William Blake

William Blake (1757–1827)

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in Soho, London, the third of seven children of James Blake, a hosier, and his wife Catherine. His family belonged to the margins of English dissent, and some scholars have traced to the Moravian and Swedenborgian currents of the city the vocabulary of angels, visions and inner light that later filled his work. He was withdrawn from school early, and what education he had came at home and from the print shops and bookstalls of London. At about four he reported seeing God's face at the window; at around nine or ten, a tree on Peckham Rye full of angels. He never treated such experiences as figures of speech. They were the ground he stood on.

At fourteen he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, and the seven years of copying medieval tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey fixed his lifelong preference for the firm, bounded line over the soft modeling of fashionable painters. In 1779 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he quarrelled with Sir Joshua Reynolds and the academic creed that art should follow polite convention. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate daughter of a market gardener, whom he taught to read and to help with printing. She was his companion and collaborator for forty-five years, and they had no children. Blake's early years included a brush with public danger: in 1780, amid the Gordon Riots, he was swept up in the crowd that burned Newgate Prison.

Blake spent nearly all his life in London, leaving it only for three years, from 1800 to 1803, at Felpham on the Sussex coast, under the patronage of the poet William Hayley. The arrangement soured. Hayley wanted a dependable engraver, not a prophet, and Blake felt his gift being smothered. After a quarrel with a soldier named John Scolfield in his garden, Blake was charged in 1803 with sedition for allegedly cursing the king. He was acquitted at Chichester in 1804, but the episode, together with Hayley's condescension, marked the failure of his hopes for patronage and gave him a lasting suspicion of worldly protectors.

His most original achievement was technical as well as poetic. From the 1780s he developed what he called illuminated printing, etching text and image together on copper plates and colouring the impressions by hand. Songs of Innocence appeared in 1789 and was joined by Songs of Experience in 1794; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a satirical overturning of conventional morality, belongs to the early 1790s. He never found a public. Perhaps a few dozen copies of each work were sold in his lifetime, and he lived by commercial engraving, much of it routine, with only a handful of loyal patrons such as Thomas Butts and, late in life, the young painters around John Linnell who called themselves the Ancients.

Blake's religion cannot be tidily classed. He was baptized and buried in the Church of England, yet he despised institutional religion and what he called the "mind-forged manacles" of priestcraft and rationalism alike. He rejected Newton, Locke and Bacon as architects of a mechanical world, and he read Scripture, Milton, Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg with ferocious attention, answering Swedenborg directly in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His position on Christ was nonetheless fervent: late in life he said that Jesus was the only God, and that he himself was a Christian in his own way. The long prophetic books, among them Milton and Jerusalem, were written in a private mythology of Urizen, Los and Albion that few contemporaries could follow.

His last years were poor but not unhappy. He worked on the watercolours for Dante and the engravings for the Book of Job, among the finest things he made. He died on August 12, 1827, in his rooms in Fountain Court off the Strand, singing, according to a witness, of the things he saw in heaven. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields, the dissenters' burying ground.

His Writing and Its Influence

Blake's writing cannot be separated from his printing. The poems and the pictures were designed as one object, etched on copper, printed and coloured by hand, so that no two copies are quite alike. Songs of Innocence and of Experience, subtitled "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul," set paired poems against each other: the lamb and the tyger, the nurse's song of play and the nurse's song of repression. The pairing was not a ladder from naivety to wisdom. Blake held that both states were real, and that a faith which could speak only one of them was either sentimental or cruel. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written in the early 1790s, pushed the argument further, inverting the moral vocabulary of his age and insisting that "Without Contraries is no progression." Its "Proverbs of Hell" were meant to shock, and they did; they were also aimed at a Christianity he believed had mistaken restraint for holiness.

The later prophetic books, among them The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem, are a different undertaking. In them Blake constructed a mythology of fallen and divided humanity, with Urizen as the lawgiver of cold reason, Los as the figure of imagination at work in time, and Albion as the whole human being waiting to be restored. The scheme is demanding, and it kept him from readers in his lifetime. Behind it stands a conviction he never wavered on: that imagination is not a decoration of faith but a faculty by which God is perceived, and that to starve it is to worship a smaller god. His designs for the Book of Job, completed near the end of his life, show the same conviction in a quieter register, reading the old story as the recovery of a man who had mistaken the God of rules for the living God.

His reception was slow. A few friends and the circle of the Ancients kept his memory alive, and Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake in 1863 brought him to the attention of the Victorians, though largely as an eccentric genius. The twentieth century gave him a far larger place. W. B. Yeats and Edwin Ellis produced an early edition of the works, Geoffrey Keynes's editions made the texts widely available, and Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry in 1947 established him as a systematic thinker. By then he was claimed by Romantic poets, by the counterculture, and by readers of widely differing convictions, many of whom took him for an enemy of Christianity.

Christian writers have drawn on him with more care than that reading allows. C. S. Lewis chose the title The Great Divorce as a deliberate answer to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, rejecting Blake's claim that good and evil can be reconciled while keeping something of his hostility to dead religion. Evangelical and Anglican critics have debated whether his Christ is the Christ of the creeds, and the verdict is mixed: Blake affirmed the divinity of Jesus and the centrality of forgiveness, but denied the authority of the institutional church and often spoke of God and humanity as one. Poets and theologians in the Christian tradition have nonetheless returned to him for his insistence that the imagination is a place where faith is exercised, a point that writers such as Madeleine L'Engle and Eugene Peterson, in different ways, have echoed.

Who should read Blake: Readers of this library who want to understand the objection to Christianity that comes from within the imagination rather than from outside it, and who are willing to be unsettled by it. Blake is useful for those who sense that devotional writing can grow tame, and for those who suspect that the reaction against reason and rule has its own dangers. He is not a guide to doctrine or a teacher of spiritual formation, and readers looking for orthodox instruction or plain devotion will find the prophetic books closed to them. He is for those prepared to argue with him, as the best Christian readers have.