William Blake: Context and Analysis

William Blake 1757-1827 Context (AO4)

• Ideas sourced from Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Blake.

• References available from the British Library.

Poems from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience

• Selection includes:

  • Songs of Innocence: Holy Thursday

  • Songs of Experience: Holy Thursday, The Tyger, The Sick Rose, London

• Initial reception was underwhelming due to political content disguised as children's ballads.

Biography

• Family and Birth:

  • Possible resentment towards his supportive and loving family.

  • Family belonged to a dissenting sect, buried with Non-conformists.

  • Blake's writing suggests he was deeply religious.

  • Referred to as ‘the last great religious poet in England’.

  • Emanuel Swedenborg claimed 1757 (Blake's birth year) marked the passing into a new world.

  • Brother Robert died in 1787; Blake believed he communicated with Robert's spirit.

  • Blake read Swedenborg, who believed spirits of the dead reassumed physical form in another world.

• Personality:

  • Outspoken.

  • Considered mad by some, defended as wild by friends.

  • Friends were committed political radicals.

  • Oversensitive, also considered a genius.

  • Solitary walking.

  • Preoccupation with death, partly fashionable during the period; connection between interest in the past and death.

• Social Standing:

  • Son of a hosier (lower-middle class).

  • Had to learn a trade: engraver.

  • Even with success, remained a shopkeeper and tradesman, not just an artist.

  • Referred to as ‘Poor Blake’ by some.

Beliefs

• Memory versus vision.

• Poetry imbued with Biblical motifs, images, and cadences from the Old Testament.

• Swedenborg's Influence:

  • ‘Man is a microcosm, comprehending in himself partially every thing which the world contains divinely and totally.’

  • Belief in ‘a certain state between sleeping and waking’.

  • Interested in revelation of ancient truths and myths.

  • Doctrine of ‘correspondences’ (p102): idea that man was heavenly.

  • Understanding based on vision, not logic.

  • Ideas popular with political and spiritual radicals, some considered eccentric.

  • Lost faith in New Church due to rituals or mockery.

• Paracelsus and Jacob Behmen:

  • Followed beliefs of Paracelsus and Jacob Behmen after moving away from Swedenborg.

  • Humble visionaries who distrusted orthodox learning.

  • Considered himself to inherit their legacy.

  • Paracelsus: ‘Imagination is like the sun…may set a house on fire.’ (p152)

  • Each man has the essence of God within.

  • Boehme: Wheel of life is a wheel of fire, emblem of will creating desire and motion through conflict.

  • Belief that the outcast could also be the visionary.

Enlightenment and Science

• Contempt for Locke, Burke, and Bacon who mocked inspiration.

• Newton:

  • Associated Newton with stones; painted him in a cage representing fallen man.

  • Believed material existence is a prison, human senses are degraded.

Influences

• John Milton:

  • Writer of Paradise Lost (1667), considered a prophetic outcast.

  • Blake made illustrations of Paradise Lost.

• Orientalism: mysteries of the remote past.

• Michelangelo & Raphael: grand, heroic gestures.

• Friendship and work with Henry Fuseli.

Historical Context

• Great Fiery Meteor in 1783 influenced ‘The Tyger’ (stars throwing down spears).

  • P148 - A constellation of stars was known as the Tiger (Helvetius).

• War:

  • Era of war and violent conflict; England at war with America.

  • 1792: young English soldiers suffered on manoeuvres.

  • Slogans of revolutionary sympathisers on palace walls: ‘No coach tax. Damn Pitt. Damn the Duke of Richmond! No king!’

  • ‘The hapless soldier’s sigh’ (London) linked to Paine’s reference: monarchical governments thrive on war for plunder and revenue.

• Abolitionists, Republicans and Revolutionaries:

  • Part of a radical group attached to Thomas Paine's English campaign.

  • William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft also in this group, who were atheists (unlike Blake).

  • Paine: religion restricts minds; Blake: ‘the religion of Jesus was a perfect law of liberty’.

  • Stories of Blake defending justice.

  • Sympathised with the Revolution.

  • Dissenters delighted in the French Revolution.

  • ‘London’ written at height of revolutionary fervour.

  • ‘Manacles’ and ‘Chartered’ were radical code words against oppression.

  • Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: ‘every chartered town is an aristocratical monopoly in itself’.

Social Context

• The Enlightenment: period of social reflection; Blake opposed social inequality.

• Connection between slaves of Surinam and women of England; between commerce and brutality.

• Poverty & Exploitation:

  • Food riots in London (Gordon Riots, 1780); Blake involved.

  • Drawing of ‘Albion Rose’ related to energy and liberation of Gordon Riots.

  • ‘The youthful harlot’s curse’ written when London had fifty thousand prostitutes.

  • Awful experiences of chimney sweepers.

  • Lambeth asylum housed girls who would otherwise become prostitutes.

• Crime & Punishment:

  • Heads of condemned rotting on Temple Bar; stocks and soldiers lashing in streets.

  • Sedition was a crime; Blake wary and sometimes wrote articles calling for the death of George III, but did not print them.

  • Living in London during French Revolution meant constant suspicion, espionage, and treason trials.

• London:

  • Viewed as in thrall to effeminacy and luxury.

  • Blake was a Londoner (the Cockney visionary).

  • City offered light & darkness.

  • Blake drawn to its spectacles, melodrama, energy & rituals.

  • Anarchic individualism characteristic of London artisans.

• Sex & Morality:

  • Era of laxness, leading to moralism.

  • Time of open sexuality and public licentiousness.

  • Blake had liberal views, including shared wives.

• Prosperity:

  • Upturn around 1784 due to print exports.

  • Prosperity from end of war with France and America.

The Imagination and Visions

• Blake believed the ‘pure soul’ will ‘cut a path into heaven’.

• Engravings presented unity of human vision through poetry and drawings.

• Blake’s Mythology:

  • Visionary allegories: Luvah (sexual energy), Los (poetic imagination), Orc (energy and rebellion), Urizen (tyrant and law giver).

  • Roles later became more complex.

• First vision at 8 or 10: angels in Peckham Rye; punished by father.

• Considered himself a prophet: ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness’.

• Art gave eighteenth-century shape to ancient mysteries.

• Loved writings of St Teresa (visionary).

Art Songs of Innocence and Experience

• Aimed to produce a combination of poetry and illustration to proclaim the unity of human vision.

• Borrowed movement of popular ballads and nursery rhymes.

• Uniqueness of individual copies.

• Not just poems like Lyrical Ballads but discrete works of art with words and images.

• Associated with medieval illuminations, stained glass, bardic prophecy, cadences of the Bible and popular hymns.

• Collection considered cryptic.

• Poems are contrary, using both sides of plates for engraving poems of ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’.

• Anti-Establishment:

  • Critical of Joshua Reynolds, who advocated ‘ideal beauty’ untainted by commerce.

  • Reynolds celebrated subtlety and skill over ‘enthusiasm’.

  • Blake favoured Raphael and Michelangelo’s heroic art.

  • Advocated outline over colour and perspective.

  • Art historian suggested Blake could almost have been blind.

  • Painted non-naturalistic figures and abstract representations of primeval scenes.

• Commerce:

  • Aware of commercial issues, earned a living by his trade.

• Observations about his Poetry:

  • Tight metres and sense of intensity and energy.

  • Different voices in poems, not same speaker.

  • Contrary states of the human soul evident in parallelism, symmetry, and antithesis.

  • ‘Nouns and gerunds provide the colour of all action, while the verbs [have] epic simplicity and sublimity.’

  • Measured, aphoristic, didactic and tightly controlled.