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William Blake: Life
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William Blake was one of England’s greatest poets. He combined both a lofty mysticism and an uncompromising awareness of the harsh realities of life. As a young boy he had a most revealing vision of seeing angels in the trees. These mystical visions returned throughout his life, leaving a profound mark on his poetry and outlook. William Blake was ... particularly sensitive to cruelty. His heart wept at the site of man’s inhumanity to other men and children.
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William Blake typified the Romantic viewpoint. Blake was a disturbing prophet who desired social change. He believed the repressions of Christianity and Victorian England – which preached against indulgence in hedonistic and physical pleasures – meant a loss of imagination and denial of the joy of life. In effect, to him such teachings preached lack of imagination, repression of the spirit, and death of the soul. He despised attempts to buy eternal redemption in the next world through asceticism and self-denial in this one. He was a man of personal force who, in his artwork, made strong demands on the imaginations of his fellow humans.
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William Blake was born in London on Nov. 28, 1757, the second son of a hosier and haberdasher. Except for a few years in Sussex, his entire life was spent in London. Its streets and their names took on spiritual symbolism in his writings, much as the place names of the Holy Land did in the writings of the biblical prophets whom Blake always regarded as his spiritual progenitors. From his earliest years he saw visions - trees full of angels, for example. If these were not true mystical visions, it is probably best to regard them not as hallucinations but as the artist's intense spiritual and sensory realization of the world.
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Blake's story of creation differs from the Genesis account. The familiar world was created only after a cosmic catastrophe. When the life of the spirit was reduced to a sea of atoms, the Creator set a limit below which it could not deteriorate farther, and began creating the world of nature. The longer books that Blake wrote describe Los's creation of animals and people within the world of nature. One particularly powerful passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.
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Blake's history does not end with his death. In his own lifetime he was almost unknown except to a few friends and faithful patrons, like Thomas Butts and the young disciples he attracted in his last years. He was even suspected of being mad. But interest in his work grew during the mid-19th century, and since then painstaking commentators have gradually elucidated Blake's beautiful, intricate, and difficult mythology. The 20th century has made him its own; he has been acclaimed as a kindred spirit by psychologists, writers (most notably William Butler Yeats), radical theologians, rock-and-roll musicians, and devotees of Oriental religion. He has furnished texts to a wide variety of rebels against war, orthodoxy, and almost every kind of psychic and personal repression.
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The Blake List is an electronic conference & mailing list dedicated to the life & work of William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, poet & mystic. List topics include anything of interest to Blakeans, including: commentary & criticism, contemporary influences, announcements of events & publications of interest to Blakeans, pointers to other Blake resources, both online & book-bound, efforts to digitize & "re-illuminate" Blake's work, the Printing house in Hell & other memorable fancies. The Blake List is unmoderated and open to the networking public.
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