William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His

father was a successful London hosier and attracted by the doctrines

of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by

his mother. His parents encouraged him to collect prints of the

Italian masters, and in 1767 sent him to Henry Pars' drawing school.

From his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly

monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary,

and various historical figures.

At the age of 14 Blake was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver

James Basire. Gothic art and architecture influenced him deeply. After

studies at the Royal Academy School, Blake started to produce

watercolors and engrave illustrations for magazines. In 1783 he

married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. Blake

taught her to draw and paint and she assisted him devoutly. In 1774

Blake opened with his wife and younger brother Robert a print shop at

27 Broad Street, but the venture failed after the death of Robert in

1787. Blake's important cultural and social contacts included Henry

Fuseli, Reverend A.S. Mathew and his wife, John Flaxman (1755-1826), a

sculptor and draftsman, Tom Paine, William Godwin, and Mrs Elizabeth

Montagu (1720-1800), married to the wealthy grandson of the earl of

Sandwich.

His early poems Blake wrote at the age of 12. However, being early

apprenticed to a manual occupation, journalistic-social career was not

open to him. His first book of poems, POETICAL SKETCHES, appeared in

1783 and was followed by SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789), and SONGS OF

EXPERIENCE (1794). His most famous poem, 'The Tyger', was part of his

Songs of Experience. He approved of free love, and sympathized with

the actions of the French revolutionaries but the Reign of Terror

sickened him. In 1790 Blake engraved THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL,

a book of paradoxical aphorisms and his principal prose work.

Radically he sided with the Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost and

attacked the conventional religious views in a series of aphorisms.

But the poet's life in the realms of images did not please his wife

who once remarked: "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is

always in Paradise." Some of Blake's contemporaries called him a

harmless lunatic.

The Blakes moved south of the Thames to Lambeth in 1790. During this

time Blake began to work on his 'prophetic books', where he expressed

his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural

energies from reason and organized religion. Although Blake first

accepted Swedenborg's ideas, he eventually rejected him. He wrote THE

VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793), AMERICA: A PROPHESY (1793),