LECTURE 2

MAJOR WORKS

Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794)

Prophetic books

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1794)

Milton

Jerusalem

LIFE

William Blake was born in London and raised in a state of economic hardship. He received very little formal education. He showed early signs of artistic talent and at the age of fourteen became an apprentice in an engraver’s shop where he worked and studied the craft.

The year 1783 marked the beginning of a period of great creativity. Blake published his first volume of poetry and invented a new method of printing, a mixture of engraving and painting. In 1789 he engraved and published his first great work, Songs of Innocence, followed in 1794 by Songs of Experience.

Lack of recognition drove Blake to depression which verged on insanity. From 1810 to 1817 he lived completely alienated from the material world and claimed that his work was inspired by visions of angels, spirits and prophets.

After 1818 he stopped writing poetry but continued to produce engravings. He died and was buried in obscurity.

POETRY

W. Blake’s poetry is noted for his highly distinctive mystic vision and based on personal mythology and symbolism. (“The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative”)

Blake’s lyric technique was that of compressed metaphor and symbol which explode into a multiplicity of references. An English encyclopedia describes him as “a solitary and deeply religious man”, who “had a hatred of materialism” and his poems as ranging “from the mystic and almost incomprehensible to the delightfully simple”.

William Blake was a poet and an artist. He did not only write poetry, but published his own texts and engraved illustrations in the mode of relief etching. So his work is an integral and mutually illuminating combination of words and design.

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