Before Reading Meet William Blake (1757-1827)

In William Blake’s own day, few saw or read any of his illustrated books, and those who did often dismissed them as the works of a madman. More than 100 years passed before people began to recognize Blake’s stunning achievements as a poet and artist.

An Unusual YouthThe son of a hosier, Blake spent nearly his entire life in London. As a schoolboy, he was precocious, reading the Bible and the works of John Milton at a young age, attending art school when he was only 10, and writing poetry by age 12. From early on in his life, Blake saw visions—first of angels and ghostly monks, and later of the Virgin Mary and various historical figures. He attributed these visions not to a supernatural source but to the interaction of his imagination with the world and with the infinite, or God. Blake believed that children’s unfettered imagination was something of a state of grace. Though he was a Christian, he found church doctrine inadequate and thought it was used primarily as a form of social control.

Marriage and ArtIn 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher, a poor, illiterate woman whom he taught to read and paint. The couple enjoyed a close, loving marriage, though Blake’s mysticism sometimes exasperated his wife. “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company,” she once quipped. “He is always in Paradise.” In 1784, Blake opened his own print shop, where he developed a technique called illuminated printing, which involved engraving a poem’s text and illustration on the same plate. Blake’s first illuminated book of poems, Songs of Innocence, appeared in 1789; in 1794, he added a group of contrasting poems called Songs of Experience. Blake indicated that his purpose in putting them together was to show “the two contrary states of the human soul.”

While Reading

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1153