Blake, William : The Greatest visionaries of the early Romantic era

William Blake:

(1757-1827)

William Blake's portrait
by Thomas Phillips.

He was an English poet, painter, engraver and a mystic, he was born on 28 November 1757 in SoHo (now Broad wick ST), London. He was third child of his parents from 7. William Blake was one of the greatest figures in English literature and art. Blake was the son of a stocking maker, and was apprenticed to an engraver in 1771. In 1782, at the age of 25, he married a girl named ‘Catherine Boucher’. She was the daughter of a Battersea market gardener. She was a devoted wife and remained as a loyal companion to him throughout his life of great poverty and neglect.

Blake’s earliest poems were ‘Poetical Sketches’, privately printed in 1783. He wrote those poems between the ages of 12 and 20, many of them are clearly derivative but the best, such as the song ‘How sweet I roam’d from field to field’ (composed at the age of 14) and ‘My skills and fine array’ are his very fine poems.

In 1789 he brought out his first major work ‘Song of Innocence’. He did not publish it in an ordinary way. Blake etched both text and illustration on copper plate and colored pages by hand. By now he was at his height as a lyric poet. He wrote the book called ‘The Book of Thel’ in 1789. In his chief prose work ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, written in 1793 he showed both good and evil, innocence and experience, the proposal idyll and the dark Satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. He ended with the cry ’For everything that lives in Holy’.

William Blake's portrait, by john linnell.

During this time Blake’s mystical awareness was developing, and he was elaborating his insights by the use of symbol. He gave up his earlier lyric style and wrote a remarkable series of poems which was called ‘Prophetic Books’. In addition to ‘Songs of Experience’ he wrote, he engraved and ‘Colored America’ (1793), ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’(1793), ‘Europe’(1794), ’Urizen’(1794), ‘The Book of Los’(1794) and the ‘Song of Los’(1795). Most of these poems were written in long, flexible, unrhymed lines which Blake invented for his purpose.

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