William Blake: Radical Visionary (28/11/1757 - 12/8/1827)

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William Blake was a British, poet, painter, engraver, visionary who was born in the Soho district of London on November 28, 1757, to  religious dissenting parents, James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Considered eccentric, if not mad, in his own day,he is now highly regarded as a seminal figure of the romantic age, and for his expressiveness and creativity, as well as the philosophical and mystical undercurrents that reside within his work
How the hell he's only got a fleeting mention here on this blog over the years cannot fathom because long have I admired  and found inspiration from his life and work.
Two of his six siblings died in infancy, and from an early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions, at four he saw God “put his head to the window”; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he allegedly saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree and had a vision of "a tree filled with angels .These visions would have a lasting impact on the art and writings that he created.
His parents observed that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school. He learned to read and write at home. At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with James Basire, (because art school proved to costly),who was official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. He sent Blake to draw the tombs and monuments at Westminster Abbey, a task which brought him to his lifelong love of Gothic art. After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy.of Arts school of Design .where he began exhibiting his own works in 1780,
In 1782, he married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and to write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. He also helped her to experience visions as he did. Catherine believed absolutely in her husbands visions and genius , and supported him in everything he did. She would help  him print the illuminated poetry for which he best remembered today; the couple had no children. He was faithful to her despite writing about sexual energy and polygamy and their marriage remained a close and devoted one until his death.
In 1784 he set up a printshop with a friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker, but this venture failed after several years. For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother Robert in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787 and succumbed, probably to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother’s spirit rise up through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.” He believed that Robert’s spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other “illuminated” works.
Blake’s first printed work, Poetical Sketches (1783), is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. The poems protest against war, tyranny, and King George III’s treatment of the American colonies. The poem below To Autumn is taken from it. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence, in 1789 and followed it, in 1794, with Songs of Experience. Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children’s book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics. Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors.

Blake was a bold rebel and nonconformist all his life in both his thought and art who was once arrested on a trumped up charge of sedition. A man  who hated tyranny and celebrated liberty and was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions and openly wore the red revolutionary bonnet in the streets. He espoused savage anarchy and also peace and love and was also an anti monarchist who found it necessary to protest conformity and war in his lifelong struggle for individualism.
He was associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of 18th-century neoclassical conventions, he valued imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Works such as “The French Revolution” (1791), “America, a Prophecy” (1793), “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793), and “Europe, a Prophecy” (1794) express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to 18th-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794). In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), he satirized oppressive authority in church and state.He abhorred the way in which Christians looked up to a God enthroned in heaven, a view which offered a model for a hierarchical human politics, which subordinated the majority to a (supposedly) superior elite. He also criticised the dominant philosophy of his day which believed that a narrow view of sense experience could help us to understand everything that there was to be known, including God. Blake's own visionary experiences showed him that rationalism ignored important dimensions of human life which would enable people to hope, to look for change, and to rely on more than that which their senses told them.
Despite his famously radical politics and vehement rejection of much of the social establishment about him, he has since been affectionately adopted by a wide British public as a kind of patron saint. I believe it is precisely because of his politics and anti-establishment views that people feel so much affection for Blake.
While his poetry seemed to focus on the darker aspects of emotion, the texts still adhered to the characteristics typical of the Romantic Period.  Blake, like many Romantics of his time, wanted to forge a new path for himself, idealize the individual, feeling over reason, importance of nature and imagination, and removal from corrupt limiting societies.
In 1800 Blake moved to the seacoast town of Felpham, where he lived and worked until 1803 under the patronage of William Hayley. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, so that he could read classical works in their original language. In Felpham he experienced profound spiritual insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched between about 1804 and 1820. Milton (1804-08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-20)  They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason.
Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by common people, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. Blake’s final years, though spent in great poverty and periods of depression because of critical and public failure as an artist, he was cheered by the admiring friendship of a group of younger artists who called themselves “the Ancients.” In 1818 he met John Linnell, a young artist who helped him financially and also helped to create new interest in his work. It was Linnell who, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy.His engraving The Ancient of Days,was popular enough to generate commissions for reproductions. To our good fortune, Blake was happy to create several copies of his favorite engraving, at least a baker’s dozen and each one of them unique, the last of which was completed only a few weeks before his death in 1827 from gallstones.

In 1827, the last year of his life, Blake wrote to a friend about those Englishmen who despised “Republican Art” and who, after the French Revolution, thought they were in a “happy state of agreement to which I for One do not agree”. It is amazing that he appears to have retained his radicalism and confidence in humanity. He wrote in The Everlasting Gospel:

Thou art a Man, God is no more
Thy own humanity learn to adore”

On the actual day of his death, he drew one last portrait of his beloved wife, and died a few hours later. However Catherine believed that her husband's spirit remained with her. She continued to sell copies of his illuminated works and paintings, but would not agree to a sale before 'consulting Mr Blake.' On the day that she died, she cheerfully called out to her husband, as if they were in the sae room, that she was coming to him.
William Blake is buried in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, City Road, Finsbury, London, England. This cemetery was originally the 'Dissenters' graveyard. There is no church attached to the cemetery and the ground is unconsecrated.  Here Catherine  too was buried four years later among other notable figures of dissent like Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan. A grave marker now stands near to where they were buried.

His works have since been used by people rebelling against a wide range of issues, such as war, conformity, and almost every kind of repression. In the present day among our own progressive idylls we can be like Blake and continue to dream of heaven on Earth, building the new Jerusalem, the new moral world and a restored Albion of free and equal imaginations.
I conclude with this set  of four seasonal poems written by Blake, aptly titled   "To Spring,” and “To Summer.” 'To Autumn" "To Winter" these seasonal invocations can be read alone, but Blake also intended them to interconnect. The personas of the seasons can be read as counterparts to Blake’s spirits: Tharmas (most like spring), Orc (most like summer), Los (most like autumn), and Urizen (most like winter).In the poem  Blake hints at the promise of future growth. Within the harvest are the seeds for future crops. As Autumn flies over the bleak hills to make way for Winter, he leaves behind “his golden load”: an abundance of food, seeds for the Spring, and a feeling of joyous celebration, reflecting his particular view of human nature.

To Spring

 O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro' the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell each other, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turned
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth,
And let thy holy feet visit our clime.

Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.

 O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languished head,
Whose modest tresses were bound up for thee.

To Summer
 

O Thou who passest thro’ our vallies in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitched’st here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o’er the deep of heaven; beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy vallies, on
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:

Our vallies love the Summer in his pride.
Our bards are fam’d who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.

 To Autumn

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stainèd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of
Morning, and Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.

The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.“
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

To Winter

 O Winter! bar thine adamantine doors:
The north is thine; there hast thou built thy dark
Deep-founded habitation. Shake not thy roofs,
Nor bend thy pillars with thine iron car.'
He hears me not, but o'er the yawning deep
Rides heavy; his storms are unchain'd, sheathèd
In ribbèd steel; I dare not lift mine eyes,
For he hath rear'd his sceptre o'er the world.

Lo! now the direful monster, whose 1000 skin clings
To his strong bones, strides o'er the groaning rocks:
He withers all in silence, and in his hand
Unclothes the earth, and freezes up frail life.

He takes his seat upon the cliffs,--the mariner
Cries in vain. Poor little wretch, that deal'st
With storms!--till heaven smiles, and the monster
Is driv'n yelling to his caves beneath mount Hecla.

The following  two sites contain useful material and links about William Blake :-

http://www.betatesters.com/penn/blake.htm

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/

I strongly recommend the following books too :-

William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (reproductions from the Blake Trust, with introduction by David Bindman, Thames & Hudson, W.W. Norton & Co., 2001)

The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake (ed. David Erdman, with commentary by Harold Bloom, revised edition, Anchor, 1997)

William Blake : Visionary Anarchist - Peter Marshall , Freedom Press

In the following video, author, poet  Iain Sinclair gives an inside look to the history behind Blake’s radical works.