William Blake

gigatos | February 28, 2022

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Summary

William Blake (28 November 1757, London – 12 August 1827, London) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Almost unrecognized in his lifetime, Blake is now considered an important figure in the history of poetry and the fine arts of the Romantic era. He lived all his life in London (with the exception of three years in Felpham).

Although Blake”s contemporaries considered him insane, later critics noted his expressiveness as well as the philosophical and mystical depth of his work. His paintings and poems have been characterized as romantic or pre-Romantic. An adherent of the Bible but an opponent of the Church of England (as well as all forms of organized religion in general), Blake was influenced by the ideals of the French and American Revolutions. Although later disillusioned with many of these political beliefs, he maintained friendships with the political activist Thomas Paine; he was also influenced by the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite all the influences, Blake”s works are difficult to categorize unequivocally. The 19th century writer William Rossetti called him “a glorious luminary” and “a man neither prefigured by his predecessors, nor classified by his contemporaries, nor replaced by known or presumed successors.”

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Origins

Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in Soho, London, the son of James Blake, a shopkeeper. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. William attended school only until the age of ten, learning only to write and read, and was educated at home by his mother, Catherine Blake (nee Wright). Although his parents were Protestant dissenters from the Moravian Church, they baptized William at St. James” Anglican Church in Piccadilly. Throughout his life, the Bible was a strong influence on Blake”s worldview. Throughout his life it would remain a major source of inspiration for him.

As a child, Blake was fascinated by copying Greek subjects from drawings his father acquired for him. Works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Martin van Heemsker and Albrecht Dürer instilled in him a love of classical forms. Judging by the number of paintings and well-bound books his parents bought William, we can assume that the family was, at least for a time, well-to-do. Gradually this occupation developed into a passion for painting. His parents, knowing the ardent temperament of the boy and regretting the fact that he did not go to school, sent him to the lessons of painting. It is true that during these lessons Blake studied only what was interesting to him. His early works show an acquaintance with the work of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spencer.

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Training with an engraver

On August 4, 1772, Blake entered a seven-year apprenticeship in the art of engraving with engraver James Besire of Great Queen Street. By the end of that term, by the time he was 21, he had become a professional engraver. There is no record of any serious quarrel or conflict between them, but Blake”s biographer Peter Ackroyd notes that Blake would later put Baysayer”s name on a list of his artistic rivals, but soon crossed him off. The reason for this was that Baysayer”s style of engraving was already considered old-fashioned at the time, and teaching his pupil in such a way might not have had the best effect on the skills he was gaining in the work as well as on future recognition. And Blake understood that.

In his third year, Baysayer sent Blake to London to draw picturesque frescoes of Gothic churches (an assignment that may well have been given to Blake to exacerbate the conflict between him and James Parker, another of Baysayer”s students). The experience gained while working at Westminster Abbey contributed to Blake”s own artistic style and ideas. The Abbey at that time was decorated with military armor and equipment, images of memorial services, and numerous wax figures. Ackroyd notes that “the strongest impressions were created by the alternation of vivid colors, now appearing, now seeming to disappear.” Blake spent long evenings sketching the abbey. One day he was interrupted by the boys at Westminster School, one of whom so tormented Blake that James violently pushed him from the scaffolding to the ground, where he collapsed with a terrible rumble. Blake had visions at the abbey, such as seeing Christ and the apostles, a church procession with monks and priests, during which he imagined singing psalms and chorales.

The Royal Academy

On October 8, 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy at Old Somerset House near the Strand. Although he was not required to pay tuition, during his six-year stay at the academy Blake had to buy his own supplies and instruments. Here he rebels against what he calls the “unfinished style of fashionable artists,” such as Rubens, so beloved by the school”s first president, Joshua Reynolds. As time passed, Blake hated Reynolds” attitude toward art in general and especially his search for a “single truth” and a “classical understanding of beauty.” Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that “the tendency to see a subject in the abstract and to generalize and classify it is a triumph of the human mind”; Blake, in his marginal notes, noted that “to generalize everything, to ”lump it together,” is to be an idiot; to sharpen the focus is what every feature deserves. Blake also disliked Reynolds” modesty, which he considered hypocrisy. Blake preferred the then fashionable oil paintings of Reynolds to the classic neatness and clarity of the works of Michelangelo and Raphael that had influenced his early work.

In his first year at the academy, Blake became friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard, and George Cumberland, with whom he shared his radical political views, prompted in large part by the American Revolution.

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Gordon Riots

Blake”s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist”s account of an incident in June 1780, describes how, as he walked past Baysayer”s shop on Great Queen Street, Blake was nearly knocked down by an angry mob that was on its way to storm Newgate Prison in London. They attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building on fire, and let the prisoners go free. According to eyewitness accounts, Blake was at the forefront of the crowd during the attack. This rebellion, later a reaction to the Papists Act of Parliament, which lifted sanctions against Roman Catholicism, became known as the Gordon Riots. They also provoked a large number of laws from the government of George III, as well as the creation of a police force.

Despite Gilchrist”s insistence that Blake joined the mob involuntarily, some biographers have argued that he allegedly joined the mob impulsively, or supported the riots as a revolutionary act. A different view is held by Jerome McGann, who argues that since the riots were reactionary, they could only have aroused Blake”s indignation.

Getting married and starting a career

In 1782 Blake meets John Flaxman, who becomes his patron, and Catherine Boucher, who soon becomes his wife. At this time Blake is recovering from a relationship that culminated in his rejection of a marriage proposal. He details this sad story to Catherine and her parents, after which he asks the girl, “Do you feel sorry for me?” When Catherine answers in the affirmative, he confesses, “Then I love you.” William Blake and Katherine Boucher, who was five years his junior, were married on August 18 at St. Mary”s Church in Battersea. Catherine, who was illiterate, put an “X” instead of her signature on the marriage certificate. The original can be seen in the church, where a commemorative stained glass window was also installed between 1976 and 1982. Later, in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake also taught her the art of printmaking. Throughout his life, he would realize how invaluable this woman”s help and support was to him. In the midst of countless failures, Catherine would not let the flame of inspiration in her husband”s soul go out and would also take part in the printing of his many illustrations.

The publication of Blake”s first collection of poetry, Poetical Sketches, is attributed to 1783. After his father”s death, in 1784, William and a former fellow student, James Parker, opened a print shop and began working with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson”s house was a meeting place for intellectuals, some of the leading English dissidents of the day. Among them were the theologian and scholar Joseph Priestley, the philosopher Richard Price, the painter John Henry Fussley, the feminist Mary Walstonecraft, and the American revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had high hopes for the French and American Revolutions and wore the Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French Revolutionaries, but despaired with the years of Robespierre”s heyday and the Rule of Terror in France. In 1784 Blake also composed but left unfinished his manuscript, An Island in the Moon.

Blake illustrated Mary Walstonecraft”s book True Stories from Real Life. They are thought to have shared views on equality between the sexes and the institution of marriage, yet there is no indisputable evidence that they ever met at all. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion, published in 1793, Blake condemns the cruel absurdity of forced, coerced abstinence and loveless marriage, and stands up for the right of women to exercise their abilities and capabilities.

Relief etching

In 1788, at the age of 31, Blake experimented with the technique of etching. The artist called the process he invented “illuminated printing” because he used his method to design most of his books of poetry – to print text and illustrations simultaneously on one sheet of paper. This is how Blake”s masterpiece, the illustrations for the Bible, was executed. Blake applied the text and illustrations to the copper plates with a pen or brush with acid-resistant varnish. The plates were then etched in acid to dissolve the raw copper and produce an embossed letterpress printing plate. In contrast to conventional gravure etching, Blake called his technique “stereotype,” the “intaglio method,” or “relief etching.

This was a fundamental change from the then generally accepted method of etching etching for gravure printing, where the image lines are exposed to acid and the plate is preserved under an acid-resistant varnish. The relief etching invented by Blake later became an important commercial method. Before pages imprinted with such plates were turned into a book volume, they were hand-colored with watercolor paints and then stitched. Blake used this method of imprinting to illustrate most of his famous works, including Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thal, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem, Emanation of the Gigantic Albion.

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Prints

Although Blake became famous specifically for his relief etching technique, in his own work he more often had to adhere to the intaglio method, the standard eighteenth-century method of engraving, which consisted simply of notching a tin plate. It was complex and laborious work; it took a great deal of time, months, even years, to transfer images to the plates, but, as Blake”s contemporary John Boydell noted, this method of engraving made its product “a weak link to commerce,” allowing artists to get closer to the people, and making it an important art form by the end of the eighteenth century.

Blake also used the intaglio method in his works, particularly for the illustrations for The Book of Job, which he completed just before his death. Blake”s technique of relief etching has been the main subject of research, but in 2009 a work was published that focused on Blake”s surviving plates, including those used for the Book of Job: they show that he also frequently used the technique of metalwork (repoussage): to smooth out imperfections, he simply turned the plate over and smoothed out the unwanted notch with several strokes, making it convex. This technique, typical of the engraving work of the time, is in many ways inferior to the faster process of minting in liquid medium that Blake used for his relief impression, and explains why the engraving process was so time-consuming.

Further life and career

Blake and Catherine”s marriage was strong and happy until the artist”s death. Blake taught Catherine how to write, and she helped him color the printed books of his poems. Gilchrist, on the other hand, tells of a “tumultuous time” in the early years of their marriage. Some biographers have claimed that Blake tried to invite a mistress to the marriage bed according to the principles of the Swedenborgian Society, but scholars have decided to dismiss this theory as mere speculation. The child that William and Catherine so desired, Thal, might have been the first child, but not surviving the birth, became the last. Perhaps she is the one Blake writes about in The Book of Thael.

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Felpham

In 1800 Blake moved to a small house in Felpham, Sussex (now West Sussex), having been commissioned to illustrate the works of the young poet William Haley. It was in this house that Blake once worked on Milton: A Poem (the design of the book”s preface is dated 1804, but Blake continued to work through 1808). The book begins with the lines: “On this steep mountain slope did the foot of an angel tread?”, immortalized later in the hymn “Jerusalem.” Blake soon became indignant at his new patron, realizing that Haley was not at all interested in the arts and was more engaged in “the hard work of business. Blake”s disappointment with his patron Haley so affected the former that he wrote in his poem “Milton” that “Friends in the material world are spiritual enemies.

Blake”s problems with authority reached a critical stage in August 1803 when he got into a fight with a soldier named John Scofield. Blake was accused not only of assault but also of making inflammatory and seditious speeches against the king. Scofield stated that Blake exclaimed: “Damn the king. All his soldiers are slaves.” The Chichester retrial of the jury finds Blake not guilty. The Sussex City Gazette reports, “The fabrication of what happened was so obvious that the accused was immediately acquitted.” Later, in an illustration for the poem “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” Scofield would become a symbol of “the limitedness of the mind, ”enclosed in the fetters” of slavery.”

Return to London

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began work on the poem Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-1820), his most ambitious work. Intent on portraying the heroes of Chaucer”s Canterbury Tales, Blake approached the merchant Robert Cromec (English) with the idea of selling such engravings. Thinking Blake too eccentric to paint popular paintings, Cromerck immediately referred the order to Thomas Stotherd. When Blake learned that he had been cheated, he ended all relations with Stotherd. He opened an independent exhibition in his brother”s haberdashery store at 27 Broad Street in London”s Soho district. The exhibition was designed to sell, along with other works, his version of the illustrations for The Canterbury Tales (collectively titled The Canterbury Pilgrims). He would also write a “Descriptive Catalogue” (1809), which would present what Anthony Blunt would call an “outstanding analysis” of Chaucer”s work. Blake”s book rightly takes its place in the classic anthology of criticism on Chaucer. At the same time it contains a detailed explanation of Blake”s other paintings.

However, the exhibition was very poorly attended, not a single painting in tempera was sold, not a single painting in watercolor. An article about the exhibition, which appeared in The Examiner, was openly hostile.

In 1818 John Cumberland”s son introduced Blake to a young artist named John Linnell. Through Linnell, Blake met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. They shared Blake”s antipathy to modern trends and his belief in a spiritual and artistic revival. At the age of 65, Blake took up the illustrations for the Book of Job. These works would later be admired by John Ruskin, who would compare Blake to Rembrandt, and by Ralph Vaughan-Williams, who would direct his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, using a selection of the artist”s illustrations.

Later, Blake would sell a great deal of his work, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, Blake”s patron, who regarded him more as a friend than as an honored artist whose work had been honored. And that was the typical view of Blake”s work throughout his life.

In 1826, with the help of Linnell, Blake is commissioned to create a series of prints for Dante”s The Divine Comedy. But Blake”s death in 1827 prevents him from realizing his bold vision, and only a few works in watercolor and only seven proofs remain completed. But even these were admired:

Given the complexity of the contents of The Divine Comedy, Blake”s talented watercolor illustrations are among the artist”s greatest achievements. The mastery of watercolor painting has reached an even higher level than before, and has been used to incredible effect in recreating the absolutely unique atmosphere of each of the three states of being in the poem.

Blake”s illustrations of the poem do not accompany what is described literally; rather, they force a critical reconsideration of what is happening, sometimes providing new insights into the spiritual and moral aspects of the work.

Since the project was never completed, Blake”s intent remains unclear. Some take the view, however, that it can only be concluded by speaking generally of the entire series of illustrations. Namely, they challenge the text they accompany by challenging the author”s opinion: for example, of the scene where Homer marches with a sword and his associates, Blake writes: “Everything in The Divine Comedy suggests that because of his tyrannical ideas Dante ”made” This World out of Creation and the Goddess of Nature, but without the participation of the Holy Spirit.” Nor perhaps did Blake share Dante”s admiration for the poetry of the ancient Greeks, nor did he share the undoubted joy with which he assigned and dispensed charges and punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the dark humor of some of the poem”s songs).

But Blake shared Dante”s distrust of materialism and his protest against the corrupt nature of authority. He also took great pleasure in being able to present his personal sense of the atmosphere of the poem visually, through illustration. Even Blake”s sense of impending death could not distract him from the art in which he was fully absorbed. During this time he was feverishly poring over Dante”s Inferno. He is said to have spent one of his last shillings on a pencil to continue sketching.

Blake lived his last years on Fountain Court near the Strand (the house where he lived was demolished when the Savoy Hotel was built). On the day of his death Blake was working tirelessly on illustrations of Dante. He is said to have finally put the work down and turned to his wife, who had been sitting on the bed beside him the entire time, unable to hold back her tears. Looking at her, he exclaimed: “Oh, Kate, please remain immovable, I will now paint your portrait, for you have always been an angel to me.” After completing the portrait (now lost and unreceived), Blake put aside all his brushes and supplies and began to sing hymns and poems. At 6 p.m. that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her forever, Blake passed away. Gilchrist said a woman who lived in the same house and was present when Blake died said: “I saw not the death of a man, but of a blessed angel.”

In his letter to Samuel Palmer, George Richmond describes Blake”s death this way:

He rested with honor. He went to the country he had dreamed of seeing all his life, saying he would find the greatest happiness there. He hoped for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died, his face became clear, his eyes brightened, and he began to sing about the things he had seen in heaven.

Catherine paid for her husband”s funeral with money borrowed from Lynnell. Five days after his death, on the eve of his and Catherine”s 45th wedding anniversary, Blake was buried at the Dissenter”s burial ground in Bunhill Fields (now Islington), where his parents were also buried. The funeral was attended by Catherine, Edward Calvert, George Richmond, Frederick Tatum, and John Linnell. After her husband”s death, Catherine moved into the Tatham home, where she lived and worked as a housekeeper. During this time, she claimed, she was often visited by the ghost of her husband. She continued to sell his illustrations and paintings, but would not take over his business without first “discussing it with Mr. Blake.” On the day of her own death, in October 1831, she was as calm, as joyful as her husband, and called to him “as if he were in the next room to say that she was on her way to him and very soon they would be together.

After her death Blake”s manuscripts passed to Frederick Tatem, who burned some of what he considered heretical or too politically radical. Tatham was an Irvingian, a member of one of the many nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalist movements, and so he rejected without hesitation anything that “reeked of blasphemy. The sexual elements in some of Blake”s paintings were also unacceptable, which led to their destruction by another friend of the poet, John Linell.

Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake”s grave has been lost; the cemetery was badly damaged during the war, the monuments were dismantled, and a garden was planted on the burial site. The poet”s memory was commemorated by a stele with the inscription “Near this place rest the remains of the poet and artist William Blake (it is about 20 meters from the actual place of burial. The exact location of the grave was established by a couple from Portugal, Carole and Luis Garrido, after 14 years of searching. The Blake Society placed a tombstone on it with the inscription “Here lies William Blake 1757-1827 Poet Artist Prophet” and lines from the poem “Jerusalem”; the slab was unveiled on August 12, 2018.

Blake was also beatified by the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica (a branch of the Order of the Knights Templar of the East). In 1949, the William Blake Award for Religious Art was established in Australia. In 1957, a memorial to Blake and his wife was erected in Westminster Abbey.

Blake was not a member of any political party. His poetry explicitly expresses a rebellious attitude toward the abuse of power by the ruling classes, as described in David Erdman”s great study, Blake: Prophet Against Empire. Blake was troubled by senseless wars and the destructive effects of the Industrial Revolution. Much of his poetry describes the results of the French and American Revolutions in symbolic allegory. Erdmann argues that Blake was disillusioned with them, believing that they simply replaced monarchy with irresponsible mercantilism, and notes that Blake was an absolute opponent of slavery and suggests that some of his poems, usually considered to be celebrating “free love,” were in fact directed against slavery. In his study “William Blake. William Blake: Visionary Anarchist,” Peter Marshall calls Blake and his contemporary William Godwin forerunners of modern anarchism. The British Marxist historian Edward Palmer Thompson, in his work “Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law,” shows how strongly dissident religious ideas influenced opponents of the English monarchy.

Blake”s later works were printed in much smaller numbers than his earlier ones. The reason for this is that the poet now operates with a mythology of his own devising, with its own complex symbolism. Patti Smith”s recent anthology by Vintage Books focuses on the early work, as do many other studies, such as D. G. Gillham”s William Blake, for example.

The early works, breathing the spirit of rebellion and rebellion, can be seen as a protest against dogmatic religion. This mood is particularly evident in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Satan is essentially a hero struggling against a self-appointed authoritarian deity. In later works, such as Milton and Jerusalem, Blake constructs a particular vision of humanity redeemed by self-sacrifice and forgiveness, while demonstrating his disgust with Christianity and its traditions.

Psychoanalyst June Singer has written that Blake”s later works represent a development of the poet”s ideas first reflected in his earlier works, in particular the truly humanitarian idea of uniting body and soul.

John Middleton Murray notes the disconnect between Marriage and later works, while in the early Blake focused on the “confrontation between passion and reason,” later Blake emphasized self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the path to harmony. The rejection of the dualistic idea in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is evidenced, in particular, by the humanization of Urizen”s character in later works. Middleton characterizes Blake”s later works by the presence in them of “mutual understanding” and “mutual forgiveness.

The “free love” movement in the nineteenth century

After William Blake”s death, a variety of movements interpreted his complex symbolism and allegories to their own advantage.In particular, Blake (along with Mary Walstonecraft and her husband William Godwin) is considered a forerunner of the “free love” movement that broke out in the 19th century, a vast reform movement that began in 1820. The reformers argued that marriage was slavery and advocated the repeal of all state prohibitions concerning sexual activity, such as homosexuality, prostitution, and even adultery, culminating in the birth control movement in the very early 20th century. However, Blake scholars were more concerned with this theme in Blake”s work in the early twentieth century than they are today. Today the theme is sometimes touched on, but with reservations; for example, researcher Mangus Ankarsjö believes that the nineteenth-century “free love” movement was centered not on the idea of multiple partner changes, but on Walstonecraft”s idea that the state institution of marriage was “legal prostitution. This had much in common with the feminist movements of the time.

Blake was critical of the marriage of his time and denounced the traditional moral and Christian tenets that maintained that chastity was a virtue. At a time of acute family turmoil, one of the causes of which was Catherine”s infertility, he firmly declared his intention to bring home a second wife. His poetry argues that the outside world”s demands for iron fidelity turn love from affection to obligation. A poem such as “Earth”s Answer” seems to promote polygamy. In the poem “London,” he describes “The Marriage Herald.” “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” is a tribute to free love, where the relationship between Bromion and Utuna, in his view, is held by law rather than love. For Blake, Love and law are absolutely antithetical to each other, and he scolds the “frozen bed of love. “In “Visions,” Blake writes:

…she, who burns with youth, and knows no better, is chained by the curse of the law to one she cannot bear.Should she drag the chains of her life in tedious passion?

A notable nineteenth-century poet who promoted free love was Algernon Charles Swinburne, who wrote a book about Blake. He drew attention to similar motifs in the poet”s poems, where he extolled “holy natural love,” free from the shackles of jealousy, which Blake calls “the crawling skeleton. Swinburne also echoes these motifs in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which condemns the hypocrisy of the “religious debauchery” of the defenders of tradition. His other contemporary, Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), also an advocate of free love, was also inspired by the special attention Blake paid in his work to a vital energy free from the prejudices of the outside world.

Pierre Berger emphasizes that for Blake the enemies of free love are “jealousy and selfishness,” and so does Mary Wolstonecraft, who, like him, places true love, not duty, at the head of relationships.

According to S. Foster Dimon, Blake, as a religious writer, held the concept of man as a being “fallen,” and for Blake the main obstacles to free love lie in the corruption of society and human nature, and not in the intolerance of society and jealousy per se, but in the hypocritical nature of human communication.

Some scholars believe that the poet”s conception of free love underwent a change. Magnus Ankarsjö notes that while the heroine of The Vision of the Daughters of Albion is a strong advocate of free love, at the end of the poem she becomes more circumspect as she comes to realize the dark side of sexuality and cries, “Is that which can drink another to the bottom, like a sponge that absorbs water, and is love?” Ankarsjö also notes that Wollstonecraft, who had been Blake”s main source of inspiration, similarly began to express more cautious views on sexual freedom late in life.

Blake”s later manuscripts show a renewed interest in Christianity, and although he radically alters his interpretation of Christian morality so that sensual pleasure has a place in it, much less emphasis is placed on sexual freedom, the theme of some of his earlier poems. In later works there is a motif of self-denial, the reason for which must still be love rather than authoritarian coercion. Berger is convinced of Blake”s changing attitude toward “free love” in his later period. Berger notes that young Blake follows the impulse, while at a more mature age his ideal of true love, which is sincere and capable of sacrifice, is already fully formed.

Although Blake”s attacks on mainstream religion were shocking for his time, his rejection of religiosity did not mean that he did not accept religion as such. His view of Christianity can be seen in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” written in the likeness of the Bible”s predictions. In his work, Blake devotes a section to “Proverbs of Hell,” among which are the following:

In The Everlasting Gospel Blake presents Jesus not as a philosopher or as a Savior, but as a truly creative person who is above all dogma, logic, and even morality:

For Blake, Jesus is the symbol of an important relationship and unity between the divine and the human: “Everything was spoken in one language and believed in one religion: it was the religion of Jesus, the ever-sounding gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus.”

One of Blake”s strongest objections to Christianity was that it seemed to him that the religion encouraged the suppression of man”s natural needs and discouraged earthly joy. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake says that:

People are admitted to Heaven not because they have mastered their Passions, or had no Passions at all, but because they have Cultivated in themselves their Understanding. The Treasures of Heaven are not the Denial of the Passions, but the Essence of the Intellect from which all these Passions sprout , in their Eternal Glory.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell also has lines condemning religion:

Blake does not subscribe to the idea of the separateness of the soul from the body from each other, but views the body as the basis and the soul as an extension. Thus, the rejection of bodily desires that Christianity calls for is a dualistic error resulting from a misconception of the relationship between body and soul; in one work he presents Satan as a “mistaken state” and as an impossibility of obtaining salvation.

Blake contrasted sophistry with theological thought that justifies pain, tolerates evil, and forgives injustice. He harbored an aversion to self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and especially with the repression of sexuality: “Prudence is a rich old ugly maiden groomed by helplessness. “He who desires something but does nothing for it produces a plague.” For him, the concept of “sin” is a trap for human desire (briar from “The Garden of Love”); he believes that reverence for a moral code imposed from outside is against the human spirit and his being:

He did not hold to the doctrine that God is Lord, a Being separate and superior to mankind; this becomes clear from the words about Jesus Christ: “He is one God, and so am I, and so are you. One of the main sayings of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell is, “God exists and works only in men. This echoes Blake”s belief in freedom and social equality among men and in the equality of the sexes.

Blake created his own mythology, which he set forth in his prophetic books. It is an entire world inhabited by deities and heroes to whom he gave unusual names: Urizen, Luva, Tarmas, Urtona, Los, Enitharmon, Ahania, Enion, Rintra, Bromion, Tyriel, Har, etc. Blake”s mythology has many origins, including the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, the Scandinavian Eddas, and the treatises of theosophists, occultists, and religious mystics such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme, among others.

Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Relying on his own fantastical religious beliefs, Blake contrasted them with Newton”s vision of the universe.

Blake also believed that Joshua Reynolds” painting, which depicted the natural incidence of light on objects, was truly a product of the “vegetative eye,” and he considered Locke and Newton “the real progenitors of the Joshua Reynolds aesthetic. In England at the time there was a fashion for mezzotint, a print that was made by applying thousands of tiny dots to the surface depending on the features being depicted. Blake traced the analogy between this and Newton”s theory of light. Blake never used this technique, choosing to develop the method of engraving in particular in a fluid medium, insisting that

Despite his opposition to Enlightenment principles, Blake still arrived at a linear aesthetic that was more traditional for Neoclassicism, particularly the engravings of John Flaxman, than for the engravings of Romanticism, to which Blake was often classified.

At the same time, Blake was seen as an Enlightenment poet and artist in the sense that he similarly rejected ideas, systems, authorities, and traditions of style. In a dialectical sense, he used the spirit of the Enlightenment as a spirit of confrontation with external authorities in order to criticize the narrow-minded conception of the period.

Northrop Frye, speaking of Blake”s constancy and steadfast views, notes that Blake himself said how strikingly similar his notes in his fifties on Reynolds were to his notes in his youth on Locke and Bacon. According to Fry, “consistency in his beliefs was itself one of his own principles.

Blake abhorred slavery and believed in sexual and racial equality. Several of his poems and paintings express the idea of universal humanity: “all men are alike (though infinitely different). In one poem, written on behalf of a black boy, white and black bodies are described as shady groves and clouds that exist only until they are “illuminated by the rays of love:

Blake had a lively interest in social and political events throughout his life, and social and political language is often found in his mystical symbolism. His views on what constituted oppression and restriction of liberty extended to the church. Blake”s spiritual beliefs can be seen in Songs of Knowledge (1794), in which he distinguishes between the Old Testament, whose limitations he does not accept, and the New Testament, whose influence he regards as positive.

Blake claimed to have had visions from an early age. The first occurred as a child, when he was four years old, and, according to the story, the young artist “saw God” when He poked his head through a window, causing Blake to wail in horror. At the age of 8-10 in Peckham Paradise, London, Blake himself claimed to have seen “a tree literally flecked with angels, bright angel wings scattering the branches of the tree like stars.” According to the story told by Blake”s Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and recorded his vision without getting a beating from his father for lying only because of his mother”s intervention. All evidence suggests, though, that Blake”s parents were very supportive of their son, especially his mother. Some of Blake”s early paintings adorned the walls of her room. On another occasion, as Blake watched the mowers at work, he saw angel-like figures in their midst.

Blake”s accounts of his visions so impressed the artist and astrologer John Varley that he asked Blake to capture them on paper in his presence. The result was the Ghost Heads series, consisting of over a hundred pencil portraits including images of historical and mythological figures such as David, Solomon, Bathsheba, Nebuchadnezzar, as well as the Devil, Satan, “Cancer,” “The Man Who Built the Pyramids” and many others. Based on the latter, Blake created one of his most famous paintings, Ghost of the Flea (Eng.) (Russ.

Throughout his life Blake saw visions. They were often associated with religious themes and episodes from the Bible, and inspired his later spiritual work and quest. Religious intent is central to his work. God and Christianity are the intellectual center of his works, a source of inspiration for the artist. On top of this, Blake believed he was guided by archangels in the creation of his paintings. In a letter to John Flexman on September 21, 1800, Blake writes: “Felpham is a fine place to study because there is more spirituality here than in London. Paradise here opens on all sides of Golden Gates. My wife and sister are feeling well, waiting for Neptune”s embrace… I am more revered in paradise for my work than I ever thought possible. In my brain are scholarly works and studies, my rooms are filled with books and vintage paintings I wrote and painted in the years of eternity before my earthly birth; and these works are bliss for the archangels.”

William Wordsworth remarked, “There was not the slightest doubt that this man was insane, but there is something about his obsession that interests me far more than the minds of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.

Д. С. Williams (1899-1983) said that Blake was a romantic with a critical view of the world. He also argues that Songs of Innocence was created as a vision of the ideal, while the spirit of utopia is present in Songs of Experience.

Blake”s work went unnoticed for a generation after his death. He was almost forgotten until Alexander Gilchrist began writing a biography of him in 1860. Modern art historians regard him as a forerunner of Victorian fairy tale painting, an activity that took place in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Blake is most closely associated with the work of John Anster Fitzgerald.

In the twentieth century William Blake received full and unqualified recognition. The leading scholars of his work in the early to mid-century included Sue Foster Damon, Jeffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye, David Erdman, and G. E. Bentley, Jr.

His work influenced many modernists, surrealists, and many composers such as Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan-Williams. The Irish poet William Butler Yates edited a collection of Blake”s works in 1893 and wrote several research papers about him.

June Singer and many others believe that Blake”s thoughts on human nature were ahead of his time and even similar in many ways to the theories of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, although he perceived Blake”s work only as an artistic product, not as an authentic representation of unconscious processes. Diane Hume George believes that Blake can be seen as the predecessor of Sigmud Freud.

Blake was a major influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and on the subculture of the 1960s. He was cited by such members of the generation as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, musicians Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and others. Most of the main ideas of Philip Pullman”s fantasy trilogy, Dark Beginnings, are borrowed from Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake”s poems have also been set to music by many popular composers, and Blake”s prints have been a major influence on the modern graphic novel. According to Edward Larissie, “Blake is the Romanticist writer who has had the greatest influence on the twentieth century. In Jim Jarmusch”s Dead Man, Indian Nobody takes the main character, namesake William Blake, for the long-dead English poet and artist.

American science fiction writer Philip José Farmer”s “Tiered World” series is populated by characters who bear the names of key characters from Blake”s mythology–Urizen, Tarmas, etc. The continuity with Blake is explicitly stated in the text of the works.

“Themes from William Blake”s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is the fourth studio album by the Norwegian band Ulver, released in 1998. It was written to lyrics from Blake”s poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”. The lyrics of the album fully correspond to the poem and praise Satan as a free spirit.

In the 2002 film Red Dragon, directed by Brett Ratner from the Hannibal Lecter series, a character named Francis Dolarhyde finds inspiration in Blake”s works, including having a tattoo on his back in the form of the painting The Great Red Dragon and the Sun Clad Wife. He later eats the original painting, as he sees it as tremendously powerful, and considers the act a Great Rebirth into the Beast for himself.

Also read, biographies – Diego Maradona

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