Poets and Poems

William Blake

'William Blake is now regarded as a seminal figure
in the early or pre-Romantic movement'

William Blake was born in London's Soho in 1757, the third child of James Blake and his wife Catherine Wright. After leaving school aged ten, he attended the Henry Pars drawing academy and at fourteen embarked on a seven year apprenticeship with the engraver James Bashire. After completing this in 1779, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art School of Design. By 1780 he was exhibiting paintings there. In later years he exhibited a number of times at the Royal Academy.

He was also writing poetry and in 1783 privately published his first collection, 'Poetical Sketches'. It created little interest and indeed even to the end of his life his writings had few admirers. In 1789 he illustrated and printed a children's book of verse 'Songs of Innocence' and in 1794 the complementary 'Songs of Experience'. But his reputation as a poet rests mainly on the 'Prophetic Books', a series printed between 1789 and 1809. Perhaps the most accessible of these is the early verse poem 'The Book of Thel'*.

Although neglected and misunderstood by both his own and following generations, Blake is now regarded as a seminal figure in the early or pre-Romantic movement and has had a huge influence on the poetry and art of the twentieth century. One of the first to recognise his genius and to be influenced by him was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats**.

Back in the year 1782, Blake had met and married Catherine Sophia Boucher who was five years his junior. They had no children. Although illiterate she proved an intelligent, able and loving companion. He taught her to read and write, as well as to engrave. She is now acknowledged to have been a skilful printer and colourist. Practical as well as artistic, she managed to budget for their household on the small amounts he was able to give her, for Blake often struggled financially. At the end of his life, the last picture he drew was one of her.

From an early age Blake was subject to visions that profoundly influenced both his poetry and his art. The images were often religious in content, such as the tree that as a boy he told his parents he had seen "filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." While sketching in Westminster Abbey during his apprenticeship to James Bashire, he reported that he had seen "Christ and his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests and heard their chant".

William Blake died on 20th August 1827 at his home*** in London, with Catherine at his bedside. The body of this genius of English poetry and art was interned in an unmarked grave in the Dissenter's burial ground, Bunhill Fields.

* I have only recently read this apparently simple but profound poem. Thel is a young shepherdess who lives in the Vale of Har, a place with some affinity to the Biblical Garden of Eden. She feels her life to be meaningless and fleeting, but flees back to Har when she learns what the loss of innocence would mean. There is an interesting discussion of the poem in 'Blake's "Tender Stranger"; Thel and Hervey's Meditations' (Dennis M Reid, 1982)
http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2490&context=cq
** When Yeats (b.1865) was in his mid-teens, his father gave him a book on Blake. He subsequently spent many years analysing the writings intensively and seeking to understand the complex mythology of the 'Prophetic Books'. In 1887 he wrote an essay 'William Blake and the Imagination' and in 1893 co-authored an influential study 'The Works of William Blake Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical.'
See 'William Butler Yeats and William Blake'
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=28706
*** Blake's last home, later demolished, was in Fountain Court off the Strand in London. His wife Catherine died in 1832, calmly calling out to him that she was coming and it would not be long now. She had paid for his burial out of borrowed money.