William BlakeLife and Works

William Blake

• born on 28th November, 1757 • At the age of eleven entered Par's Drawing School in

the strand• After marrying Catherine Boucher on 18th August

1782, Blake became a freelance engraver• Joseph Johnson (radical bookseller), Blake’s main

employer, influenced poet’s religious views.• 1784 – Blake opened a print shop with James Parker

at 27 Broad Street (The business was unsuccessful and by 1786 he was back working for Joseph Johnson)

1788 – Natural Religion• the first of Blake’s illuminated works ! The poetry and their illustrations were drawn in

reverse on copper plates in an impervious liquid, then the plain parts eaten away with acid. After

the prints were taken they were colored by hand. • “Man is by nature, ‘only a natural organ subject ti

Sense’, but his ‘Poetic or Prophetic’ powers releases him from bondage to nature and he therefore apprehends more than his organs of perception, however acute, can discover”. (Davis 35)

• To Blake, art and religion are the same things. The poet is the prophet. God, “the Poetic Genius”, is “the true Man”, Christ.

1789 - Songs of InnocenceIntroduction: Blake shows himself inspired by the holy spiritof poetry first to pipe, then to sing and finally to write his songs with a reed pen dipped in watercolors.

“Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with Ignorance”.The knowledge possessed by the innocent child, as by adult, Arises from imagination, “that is, God himself, The Divine Body… Jesus: We are his Members” (Davis 43).According to Blake’s songs, “Old John, with white hair,” as well as “Every child”, has access to the world of holly, Arcadian Innocence, where the shepherd is identified with Christ, the good shepherd. This world of Innocence has its sorrows: the little black boy does not expect the little while boy to love him until their souls are freed from their bodies by death.

1790 - Marriage of Heaven and Hell

• A striking, paradoxical satire which exposes church and its followers as arrogant believers in predestination. •Blake inverts established attitudes toward “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.” For Blake, obedience to reason is worship of heaven’s restraining father, the “good” God who binds man in materialism and hypocrisy: but obedience to imagination is enjoyment of hell’s liberating son, the “evil” devil who inspires art and energy (Davis 58).

1791 – The French Revolution1793 - America: A Prophecy, Visions

of the Daughters of Albion

• developed his attitude of revolt against authority, combining political belief and visionary ecstasy. • The French Revolution was printed anonymously and only distributed among political sympathizers.

1794 – Songs of Experience

• topics of corruption and social injustice; problems of good and evil.

• The frontispiece shows a youth advancing.

• Blake contrasts exultant freedom with repression by priest, father, nurse and schoolmaster. He considers how body is related to soul, and life to death.

Singing Blake

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William Blake• 1800 – moved to Felpham in West Sussex; Hayley employed Blake to decorate him library and to make the engravings for the Life of Cowper

• 1803 – Blake was charged with high treason and put on trial at Chichester; he was acquitted of high treason and moved back to London

• 1809 – exhibition of Blake's work at the Royal Academy

• 1827 – Blake died and was buried in an unmarked grave at Bunhill Fields.

Works Cited

Works Cited

Davis, Michael. William Blake: A New Kind of Man. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. Print.

Williams, Nicholas M. William Blake Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.