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| William Blake by Thomas Phillips, Public Domain |
How
could it happen that one of our best-loved existentialist poets
should die unrecognised for his great genius - and then be declared
insane?
William
Blake, (1757-1827) was a gifted graphic artist and a literary genius
who produced visionary poetry of remarkable depth and originality.
Third son of a hosier, he never went to school but was apprenticed to
James Basire, who was an engraver to the Society of Antiquaries.
Blake
became a Royal Academy student and In 1779, the bookseller J. Johnson
employed him. A year later, Blake met sculptor, John Flaxman, a man
who was to become a major influence in his life introducing him to
mysticism and to several other intellectuals of that time. His
marriage in 1782 to Catherine Boucher, a market-gardener's daughter,
was a lasting relationship, although childless.
Flaxman
helped Blake financially in the publication of his Poetical
Sketches in
1783. More help was given by a Mrs. Mathew to set up a print shop at
27 Broad Street in London. By 1789, Blake had published his Songs
of Innocence,
as well as The
Book of Thel. According
to The
Oxford Companion to English Literature: "both
works... manifest the early phases of his highly distinctive mystic
vision, and... he embarks on the evolution of his personal
mythology." The
Book of Thel is
about sexual experience and sexual initiation and introduces a
parallel world. Blake was railing against the hypocrisy and restraint
of the time.
William
Blake the Existentialist versus the Enlightenment
Blake
was much against the Enlightenment - indeed he felt it a necessity to
try to escape its constrictions. He considered it a materialist
philosophy with its Puritanical interpretation of Christianity.
Unsurprisingly, his own philosophy was directly opposed to that of
the essentialist Plato. For Plato, reason controls energy and desire.
Blake, however, favours desire and energy over reason. As stated
in The
Oxford Companion: "Blake
turns conventional morality on its head claiming that man does not
consist of the duality of Soul = Reason and Body = Evil, but that
"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul... Energy is the only
life, and is from the Body... Energy is Eternal Delight."
William
Blake the Visionary who Talks with Angels
Blake
believes himself to be a true visionary, claiming to have seen angels
and prophets. Yet his view of Jesus is uncompromisingly rebellious,
openly expressed in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, his
first actual Romantic work. This work, published 1790-3, is
considered to be his principle work of prose with its
paradoxical aphorisms.
Among other works, his Songs
of Experience followed
in 1794, including the well-known "Tyger! Tyger" burning
bright" and "Oh Rose thou are sick."
The
imagination, Blake believes, aims at a higher reality. An extract
from "William Blake," Romanticism,
An Anthology claims:
"For Blake the imagination is both creative and perceptive, and
instrumental in the fulfilment of his revolutionary aims."
A
little help from friends combined with his undeniable great genius
should have brought William Blake fame and fortune. It did not. The
tragedy of William Blake is that his contribution to English
literature remained virtually unrecognised.
Throughout
his life, Blake's work only received a limited circulation, and this
was partly due to the fact that his books were all hand-printed and
hand-illuminated. Charles
Lambis
said to have remarked to Bernard Barton in 1824 that Blake was living
in poverty and obscurity.
Interest
in the poet was rekindled in the late nineteenth century after a
biography by Alexander Gilchrist in 1863.
Sources:
-
Blake, William, Selected Poems: Blake, Penguins Classics, 2006.
-
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Edited by Margaret Drabble, Multiple, Unspecified Contributors, Book Club Associates by arrangement with Oxford University Press, 1985.
-
Romanticsim, An Anthology, Edited by Duncan Wu, Mutliple, Unspecified Contributors, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1994.
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