William Blake
1757–1827
Biography
William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker. He lived almost his whole life in London, apart from three years in Felpham. He was little known during his lifetime, and many of his contemporaries thought his views strange. Later readers came to see him as one of the most original figures of the Romantic period, and his poems and pictures are now studied side by side.
Blake made many of his books himself, setting poems and pictures together on the same page. He engraved text and images on copper, printed them, and coloured each copy by hand, so that copies could differ in their colours. His wife Catherine, whom he married in 1782, worked beside him as a printer and colourist and was essential to making these books. His religious and political views were unorthodox: he was hostile to the established church and to organised religion, was stirred by the American and French revolutions, and was influenced by the Swedish thinker Emanuel Swedenborg, although he later drew back from many of his political hopes.
Two of his works are on the site. Songs of Innocence first appeared in 1789, and Blake later brought it together with Songs of Experience (1794) under the title Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The short lyrics set a child's trust beside the harsh realities of poverty and corruption, so that each state of mind is seen against the other. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written in the early 1790s, mixes prose and verse, proverbs and visions, and it attacks conventional religion and morality while answering Swedenborg's book on heaven and hell.
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Books
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
by William Blake
Blake's two sets of short lyrics look at the same world twice, first through a child's trusting eye with the lamb and the piper, then through experience, with the tyger, the sick rose and the chimney-sweeper's cry. Read side by side, the paired poems argue about innocence…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
by William Blake
In Blake's prophetic book the poet dines with devils, collects their Proverbs of Hell, and argues that energy is eternal delight and that reason alone starves the soul. It is part verse and part prose and ends with A Song of Liberty.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.