William Blake

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757–1827) was an English painter, poet and printmaker. He is considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC’s poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Except for a period of three years spent in Felpham, Blake lived in London for his entire life. Nevertheless, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich oeuvre, which embraced the imagination as “the body of God” or “human existence itself”.

Although criticised by some contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high esteem by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His poetry has been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as “Pre-Romantic”. Influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, he turned against the Church of England but respected the Bible. He was influenced by thinkers like Emanuel Swendenborg. Blake had a complex relationship with Enlightenment philosophy. Owing to his visionary religious beliefs, he opposed the Newtonian view of the universe. This mindset is reflected in Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”. Because of the diversity of his views, critics found it difficult to classify him as a thinker.

Blake also experimented with relief etching, a method he used to produce most of his books, paintings, pamphlets and poems. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and the finished products as illuminated books or prints, which involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium.

The 19th-century scholar, William Rossetti called him a “glorious luminary”, and “a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors”. Lucas said of him: “Shall I call him artist or genius–or mystic–or madman?” Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered Blake “a man of genius”, and Wordsworth made his own copies of several of Blake’s songs. As a Romantic writer he has exerted the most powerful influence on the 20th and the 21st centuries.