Hello and welcome to the Discourse. William Blake was an English poet, printer, and painter born on 28 November 1757 and died on 12 August 1827 when he was 69. As a poet, he didn’t gain any recognition during his lifetime but in current times, he is considered as one of the most important poets of the Pre-Romantic era. His poetry and visual art had a strong influence over the Romantic Age. William Blake was a devout Christian who always opposed the Church of England and maintained his belief in Marcionism, a Christian dualistic system. Because of his idiosyncracies and eccentricities, his contemporaries considered him a mad person and never got any recognition during his lifetime. William Wordsworth once commented, "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scot.”
The critics and readers of the modern period admired his expressiveness and appreciated the philosophical and mystical basis of his works.
William Blake was born in the Age of Reason and Enlightenment but he often opposed the philosophical ideas of Enlightenment and gave more stress to Humanism, and Romanticism over Empiricism and Rationalism. Blake abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality. He was a supporter of Free Love and raised the issue of women’s rights for happiness and self-fulfillment. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity. He was a close friend of Thomas Paine and was an admirer of Emanuel Swedenborg. Blake was concerned about senseless wars and the blighting effects of the Industrial Revolution. He was influenced by the French Revolution and American Revolution and expressed his views in poetry, paintings, and engravings. Alexander Gilchrist wrote a biography of William Blake in the 1860s.
Blake attained formal education till he was 10 years old and then attained home schooling during which he also enrolled in a drawing class. Later on, he became a printer and engraver by profession. Poetry was his passion and he used his skills as a painter, printer, and engraver to express his poetic ideas in the form of Illuminated poetry in which he presented his poetic ideas in words with the help of assisting paintings and engravings. Literary critic Northrop Frye remarked that Blake perfected a “radical form of mixed art,” a “composite art” that must be read as a unity.
In 1781, Blake married Catherine Boucher who was five years younger than him. She was illiterate and signed her wedding contract with an X. William Blake not only educated her, he also taught her the skills of painting and engraving Later on, she became his assistant at work as an engraver and colorist.
Blake’s Influence:
While William Blake remained unrecognized, ridiculed, and poor during his lifetime, his works later proved to be influential. Some of the literary and artistic critics who appreciated his works included S. Foster Damon, Geoffrey Keynes, Northrop Frye, and David V. Erdman. His poems influenced Dante Gabriel Rossetti and W.B. Yeats. The authors of the Modernist period were hugely influenced by William Blake. The Beats poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylon, Jim Morrison, and English author Aldous Huxley were greatly influenced by Blake’s works.
Important Literary Works of William Blake:
Poetic Sketches:
In 1783, Blake’s first collection of poems and prose writing was published under the title Poetical Sketches. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. The book contains nineteen lyric poems, a dramatic fragment (King Edward the Third), a prologue to another play in blank verse ('Prologue, Intended for a dramatic piece of King Edward the Fourth'), a prose poem prologue ('Prologue to King John'), a ballad ('A War Song to Englishmen') and three prose poems ('The Couch of Death', 'Contemplation', and 'Samson').
The book begins with an 'Advertisement' which says that Bake began writing the contents of the book at the very early age of 12 when he was not well tutored and continued to occasionally add to the book till he was twenty years old. Considering his inexperience during this period, any irregularities and defects should be forgiven.
The first four lyrical poems of Poetical Sketches ('To Spring', 'To Summer', 'To Autumn', 'To Winter'), which are invocations to the four seasons, are often seen as offering early versions of four of the figures of Blake's later mythology, each one represented by the respective season, where "abstract personifications merge into the figures of a new myth." One of the poems titled ‘Fair Elenor’ is a Gothic poem.
In 1788, William Blake experimented with relief etching for the first time and produced two aphorisms titled ‘All Religions are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion.’
Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
In 1789, Blake published his first collection of Illuminated Poems titled Songs of Innocence which contained 23 poems illustrated with paintings and engravings. Most of these poems were based on themes of happiness and innocent perception in pastoral harmony. A few poems including "The Chimney Sweeper" and "The Little Black Boy", subtly show the dangers of this naïve and vulnerable state. In 1794, Blake published his second collection of illuminated poems titled Songs of Experience containing 26 poems. Soon, in the same year, he combined both collections and republished them as a single collection titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. Blake experimented with relief etching, a method he used to produce most of his Illuminated books, paintings, pamphlets, and poems including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem.
Visionary Poet:
William Blake is said to have had visions from a young age. At the age of four, saw God" when God "put his head to the window". At the age of 8, Blake claimed to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." Blake claimed to have such visions associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery throughout his life and these visions inspired his poetry and paintings. William Blake is known as a Prophetic poet and he wrote several Prophetic books in which he invented his own mythology to express his ideas. This poetic device is known as mythopoeia. For his inventive ways, Blake is also known as a Visionary Poet. A visionary poet uproots firmly planted ideas on the structure, the grammar, and the content of poetry to create something that had never been heard of.
Prophetic Works of William Blake :
In these books, William Blake introduced and developed his own mythology. Northrop Frye described these works by Blake as "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." These works include --
Tiriel (1789); The Book of Thel (1789), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Ahania (1795), The Book of Los (1795), Vala, or the Four Zoas (1797), Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Jerusalem: The Emancipation of Giant Albion (1804).
In addition, he also wrote three Continental Prophecies in which he openly criticized and opposed colonialism and slavery. These works by Blake were highly influenced by the American Revolution in which he strongly supported racial and sexual equality. These works include America a Prophecy (1793), Europe a Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los (1795), which is made up of sections of Africa and Asia.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793):
Blake wrote this book as an imitation of Biblical prophecy but expressed his own beliefs and ideas through the book. He experimented with relief etching in this book and colored it with the help of his wife Catherine.
The book begins with an Introductory short poem titled "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air".
In this book, Blake offered his theory of contraries and suggested that each person reflects the contrary nature of God, and that progression in life is impossible without contraries. The Heaven and Hell in the title also suggest two contraries. Another contrary he discussed is reason and energy. Blake suggested that two types of people existed: the "energetic creators" and the "rational organizers", or, as he calls them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the "devils" and "angels". Blake expounds that “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.”
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake appreciated Milton and commented that ‘Milton was a true poet’. He also claimed that John Milton, in his epic poem Paradise Lost was "of the Devil's party without knowing it."
The book describes the poet's visit to Hell, a device adopted by Blake from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. The book is written in prose but the Argument is in verse. It also includes a lyrical poem titled Song of Liberty. Blake didn’t express Hell as a place of punishment, rather he depicted it as a source of unrepressed opposition to the authoritarianism of Heaven.
The most popular part of the book is Proverbs of Hell which contains many of Blake’s Aphorisms such as –
*The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
*The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
*If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
Aldous Huxley chose the title of his autobiographical book ‘The Doors of Perception’ from this book in which he introduced his idea of ‘Mind at Large’ which has similarities with Blake’s idea.
Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1810):
Blake published his epic poem Milton: a Poem in Two Books in 1810. Its hero is John Milton, who returns from Heaven who returns from Heaven to meet the poet and discusses the relationship between current writers and their predecessors. The Preface includes a short poem titled “And did those feet in Ancient Time”. The poem is supposed to oppose the then-common apocryphal story of a young Jesus visiting England. Blake also briefly criticized the Industrial Revolution and its harmful effects on nature and human relationships by the phrase ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ in this poem. Another popular phrase from the book Milton is "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies".
This is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards!
No comments:
Post a Comment