The Work of William Blake William Blake, a visionary English poet and painter who was a precursor of English Romanticism, combined the vocations of engraver, painter, and poet. He was born on Nov. 28, 1757, the son of a London hosier. Blake spent all of his relatively quiet life in London except for a stay at Felpham, on the southern coast of England, from 1800 to 1803. Largely self-taught, Blake was, however, widely read, and his poetry shows the influence of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, for example, and of Swedenborgianism. As a child, Blake wanted to become a painter. He was sent to drawing school at age 10 and at the age of 14 was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver. From sketching frequently at Westminster Abbey, he developed an interest in the Gothic style, which he combined with a taste for the art of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Durer. He exhibited his first artwork in 1780, married Catherine Boucher in 1782, and published his first poems, Poetical Sketches, in 1783. He quickly withdrew them from circulation, however, apparently offended by the condescending preface written by a patron. Amid its traditional, derivative elements are hints of his later innovative style and themes. As with all his poetry, this volume reached few contemporary readers. Blake produced and published his other works himself, except those which remained in manuscript at his death, by using his own unique method of engraving both illustration and text on copper plates and colouring the printed volumes by hand. He executed numerous engravings for books by others as well as watercolours and other kinds of paintings. Blake gave only ... ... middle of paper ... ...as not well known in his lifetime, but his influence is apparent in the work of several painters who knew him when he was an old man, particularly Samuel Palmer. He also influenced the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the 19th century, and his first editor was W. B. Yeats, who knew much of his poetry by heart. James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce Cary, among others, found inspiration in his writings, and he has had considerable influence on modern literary criticism through the work of Northrop Frye. Today Blake is one of the most frequently discussed poets. Of those who actually knew Blake, Palmer left the most interesting estimate of him: "In him you saw the Maker, the Inventor . . . He was energy itself and shed around him a kindling influence, an atmosphere of life, full of the idea. . . . He was a man without a mask."
William Blake was a famous English poet, who lived during the Romantic Age. Blake was unrecognized and unappreciated during his life, however, now he is considered one of the greatest poets of his age. William Blake was born on November 28, 1757. Growing up in London, his parents soon realized that he was no ordinary child. He was homeschooled and then later sent to drawing school. Later in his life, he created famous poems including A Poison Tree, London, and The Tyger. William Blake’s quiet and unrecognized life inspired by the bible greatly affected his many writings and paintings he made during his lifetime.
For those living during the eighteenth-century, life was full of innovation and the reconstruction of social classes and societal norms. With the tumultuous effects of the American and French Revolution’s on the world and the Industrial Revolution in their own city, London became fertile soil for a new literary movement to flourish in . The Romantic era invoked in art, literature, and philosophy, a more aesthetic experience. Artist and poet, William Blake, not only lived through this time of great social change, but was an important contributor to the Romantic literary movement that occurred in his lifetime. William Blake uses his intuitive spirituality and artistic skills that he acquired throughout the early years of his life to write about important principles of the human condition and inherent nature of mankind in his works, namely “A Poison Tree”; his simplistic writing style and use of imagery allows his blunt and unflattering religious message to be universally understood and categorizes him as a seminal figure of the romantic era.
William Blake is remembered by his poetry, engravements, printmaking, and paintings. He was born in Soho, London, Great Britain on November 28, 1757. William was the third of seven siblings, which two of them died from infancy. As a kid he didn’t attend school, instead he was homeschooled by his mother. His mother thought him to read and write. As a little boy he was always different. Most kids of his age were going to school, hanging out with friends, or just simply playing. While William was getting visions of unusual things. At the age of four he had a vision of god and when he was nine he had another vision of angles on trees.
In "London", William Blake brings to light a city overrun by poverty and hardship. Blake discards the common, glorifying view of London and replaces it with his idea of truth. London is nothing more but a city strapped by harsh economic times where Royalty and other venues of power have allowed morality and goodness to deteriorate so that suffering and poverty are all that exist. It is with the use of three distinct metaphors; "mind-forg'd manacles", "blackning Church", and "Marriage hearse", that Blake conveys the idea of a city that suffers from physical and psychological imprisonment, social oppression, and an unraveling moral society.
Abstract: William Blake's Songs of Innocence contains a group of poetic works that the artist conceptualized as entering into a dialogue with each other and with the works in his companion work, Songs of Experience. He also saw each of the poems in Innocence as operating as part of an artistic whole creation that was encompassed by the poems and images on the plates he used to print these works. While Blake exercised a fanatical degree of control over his publications during his lifetime, after his death his poems became popular and were encountered without the contextual material that he intended to accompany them.
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Sir William Blake was known for his lucid writings and childlike imagination when it came down to his writings. Some will say that his writings were like day and night; for example, "The Lamb" and "The Tiger" or "The Little Boy Lost" and "The Little Boy Found." Born in the 18th century, Blake witnessed the cruel acts of the French and American Revolutions so his writings also, "revealed and exposed the harsh realities of life (Biography William Blake)". Although he never gained fame during his lifetime, Blake's work is thought of as to be genius and well respected today. "The lack of public recognition sent him into a severe depression which lasted from 1810-1817, and even his close friends thought him insane (William Blake,)". Blake once stated, "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you (http://brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_blake.html )."
During the British Romantic period, some writers used material from the Bible or imitated the Bible in style of writing or content. William Blake, a Romantic writer, engraver, and painter, believed that “the Bible was the greatest work of poetry ever written” (Barker 2004). The Bible influenced him throughout this life, specifically influencing both his writing and his art. There are many references to Biblical themes within his writing, and there are also many references to specific passages of Scripture (Barker 2004).
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
Historic poetry is unique in the respect that it gives readers an insight into a certain historic time period that textbooks cannot provide. Historic poetry not only gives a description of the time period but it allows the readers to connect to the emotions of the poet and to a point experience what it would have felt to live in that era. This is the case with William Blake’s poem London. London not only describes the horrid condition of England’s lower class during the industrial revolution but it also connects this description with a strong emotion response from the speaker. Blake’s stylistic and structure choices through out the poem paint a dark and morbid view of London but the emotion of the poem remains divide. The words of the poem’s speaker evokes both sympathy for the lower classes at the same time as he is chastising the people who have the power to change the situation.
Children are always portrayed in books as angelic beings that are the closest to being perfect since they are innocent and pure. Many would suggest that this is not true, that children can be just as finable as adults. They cry when they do not get their way and throw tantrums that are quite obscene. However, the idea of this angelic child did not come into play until the 18th century. The poets William Blake and William Wordsworth are the two poets that coined this idea of the child. In the poems of these two authors, children are portrayed as innocent and pure beings and are closer to God than adults. Although these two poets have very different views of what children are like such as their interactions with adults, their perspective on
William Blake's "London" is a representative of English society as a whole, and the human condition in general that outlines the socio-economic problems of the time and the major communal evils.
“Can you give to the horse mightyness? Can you clothe its neck with a rustling mane? Can you cause it to leap like a locust?”(Job 39:19-20)
New Criticism is a theory of literary criticism where the only way to interpret the text is to “closely read” and only focus on the text itself. New Criticism is a good type of literary criticism to use for the poem, London. William Blake in his poem “London” uses repetition, rhyming and imagery to portray the horrors that the speaker describes about the city of London, England.
Sociological criticism emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural aspects of literature, and one of its main focuses is evaluating writing from a Marxist perspective, which examines the writing in mostly political and economic fashion, including ideas such as communism and social inequality. The idea of class oppression is clearly represented in many of William Blake’s writings. Blake’s opposition to the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists is obvious in many of his poems. Blake’s ideology of an equalitarian society could be described in the sayings of Karl Marx. Marxist criticism explains the reasons behind Blake’s anger towards social inequality. Poems like “The Chimney Sweeper” and “London” illustrate Blake’s despairing sadness towards the phenomena produced by the unjust inequality in 18th century England. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” Blake expresses his anger at the late 18th and 19th century's use of child labor in urban England. In “London,” Blake illustrates the depressing class oppression that could be easily seen through the streets of London.