William Blake: Visionary Artist and Poet

William Blake

The sight of an angel made William Blake the most celebrated poet of his time, it influenced in his poems and painting, which it became gothic to people and made him a spiritual person. William Blake was born over his father hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London in Nov. 28,1757. His father was James Blake a hosier, and his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. (Blakearchive.org) William Blake, being mostly educated at home learned how to read and write by his mother and later on went to school. His parents watch that he was different from others and they didn’t push him to attend to school, the main reason why his mother decided to instruct him. “They did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend conventional school.” Later on, Blake saw a positive thing after, writing “Thank God”… I never sent to school…”(Bloom, page 37) Apparently William Blake was a special boy, and a true believer of faith. When Blake was four years old, he told his parent he had experienced his first visions of God “His first vision occurred…when he was four. He saw God who “put his head to the window and set (Blake) screaming.” (Bloom, page 26) A couple years later, when Blake was nine years old, William claimed he had experienced new visions of angels. “ When Blake as a child told his mother “That he saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a Tree in the Fields.”” (Bloom page 26) Those visions changed William life. An age of ten William confesses to his parents that he wanted to be a painter. Later on, his father sent him to a drafting school. “At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, so his parents sent him to drawing school.” (Guterberg.org) Two years later William began c...

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...ginning of industrialization in Britain (known as the Industrial Revolution). “Something that made the plight of the poor and uneducated even more miserable and hopeless. Adults and children alike were forced to work long hours in factories… working under dangerous and inhumane conditions for a meager wage.”() Catastrophic events affected William in different ways, for example, his arrest in August 12, 1803, but this event was outside of the American war Independence in 1775 and the French Revolution. This affected William, because he was a religious man and he believed in freedom, the Bible had an impact on Blake, which is the main reason why he believed in the freedom of the human spirit. The effects of these two big contradictions of the Romanticism and War were that Blake (a) took it as inspiration and (b) wrote a poem about those historical events.