Study Guide to The Poetry of William Blake

By Intelligent Education

<!--td {border: 1px solid #ccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}-->

• Language: English
• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645424710

Intelligent Education

Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO WILLIAM BLAKE

INTRODUCTION

On November 28, 1757, William Blake was born, the second son of James and Catherine Blake. The father, a relatively unprosperous hosier, housed his family at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Golden Square, London. The once-fashionable neighborhood was then becoming a commercial district, and today it is one of several warehouses and upper-story tailors’ workrooms. A blue disk attached to the recently-erected house that is now number 28 commemorates the birthplace of William Blake, poet and artist.

CHILDHOOD

Although James Blake was a nonconformist (or a dissenter) he still believed that certain rites should be performed by the Church of England. Thus, William, his brothers James, John, Robert, and his sister Catherine were christened at St. James Church in Piccadilly. William was a strange child, stormy of temperament and solitary in his ways. He was highly sensitive and had a remarkable imagination. At the age of four, he envisioned the face of God pressed against the window, to which he responded with screams. By the time he was eight, the occurrence of visions was habitual, and on one of his solitary walks toward the open country he reported having seen Ezekiel and a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye. Not especially tolerant of William’s reports, his father threatened to thrash the boy, but was prevented from doing so by the mother. So jarring to the sensitive boy was the threat of punishment, that he kept the visions which continued to himself, subsequently slipping away from his family into the preferred world of his imagination. Although intolerant of his son’s visionary faculties, Mr. Blake realized that the sensitive boy should be spared the rigors of school, and William was taught to read and write at home. By the age of nine, he was a voracious reader. His display of a precocious talent for drawing warranted his being sent at the age of ten to Mr. Pars’ drawing school in the Strand. The earlier of the Poetical Sketches was written when William was twelve.

APPRENTICESHIP

At first it was thought that the young Blake might be sent to the studio of a well-known painter, but William believed the cost of this would pose a hardship for the rest of the family so he asked instead if he could study engraving. At fourteen he was apprenticed to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. Blake worked his craft at the shop for two years, but with the arrival of new apprentices, friction arose and the young man was permitted to work away from the establishment. Basire sent him to Westminster Abbey, where William spent the next five years sketching the monuments there, and making drawings of other churches. The effect of his work at the Abbey was to Gothicize his imagination, for everything connected with Gothic art and architecture to him represented the passion of living form, and traces of Gothic style can be seen in his later works. It was during his apprenticeship, when he was nineteen and twenty, that he completed the Poetical Sketches.

EARLY MANHOOD

During the seventh and last year of his apprenticeship, Blake joined the Royal Academy and studied drawing at the Antique School under the Swiss decorative artist, George Moser. Here he tended to rebel at the use of life models and at the attempt of others to tamper with the formation of his own opinions. When his apprenticeship was over in 1779, Blake began to earn his living as an engraver and did not lack for commissions. His principal employers were booksellers named Harrison and Johnson, for whom he engraved illustrations for magazines and novels. In addition to illustrations, Blake received many commissions for engravings from pictures. At this time he also began to paint water-colors, the first of which was The Penance of Jane Shore. The important friends of these early years were the illustrator, Stotard; Flaxman, a sculptor; Henry Fuseli, a Swiss-born painter and writer, and an Irish painter named Barry, who had a visionary faculty in common with Blake.

COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

In 1781, the young artist fell in love with a lively little girl named Polly Wood. Unknown to him, however, she was encouraging the affections of another admirer. When she rejected his suit somewhat scornfully, he was crushed and went immediately to Battersea for a change of scene. There, as a guest of a market-gardener named Boucher, he told his troubles to Catherine, the daughter of his host. She consoled him with enough success to become his fiancee, having been convinced upon first sight that he was to be the man in her life. Blake’s father did not at first approve of the match. However, when William was earning enough money to support her a year later, they were married on August 18, 1782, and set up housekeeping in Green Street, Leicester Fields.

MARRIED LIFE

To most observers, Catherine and William had a most successful and happy marriage. However, theirs was not a trouble-free relationship. Poverty was a constant and pressing reality for most of their years together. They had no children. William was temperamental and frequently difficult because of the injuries he felt the outside world afforded those of superior vision whom it misunderstood. While their problems were not unique, nor the source of major unrest between husband and wife, they did exist, although most Blake biographers have chosen to dwell on the more positive aspects of the marriage. These outnumber the negative ones by far. Catherine was illiterate when Blake married her. She was, however, docile, intelligent, and inordinately devoted to her husband. He taught her to read, write, draw, and engrave. She assisted him in his work and was frugal and a conscientious housewife. Her unquestioning faith in him was invaluable. She shared the glory of Blake’s spiritual life as well as the poverty and frustration of his professional disappointments. Although she was not acceptable to the circle of bluestockings who patronized her husband, she was able to suffer their snobbery until William had done with them.

OTHER PROBLEMS

There were private incidents, too. Three are particularly well-known and indicative of her humility and its limitations. When in 1784, William’s younger brother Robert joined their household, a dispute arose between Catherine and her brother-in-law. Forced by her husband to kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon, she did so only to have her apology repeated the other way around by the younger man. His magnanimity terminated the issue happily. In later years, however, she was less tolerant of William’s sister, who for this reason did not remain long in residence with the Blakes. Lastly, and perhaps of a more serious nature, was William’s invitation to Mary Wollstonecraft to join their household. Catherine reacted vehemently and negatively, and the menage was never formed, much to William’s dismay. These discordant elements are the only ones on biographical record, but their deep ramifications have been a matter of moderate speculation in connection with Blake’s poetry. The greater portion of material about the Blakes’ relationship contains anecdotes and extensive descriptions only of their exceptional compatibility. During their years together, she was by his side whether at work engraving by day or keeping a vigil during the night when he was visited by his visions. After his death it is said that Catherine communed with William daily, and never made a decision before consulting the visiting spirit of her husband.

EARLY WORKS

In 1783, at the expense of his friends Flaxman and the Reverend Henry Mathew, Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed. These were originally sung or recited during Blake’s visits to the salon of Mrs. Mathew and her friends the bluestockings, or the ladies of society and intellect of that day. The copies of Poetical Sketches were neither published nor offered for sale. Soon afterward, however, Blake alienated himself from this group finding their conversation and limited imaginative depth hostile to his more independent spirit and somewhat uncouth attitudes. In 1784 his brother Robert came to live with the Blakes, for their father had died and the younger brother was to be an apprentice in the printseller’s shop in which William was a partner with James Parker, a former fellow-apprentice. Robert and William were spiritually akin, and when the younger man fell ill in 1787, Blake tended him day and night during the last weeks of the illness. When Robert died in 1793, William saw his soul rising to heaven clapping its hands for joy.

MORE PUBLISHING

After Robert’s death, the partnership with Parker was dissolved and the Blakes moved to another residence where they lived for the next five years. At the time William was much in the company of sympathizers with the French Revolution whom he met through Johnson the book-seller. Among this group were some of the most radical thinkers of that era: Tom Paine, Dr. Price, Dr. Joseph Priestly, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft. During this time, Blake was employing the newly-revealed process of relief engraving and produced his Tracts There is No Natural Religion and All Religions are One. He also annotated Lavater’s Aphorisms, Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels and wrote Tiriel. In 1789 Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel were engraved in which his mysticism was revealed. A year later, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was engraved. In 1791 Book I of The French Revolution was typeset by Johnson but was not published. Still involved with his radical friends, he published America: A Prophecy and engraved Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793. The following year Songs of Experience, Europe: A Prophecy and The First Book of Urizen were engraved.

Disillusioned by the atrocities committed during the Reign of Terror in France and the rationalism of his revolutionary associates, Blake’s career as a rebel and sympathizer reached a turning point which led to a more mystical outlook. In 1795 his mythological system was initially revealed in the engravings of The Song of Los, The Book of Los, and The Book of Ahania. It is thought that at this time he commenced work on a long mystical poem first called Vala, then altered to The Four Zoas. The prophetic works were incomprehensible to the public and did not provide the commercial substance necessary to support a wife. In 1793, Blake had the good fortune to meet Thomas Butts, who became a lifelong friend and generous patron. By 1797, however, Blake was suffering from a serious lack of employment, although his personal productivity in poetry and engraving had been notably ample. Thus, in 1799 he turned to water-color designing and for this work received some commissions from Butts.

LATER WORKS

In 1800, Blake was introduced by his good friend Flaxman to William Hayley, a country squire and writer of popular verse. At Hayley’s request, the Blakes moved from London to the seashore at Felpham and rented a cottage where Blake painted miniatures and undertook other works commissioned by the squire. It was during the three years at Felpham that he revised The Four Zoas, began working on the Milton composition, and wrote poems in the Rossetti and Pickering Manuscripts. Strained