Blake’s second best known poem is “The Tyger” (“Tyger, tyger, burning bright”) which is another “Experience” poem.

Later work

Blake next embarked on a much larger project with “The First Book of Urizen”, an alternative Book of Genesis, but there was no second book.

For a time, Blake turned back to his pictorial work, which earned him a better income than poetry, and he produced some fine relief etchings and tempera and watercolour paintings, many of them on Biblical subjects.

In 1795 Blake was commissioned to illustrate Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts”, and over the next two years produced more than 500 watercolours on this theme. However, the project collapsed before he was properly paid for his work and it turned out to be a financial disaster from Blake’s perspective. Despite this, Blake went on to paint more than a hundred watercolours for a similar commission on the poems of Thomas Gray.

Blake had not abandoned poetry completely, and he worked for some time on “Vala; or the Four Zoas”, another massive work on mystical and mythological themes, which he eventually left unfinished.

He made the acquaintance of the writer William Hayley and visited him at his home at Felpham on the Sussex coast (Felpham is now part of the seaside resort of Bognor Regis). Hayley offered him illustration and engraving work and the Blakes moved out of London in September 1800 to rent a cottage near to Hayley’s home. At first the arrangement worked very well, but Hayley’s efforts to control and refine Blake led to a falling out, which was not helped by both William and his wife suffering from poor health.

There is evidence that Blake was subject to growing mental instability at this time, and that his wish to respond to his internal visions through poetry was clashing with the need to carry out etching and portraiture commissions that would earn him a living. Blake’s mental state had convinced him that Hayley was now an enemy rather than a friend, and he determined to leave Felpham when the lease expired on his cottage.

However, before this could happen, Blake found himself in trouble of a different kind. In August 1803 he forcibly ejected a soldier from his garden, mistaking him for an intruder. The soldier then accused Blake of seditious slander against the King, and the case came to court in the following January. Blake was acquitted on all charges, but the incident did nothing to improve his mental state and he was subject to bouts of paranoia for the rest of his life.

Back in London, Blake had to look around for engraving work, but his mental and psychic condition improved somewhat and he once more felt himself capable of writing.

The results were probably Blake’s two greatest epic poems, “Milton” and “Jerusalem”, both started in 1804, but which took several years to complete.

As with Blake’s earlier epics, the poems are peopled with characters that represent aspects of the human psyche, both male and female, plus historical, Biblical and mythological figures, and there are copious references to incidents in Blake’s own life.

Confusingly, the short poem that is commonly known as “Jerusalem”, and is sung to Hubert Parry’s music as the anthem of the Women’s Institute, is not from the much longer poem of that name, but forms part of the preface to “Milton”.

From 1805 onwards, Blake found it difficult to make money from commercial illustration work, as his style was less well-favoured than that of his competitors, but he did manage to acquire several patrons who commissioned his work privately. Without this work it is certain that he would have had great difficulty in making ends meet.

In 1818 Blake met John Linnell, an artist who became a firm friend and introduced Blake to a number of people who commissioned work from him and even made him gifts of money. These commissions included illustrations for the Book of Job, a project that brought Blake a small but regular income for nearly two years, and another series for Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, unfinished at his death.

In his last years, Blake became something of a sage and a curiosity, visited by many up-and-coming artists, including Samuel Palmer.

He died on 12 August 1827, apparently from liver failure, possibly brought on by years of inhaling copper fumes whilst engraving. He was buried in the nonconformists’ burial ground of Bunhill Fields, close to the graves of his parents.

Known in his lifetime largely as a talented but eccentric artist and printmaker, it was many years before he was fully appreciated as a major English poet. Despite his influence on such poets as W. B. Yeats, he is still best remembered for a handful of poems, due to the impenetrability of much of his corpus of mystical and mythological works. However, it was fitting that he should be memorialized by Paolozzi’s bronze of Milton, based on Blake’s 1795 print, placed in the forecourt of the new British Library 200 years later.

© John Welford