William Blake

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose work belongs to the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age, and is also often described as Pre-Romantic. He lived in London for nearly all his life, apart from three years in Felpham. During his lifetime he was largely unrecognised, and some contemporaries considered him mad because of his idiosyncratic views. Later critics and readers came to value the force, strangeness, and originality of his poems and images.

Blake is best known for a body of poetry and visual art that joined imagination, religion, politics, and symbol. He called some of his writings his “prophetic works.” The 20th-century critic Northrop Frye described them as “what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language.” Blake’s art and writing treated the imagination as “the body of God,” or “human existence itself,” and his work is marked by philosophical and mystical undercurrents that have made him difficult to classify.

He was born at 28 Broad Street, now Broadwick Street, in Soho, London, the third of seven children. His father, James Blake, was a hosier, and his mother was Catherine Blake, née Wright. William attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at age 10, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother. The Bible shaped him early and remained a source of inspiration throughout his life. Blake later described childhood religious visions, including seeing God’s face at his window, angels among haystacks, and the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.

His training was practical and visual from the start. As a child he engraved copies of drawings of Greek antiquities bought for him by his father, gaining early exposure to classical forms through Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Albrecht Dürer. He also read widely in subjects of his own choosing, and his early poetry shows knowledge of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms. At 10 he entered Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand. In 1772 he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire for seven years, becoming a professional engraver at 21.

Blake’s time copying images from Gothic churches in London, especially Westminster Abbey, helped form his artistic style and ideas. He saw Gothic art as a “living form,” and the armour, funeral effigies, coloured waxworks, and old religious imagery of the Abbey left clear traces in his work. In 1779 he became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, where he rejected the fashionable taste associated with Joshua Reynolds. Against Reynolds’s “general truth” and “general beauty,” Blake wrote, “To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”

Blake was hostile to the Church of England and to almost all organised religion. He was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions, though he later rejected many of those political beliefs. He maintained an amicable relationship with Thomas Paine and was also influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. His wife, Catherine Boucher, was central to the making of many of his books as a printmaker and colourist, and was an artist and printer in her own right. Blake’s words still matter because they speak from a rare mixture of craft, vision, dissent, and fierce attention to the particular.