William Blake wrote in 1799: "I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision." Sadly, few of his contemporaries in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain shared his vision. It was only after Blake's death that his genius became recognized and his poetry, prints, artwork and visionary thinking inspired new generations of imaginative minds.
Blake was born in Soho, London, on 28 November 1757. His father was a hosier and the family lived above his shop near Oxford Street. Mostly homeschooled by his mother, Blake claimed to have experienced visions from an early age. Alexander Gilchrist, his first biographer, describes how young William saw "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars". Blake continued to have visions throughout his life, with an intense recall of what he had experienced. He knew that few people could see what he saw, but by sharing his visions through his writings and art, he believed that they could be understood.
The released spirit
Recognizing their son's artistic talent, Blake's parents enrolled him at drawing school at the age of ten. While others might have dreamed of a career in fine art, Blake's studies were focused more on accuracy of reproduction than on originality. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to James Basire, a London engraver who worked for the Society of Antiquaries. Engraving required stamina, concentration and precision, but Blake enjoyed the work. He gained particular inspiration from visits to Westminster Abbey, where he made drawings of the tombs and monuments, and where he experienced memorable visions. The abbey of Blake's time was luminous: filled with Gothic architecture, imagery and colour, suits of armour and painted waxwork funeral effigies.
By 1779, aged 21, Blake had completed his seven-year apprenticeship and began to earn a living as a copy engraver. Sadly, the style of line engraving he had learned was falling out of fashion, which meant fewer commissions. He enrolled to study painting at the Royal Academy of Arts, but after having various disagreements, in particular with Joshua Reynolds, the school's first president, he left after less than a year.
Life changed when Blake met Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. They married in 1782. Catherine was five years younger and, like many young women at the time, illiterate. With Blake's help, she learned to read and write, to engrave and etch, and to become skilled in printing and colouring. Most importantly, she also learned to share her husband's visions.
One of Blake's strongest visions came on the death of his younger brother, Robert. According to Alexander Gilchrist, Blake witnessed "the released spirit ascend heavenward... ‘clapping its hands for joy'". Blake believed that Robert's spirit stayed with him and even inspired him to invent a new method of etching. Using a technique of relief etching, Blake printed his designs on special paper, which he and Catherine would then paint by hand.
Romantic and revolutionary
The Blakes had no children and lived, mostly in poverty, in rented rooms in central London. They had a close circle of friends and family, and it was friends who helped Blake to publish his first poetry collection, Poetical Sketches, in 1783. The poems protest against war, tyranny and King George III's treatment of the American colonies.
Blake was a non-conformist who read and met many of the radical thinkers of the time. He believed in racial and sexual equality and was an outspoken critic of slavery and marriage laws. He distrusted materialism, the Industrial Revolution and the abuse of power by the establishment and religious institutions. "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's," he wrote. "I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."
In 1784, after his father's death, Blake used part of his inheritance to set up a print-selling shop with a friend. The business was not a success and the friends parted amicably. Blake kept their heavy printing press, which stayed with him and Catherine whenever they moved.
Blake's best-known poetry collections, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), are beautifully illustrated. They mirror Milton's Paradise Lost and its states of "Paradise" (Innocence) and "the Fall" (Experience). Poems include "The Chimney Sweeper", highlighting the issues of poverty and child labour, and "The Tyger", which shows the paradox of beauty and ferocity in God's creatures. Published as illustrated poetry and prose, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) was a form of biblical prophecy used to express Blake's intense Romantic and revolutionary beliefs. None of his collections sold well.
Poet, artist and prophet
Blake spent three years with the writer William Hayley at Felpham, on the south coast of England, where he read many great classical works. His learning and insights prepared him for writing and etching his masterpiece: Jerusalem (1804-20), a visionary epic showing the fall of Albion, the primeval man, and the human spirit prevailing over reason.
Like others in the Romantic movement of the time, Blake personified abstract ideas and depicted feelings in human form. He looked for originality and inner meaning, not imitation. But his work was at odds with contemporary style and convention. William Wordsworth believed him to be mad. He was not alone in that view. "Shall I call him Artist or Genius - or Mystic - or Madman?" wrote Blake's friend the lawyer and diarist Henry Crabb Robinson in 1825, before concluding: "Probably he is all!"
The older he got, the less Blake was willing to compromise. The work he exhibited, including at the Royal Academy, was mocked, negatively reviewed or simply ignored. Blake depended upon engraving work to earn a living, but after 1806, he earned no commissions for a decade.
Although his final years were spent in terrible hardship, Blake was supported by a group of young artists who called themselves "The Ancients". One of them, John Linnell, helped him financially and, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Although in poor health, Blake was still completing this work on 12 August 1827, when he became unwell. He first insisted on sketching his wife's portrait before starting to sing hymns and verses - and then he died. He was 69. Blake was buried in an unmarked grave at the dissenters' burial ground in Bunhill Fields, near what is today Old Street station.
Obituaries at the time focused on Blake's eccentric character and beliefs rather than any artistic or literary talent. It took several decades for recognition to come. The Pre-Raphaelites found Blake inspirational, while Gilchrist's Life of William Blake (1863) transformed his reputation. Blake's influence extended to the modernists of the 20th century and to later artists such as Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and even Maurice Sendak. Blake inspired the beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s, and musicians ranging from Benjamin Britten to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Today, his poem "Jerusalem" ("And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green") is used as an anthem for English sports teams and on other patriotic occasions.
On 12 August 2018, a large crowd gathered near Blake's grave in London for the unveiling of a headstone provided by the Blake Society. They came from around the globe to pay homage to a poet, artist and prophet who knew no limitations. "You never know what is enough," writes Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "unless you know what is more than enough."