Introduction to William Blake 6 / 8 October
“Considered insane and largely disregarded by his peers, the visionary poet and engraver William Blake is now recognised among the greatest contributors to English literature and art.” (BBC)
I. Blake’s background
a. born poor to a plebian family; his father made and sold hosiery
b. saw visions of angels and God throughout his life, beginning when he was 3 or 4; for this reason, many believed him to be mad
c. apprenticed to an artist (engraver) at age 11; thought of himself primarily as a visual artist, although he was accomplished as a poet, and was reputed to be a talented (though untrained) musician
d. left London only once for a 3-year stay in the country (Sussex)
e. was reclusive in general (“isolated with his ideas”), considered a “charming crank” by his friends and acquaintances
f. Blake “trained his wife to be the mirror of his mind” – they were close companions and had a very loving marriage, but Blake wanted to take additional wives when she was unable to bear children
II. Blake’s beliefs & interests
a. had unconventional ideas about religion, physical pleasure, sex and marriage: among his primary complaints about orthodox Christianity was the fact that it discouraged natural desires and earthly joy
b. associated the imagination with God, and loathed reason / rationalism
c. he was associated at one point with the New Church (aka Swedenborgianism), a Christian sect that worships Jesus Christ as the single body of God
d. longed for “the absolute integration of man, in his total nature, with the universe”
e. “He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself ‘a mental prince’; and was one.” (Kazin)
f. was passionate about anything medieval
g. considered by some to be forerunner of anarchism (“a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government”, dictionary.com)
III. Blake’s work
a. Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, represents Blake’s attempt to view the world as from a child’s innocent perspective; five years later, he republished the volume with a second half (Songs of Experience) dedicated to the darker, more cynical perspective of a worldly adult.
b. considered pre-Romantic solely due to the fact that he was publishing before Wordsworth & Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads and officially began the movement – his ideas (emphasis on imagination and emotion; rejection of reason and intellectualism; loathing of the rigid order imposed by the ancient Greeks & Romans; disgust with heavy industry and the urban landscape) line up very neatly with the tenets of Romanticism
c. considered visionary because he saw the future (urban decay, plight of the poor and oppressed, “satanic mills”) and was possessed of incredible imagination
d. Blake’s body of work is among the most complex of any writer – as a poet and artist he is difficult to categorize
e. Blake’s early work was rebellious in character, seen as a protest against most rigid and conventional forms of religion
i. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell creates a powerful duality between Energy (positive) and Reason (negative), and Blake’s Satan figure seems to be more of a hero than a villain, rebelling against a false and controlling God.
ii. The following are some of the radical proverbs included in the work:
1. “All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
a. That Man has two real existing principles: a Body & a Soul.
b. That Energy, calld Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, calld Good, is alone from the Soul.
c. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
2. But the following Contraries to these are True:
a. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
b. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
c. Energy is Eternal Delight.”
3. “The Proverbs of Hell”, including:
a. “Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
b. As the catterpillar [sic] chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”
f. In his later works (i.e. Milton and Jerusalem) Blake’s vision of humanity is more positive; he cites self-sacrifice and forgiveness as the path to redemption, but still condemns traditional religion as overly dogmatic.
g. Blake created his own private mythology with a complex system of symbols – due to this complexity and inaccessibility, some of his later work is less published and generally known.
i. Urizen (a play on “Your Reason”) is the central figure in his mythology – although Urizen is a God-like creator figure, he is antagonistic due to his use of reason and calculation to measure the universe
ii. In Blake’s The Everlasting Gospel, Jesus is a “supremely creative being, above dogma, logic and even morality.”
h. Blake’s attitude toward his poetic forbears, particularly Milton and Dante, is interesting: he rejects both on certain counts (for example, he believed Milton’s Satan to be a far more compelling character than his God, to the extent that he considered Milton “an unwitting Satanist”; in Dante’s case, Blake despised his obsession with Greek mythology and the apparent pleasure Dante took in depicting Satan’s doling out of punishment to sinners), but spent years meticulously illuminating their poetry with his art
IV. Some further reading about Blake: Admittedly, most of these are from Wikipedia! But in all sincerity, their coverage of Blake is quite thorough and interesting.
a. “Blake does not subscribe to the notion of a body distinct from the soul that must submit to the rule of the soul, but sees the body as an extension of the soul, derived from the 'discernment' of the senses. Thus, the emphasis orthodoxy places upon the denial of bodily urges is a dualistic error born of misapprehension of the relationship between body and soul.” (Wikipedia)
b. “Blake opposed the sophistry of theological thought that excuses pain, admits evil and apologises for injustice. He abhorred self-denial, which he associated with religious repression and particularly sexual repression: ‘Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. / He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.’ He saw the concept of 'sin' as a trap to bind men’s desires (the briars of Garden of Love), and believed that restraint in obedience to a moral code imposed from the outside was against the spirit of life: ‘Abstinence sows sand all over / The ruddy limbs & flaming hair / But Desire Gratified / Plants fruits & beauty there.’” (Wikipedia)
c. “He did not hold with the doctrine of God as Lord, an entity separate from and superior to mankind; this is shown clearly in his words about Jesus Christ: ‘He is the only God ... and so am I, and so are you.’ A telling phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is ‘men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast’. This is very much in line with his belief in liberty and social equality in society and between the sexes.” (Wikipedia)
d. “With Blake, it would seem, we are off the main track of modern secular thought and aspiration. The textbooks label him ‘mystic,’ and that shuts him off from us. Actually he is not off the main track, but simply ahead of it; a peculiarly disturbed and disturbing prophet of the condition of modern man rather than a master-builder. From any conventional point of view he is too different in kind to be related easily to familiar conceptions of the nature of the individual and society. Blake combines, for example, the formal devotional qualities of the English dissenters with the intellectual daring of Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade, and Freud. No Christian saint ever came to be more adoring of Jesus, and no naturalistic investigator was a more candid opponent of traditional Christian ethics. He was one of the subtlest and most far-reaching figures in the intellectual liberation of Europe that took place at the end of the eighteenth century. But he had no interest in history, and easily relapsed into primitive nationalism. To the end of his life his chief symbol for man, ‘the eternal man,’ was Albion; the origin of ‘natural religion’ he located among the Druids; he hated Newton and despised Voltaire, but painted the apotheosis of Nelson and Pitt. Like so many self-educated men, he was fanatically learned; but he read like a Fundamentalist—to be inspired or to refute. He painted by ‘intellectual vision’—that is, he painted ideas; his imagination was so original that it carried him to the borders of modern surrealism. Yet he would have been maddened by the intellectual traits of surrealism: the calculated insincerities, the defiant disorder, the autonomous decorative fancy, the intellectual mockery and irreverence. That part of surrealism which is not art is usually insincerity, and to Blake any portion of insincerity was a living death. As he hated church dogma, so he hated scepticism, doubt, experimentalism. He did not believe in sin, only in ‘intellectual error’; he loathed every dualistic conception of good and evil; the belief that any human being could be punished, here or elsewhere, for ‘following his energies.’ But he thought that unbelief—that is, the admission of uncertainty on the part of any person—was wicked. He understood that man's vital energies cannot be suppressed or displaced without causing distortion; he saw into the personal motivations of human conflict and the many concealments of it which are called culture. He celebrated in Songs of Innocence, with extraordinary inward understanding, the imaginative separateness of the child. He hated scientific investigation. He could say in his old age, when provoked, that he believed the world was flat. He was undoubtedly sincere, but he did not really care what shape it was; he would not have believed any evidence whatsoever that there were many planets and universes. He did not believe in God; under all his artistic labors and intellectual heresies he seems to have thought of nothing else. He is one of the most prophetic and gifted rebels in the history of Western man—a man peculiarly of our time, with the divisions of our time. Some of his ideas were automatically superstitious, and a large part of his writing is rant. There are features of his thought that carry us beyond the subtlest understanding we have of the relations between man and woman, the recesses of the psyche, the meaning of human error, tyranny, and happiness. There are chapters in his private mythology that carry us into a nightmare world of loneliness and fanaticism, like a scream repeated interminably on a record in which a needle is stuck.” (Kazin)
Bibliography:
1. http://www.multimedialibrary.com/articles/kazin/alfredblake.asp
2. http://www.progressiveliving.org/william_blake_poetry_jerusalem.htm
3. www.taringa.net
4. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience
6. http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/
7. http://www.uh.edu/engines/romanticism/blakeart.html
8. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/blake.shtml
9. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/blake_william.shtml
10. http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=10324
11. Blunt, Anthony. “Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’: The Symbolism of the Compass”. Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Jul., 1938), pp. 53-63, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0959-2024%28193807%292%3A1%3C53%3AB%27ODTS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-X
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedenborgianism