William Blake: Visionary Artist

The brilliant 18th-century poet and engraver William Blake was ignored during his lifetime and even considered insane by many of his contemporaries. The creator of a unique artistic world, based on visions he saw throughout his life, marked a unique challenge to Britain’s social, political and religious orders. Blake is now considered one of the greatest contributors to the country’s art and literature.

Born in London on 28 November 1757, the son of a hosier, Blake was mainly educated at home by his mother. He later claimed that as a child he saw God at his window and angels on trees in the local park. His parents were supportive of his childhood imagination. They sent him to drawing school at ten, and then apprenticed him to an engraver for seven years. However, then as now, there was not much money in art. From 1779 until he died in in 1827, Blake would scrape a meagre living as a professional engraver, while filling his free hours creating poems and pictures that left his friends, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his few admirers, totally dumbstruck.

First Works

Blake’s first major works appeared in 1789 (Songs of Innocence) and 1794 (Songs of Experience.) He developed his own famous style of illuminated printing for these collections of lyric poems (just fifty copies in all), which covered subjects as diverse as childhood, education, established religion, free will and free love. The collections contain some of the best-loved poems — all in lines of deceptive simplicity — in the English language, such as London and The Tyger (“Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night …”).   

A Complete Original

Blake was an Enlightenment thinker, critical of colonialism and slavery and what he considered to be the Church’s oppression of ordinary people. However, his creativity and imagination became a harbinger for Romanticism. A complete original, his world was one in which all of life, the imagination, reason, and the physical and spiritual worlds were all connected: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” He even created his own mythology. His visions, which were his constant companion, were as real to him as life itself. And his compassion was everywhere: “A robin redbreast in a cage / Puts all heaven in a rage.”

Two Epic Books

The 1790s were a prolific time for the poet, most notably with Marriage of Heaven and Hell and His Minor Prophecies. As the new century dawned, he started work on his two great epic illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem, which occupied twenty years of his life. Milton is about poetic inspiration (Blake claimed John Milton, the great poet author of 1674’s epic poem Paradise Lost, appeared to him in a vision), while Jerusalemencourages readers to improve the society around them. The words in the much-loved hymn Jerusalem, which is regularly referred to as the ‘unofficial English National Anthem’, come from the preface to Milton.

Singing on his Death

Blake died on 12 August 1827 in poverty and obscurity, with his wife Catherine by his side. He died happy, however, singing his own poetry and of his visions of Heaven, while drawing a portrait of his wife in tears by his bedside. Catherine had helped him with his art throughout their marriage of forty-five years. As the decades passed, Blake’s genius would be slowly recognised. A true visionary, his combination of visual and verbal art was unique, and his vivid imagery has never been surpassed.