William Blake, artist, poet and philosopher, is perhaps easier to admire than understand. The breadth of his vision, the tortured eloquence of his craftsmanship and the bloody-mindedness of his daily life all speak of an intellect wrestling with fantastic worlds that boil and fester within.
Artistically he was influenced by Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer but his mental life was informed by the political, social and philosophical forces that broke from the moorings of enlightenment (and its strict codes of reason and order), fuelling the bloody revolutions of America and France.
Blake’s most productive years stretched from 1788 to 1820, covering the span of the French revolution and its bloody aftermath. This is the period when Beethoven was at the height of his own powers (initially writing the Emperor Symphony for the cultural hero that was Napoleon before disillisuion set in), when the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats sought refuge in the pastoral and the organic, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. During this period of muscular Romanticism, Blake was a contemporary (and friend) of Thomas Paine, that fiery spirit of liberty whose publication ‘Common Sense’ inspired the momentum of the American Revolution and whose Rights of Man offered stout resistance to the criticism of the French Revolution and its battle against the corrupt, unjust and pernicious structures of the aristocracy. Unlike a Shelley or a Byron, Blake was not a handsome man and regarded by many as insane, but he was firmly attached to a London intellectual society that explored the limits of liberty and revolutionary thought.
For Blake, this went further than most. He was poor, almost determinedly so, and lacked commercial success, aquiring only slight acknowledgement of his peers. His religious convictions were strong, but unorthodox. He struck hard at the embers of the enlightenment, in his poetry and his paintings, fighting for imagination and personal freedom. His visionary zeal manifested itself through his methods (his paintings exhibit a rough, organic feel, with much of his work using a unique mix of egg compound instead of oils) and the homogeneity of his purpose. His illuminated books, written and exquisitely illustrated by him, are perfect executions of this single-mindedness, with the meaning and themes of the words expressed through the flowing lines of decoration, illustration and the fluid style of the written text itself. His bold style revealed both the organic textures of the real world around him, and the power of the underlying forces in life.
Blake had a complicated relationship with God. He created a Yaweh-like figure called Urizen (Your Reason) whose purpose was to enslave the free spirit of humankind into the prison of the body. In later Prophetic Works Urizen became the Satan figure, reflecting the disillusionment of all revolutionaries when the great libertarian Napoleon began to gather totalitarian powers and generally behave like a misbegotten monarch. For Blake though Jesus was the pre-eminent figure of his belief system, Jesus the Imagination, a symbol for oppressed and suffering, a liberating force for freedom. In Blake’s paintings for his books on America and Europe these great continents were anthropomorphised and illustrated in chains, straining to be free of tyranical order, reason, with Jesus as the revolutionary saviour.
However as with many of his Romantic era companions, Blake was an uncompromising idealist, an artist in its deepest and fullest sense, a vessel of agony and conviction, gripped by forces beyond his understanding, but still consumed by them. This is the fate of all true artists, however appreciated their work is in their own lifetime, and drives modern artists too, such as Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
As a follower of the fantastic in all its forms I see Blake’s ghost in the muscular paintings of Frank Frazetta, the bold illustrations of Barry Windsor Smith, the all-encompassing power of Jim Starlin’s cosmic Captain Marvel graphic novels, but it is hard to match the scale of agonies suffered by a man who is said to have used his last shilling to buy more brushes to complete his last painting, one of a series of watercolour illustrations for Dante’s Inferno.
For more on Blake see here.
A comprehensive site on the life and works of William Blake please see here.
For very good essay on Blake’s ‘grain of sand’, see here.
To see some of his works in the flesh, please go to Tate Britain. Their website features a number of the paintings they own: they are magnificent.
To view the intimate complexity of his writings and illustration, take a look at facsimiles of his work, published by Thames and Hudson. Good places to start are The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The Songs of Experience; The First Book of Urizen; Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion. You can buy these from Amazon or Abe Books for anything out of print.
And here are some of powerful examples of Blake’s art: The image at the head of this post is plate 18 from the First Book of Urizen. Below are: Ancient of Days (Urizon imposing order on the free spirit of mankind, measuring the precise extent of creation with his compass); Elohim Creating Adam (the agonised human spirit being imprisoned in the human body); two views of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman clothed with the Sun; illustration from Europe a Prophecy; illustration from America a Prophecy; The Descent of Christ; illustration from Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion; illustration from America a Prophecy and Los, from Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion.
Great article on Blake. The only problem is that in maybe over-praising Blake as the self-possessed visionary we forget that (as you rightly point out) he was ultimately violently opposed to what he saw as the dry, life-denying forces of the Enlightenment, their suppression of the human form & spirit through their mechanical downgrading of mankind adrift in a vast empty cosmos….so, in a way he became an opponent of the forces of reason and observation that unleashed the French Revolution. Isn’t that a paradox? The passionate visionary and revolutionary who (a heavily religious nut, we have to admit) ends up on the same side as Burke + other reactionaries who denigrate what it was that led to revolution and the bloody overthrowing of class-based society?
Glad you liked the post. It *is* a paradox and Blake’s prophetic works, with their primal, often wayward density reflect his visceral responses to the emotions expressed around him during the revolutionary era. He was not a rigorous thinker but an artist who stumbled over mighty concepts and often, in a rage, sought to express himself though any means available to him. Unlike Burke, a politician and thinker whose response to the French Revolution, I think, was informed by his fear of mass mob rule, Blake empathised with the spirit and romanticism of the events.
Aahh, thank you for dousing us with this awesomeness! Have you considered putting this and similar posts into an ebook & selling it? I’d buy.
Or even giving away.
I particularly like the comparisons to modern artists like the graphic novel ppl who I’m much too unfamiliar with. & Jeffrey Catherine Jones, how have I not seen her stuff before? She’s inspiring.
Really glad you liked this. Will think about the ebook idea. There’s so much to say about Blake and those he continues to inspire.
Thank you for dousing us in your/Blake’s flaming awesomeness! The contemporary references – e.g. Jeffrey Catherine Jones – I could quite see a thematic resemblance there.
Posts like these deserve to be in ebook/book form. Please please do consider this.
If the doors of perception were cleaned – Everything would appear as it is – infinite (Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) one of my favorite Blake quotes.
That’s a fine quote, thank you. Blake’s prophetic works are harder to lever into but they’re hugely rewarding. A little bit like hearing Shakespeare on stage – the first five minutes are hell, then understanding washes in and the dexterity of the language is revealed.
Writing on the turbulent boundary between historical fiction and contemporary fantasy, my favorite Blake quote: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”
Oh yes, and on project management, I think he had the last word, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “You do not know what is enough until you know what is too much.”
Blake offers many thought-provoking pieces. Thanks for highlighting these and giving them a contemporary link.