WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) - Features and Themes

Occupations drawing and engraving were to become, with poetry, his most powerful means of expression. He worked for his generous but unimaginative patron Hayley until 1804.

Health in 1781 he became ill but recovered thanks to the care of a market gardener, Boucher. He died on August 12, 1827 in poverty and obscurity.

Personality he was defined " a visionary poet" because in childhood and throughout his life, he saw visions of prophets and angels. And also of illustrious dead (Dante, Milton and others)

Marriage married Catherine Boucher in 1782. They have an happy marriage without children. Blake taught her to read and write and to help him  in printing his engravings: her personality was somewhat annihilated by his.

Justice he had problems with justice in 1803. After a quarrel with a drunken soldier he was accused of "seditious expression". Luckily the court knew nothing of his radical poetry and he was acquitted.

Religion he rebelled against conventional religion, rejecting the morality of his day. He denied the existence of God, he was separated from man infact he was only an imagination to him.

Features and Themes

Vision and imagination: B. rejected to materialistic rationalism of the 18^th cent. And stressed the importance of imagination as an instrument of knowledge. He perceived the danger of a materialistic philosophy which relegated man to the status of mechanical instruments in an industrialized world. He found himself in opposition to all the prevailing belief and attitudes of his time. He believed that the Adults hadn't imagination because they were corrupt by the industrialized society.

Philosophy: he found necessary to create a philosophy of his own exaltation of the spirit over the body, of instinct and intuition over education, of spiritual vision over the impressions. He saw the infinite and external beyond the material appearance of the finite world.

He hated the timid conservatism and the conformity of the middle class society, the commercial system that underlay the prosperity of the period and the realistic art and literature.

Illuminated printings: it was a particular process of printing, the secret of which he claimed to have learnt from the spirit of his dead brother.

His poems dealt with the realities of the contemporary world and the potentiality of the spiritual world.

Innocence and experience: his contrasting picture of "innocence" and "experience" gave a paradoxical analysis of the human soul which for B. is both innocence and corrupt.

Exaltation of art: he anticipated the aesthetic movement, he believed that art was a creative vision.

Freedom: he rebelled against any form of oppression and slavery, either social political and religious. He believed that men were born free and that everywhere they were in chains.

Democracy: he opposed any time of institution, including church and state. He sympathized with the downtrodden classes and with women's rights.

Ambiguity: he deliberately cultivated ambiguity and paradox to give his poems wider meanings and to force the reader to think for himself, as well as to accommodate conflicting truths in a single poem or a pair of poems.

The poet was a prophet, whose task was to awaken his generation to the well-organized world of the imagination.

Childhood: represented non only a particular age but a state of soul, a child-like view of life which may persist in maturity, too. Man was close to his divine origin and can partake external truth.

Style:

First type (songs) simple and lyrical language with popular metres (ballad stanza or octosyllabic couplets)

Second type (prophetic works) difficult and committed language with arcane allegory. These types of work were very long and hard to interpret.

Sources and influence: Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Dante's "Divine Comedy", Spencer, Rousseau (for his idea on childhood, age of innocence), Emmanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystical philosopher (for him childhood was a state of soul, not an age), Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism.

Works   

Poetical Sketches.

Songs of innocence and experience: the "Songs of innocence" was written in 1789, after he wrote "songs of experience" to form a single book "Songs of innocence and experience". This book was characterized by the musicality and the simplicity (he used a naïve language rich in monosyllables). Blake believed that the contradiction "innocence" and "experience" was inside everybody and they were both necessary.

The French revolution, a prophecy.

America, a prophecy.

The marriage of heaven and hell.

Milton

Europe

Visions of the daughter of Albion.

And others.