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    William Blake - Context

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    Chris
    William Blake was born in London in 1757 and showed artistic talent from a young age. He worked as an engraver and illustrator while also writing poetry. His first published collection was called Poetical Sketches in 1783. He is known for his illustrated books including Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake rejected Enlightenment thinking and conventional religion, and his works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. In his later life, Blake wrote prophetic books fusing poetry, art, and his own mythology. He published using a labor intensive method of etching and printing that limited his reach. Blake struggled financially and felt misunderstood in his lifetime.

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    William Blake - Context

    Uploaded by

    Chris
    74 views1 page
    William Blake was born in London in 1757 and showed artistic talent from a young age. He worked as an engraver and illustrator while also writing poetry. His first published collection was called Poetical Sketches in 1783. He is known for his illustrated books including Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake rejected Enlightenment thinking and conventional religion, and his works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. In his later life, Blake wrote prophetic books fusing poetry, art, and his own mythology. He published using a labor intensive method of etching and printing that limited his reach. Blake struggled financially and felt misunderstood in his lifetime.

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    William Blake was born in London in 1757 and showed artistic talent from a young age. He worked as an engraver and illustrator while also writing poetry. His first published collection was called Poetical Sketches in 1783. He is known for his illustrated books including Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake rejected Enlightenment thinking and conventional religion, and his works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. In his later life, Blake wrote prophetic books fusing poetry, art, and his own mythology. He published using a labor intensive method of etching and printing that limited his reach. Blake struggled financially and felt misunderstood in his lifetime.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    74 views1 page

    William Blake - Context

    Uploaded by

    Chris
    William Blake was born in London in 1757 and showed artistic talent from a young age. He worked as an engraver and illustrator while also writing poetry. His first published collection was called Poetical Sketches in 1783. He is known for his illustrated books including Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake rejected Enlightenment thinking and conventional religion, and his works like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell were influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg. In his later life, Blake wrote prophetic books fusing poetry, art, and his own mythology. He published using a labor intensive method of etching and printing that limited his reach. Blake struggled financially and felt misunderstood in his lifetime.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Context

    William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father, a hosier, soon recognized his son's
    artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At 14,
    William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further
    developed his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator, and
    drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua
    Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this
    time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called
    Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by
    Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title Songs of
    Innocence and Experience showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake's political
    radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-
    book poem about the Revolution, in fact, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and
    only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightenment rationalism, of institutionalized
    religion, and of the tradition of marriage in its conventional legal and social form (though he
    was married himself). His unorthodox religious thinking owes a debt to the Swedish philosopher
    Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), whose influence is particularly evident in Blake's The
    Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In the 1790s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric
    to the prophetic mode, and wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and
    Jerusalem. Linked together by an intricate mythology and symbolism of Blake's own creation,
    these books propound a revolutionary new social, intellectual, and ethical order. Blake
    published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were
    etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These
    plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive
    and labor-intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake's poetry
    during his life. It has also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake's work, which
    has interested both literary critics and art historians. Most students of Blake find it necessary to
    consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as
    inseparable. During his own lifetime, Blake was a pronounced failure, and he harbored a good
    deal of resentment and anxiety about the public's apathy toward his work and about the
    financial straits in which he so regularly found himself. When his self-curated exhibition of his
    works met with financial failure in 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into
    obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as
    something of an eccentric--as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th
    century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age.
    Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and
    genius.

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