WILLIAM BLAKE

TIMELINE:
William Blake was born on November 28 1757
November 28, 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.)
in Soho, London.

August 1, 1767 Went to school only long enough to learn how

to read and write.

1767 Joined a drawing school named Henry Pars.

William Blake became an apprenticed engraver

August 4, 1772 to James Basire. William was into the arts at a
very early age because of his father who
encouraged him.

1778 He took up engraving as a profession; met

Catherine Boucher who became his future wife.

William Goes to College. Blake became a

October 8, 1779 student at The Royal Academy. He went there for
six years and did not have to pay but had to
provide his own supplies.
 Blake Begins To write Poetical Sketches. When
November 18, 1782 William begins to write his sketches they are
romantic. This could be because this was around
the time when he met his wife.

He got married to Catherine Boucher on 18

August 18, 1782 August at St. Mary's Church in London. Catherine
was the illiterate daughter of a gardener.

1783 His first collection of poems named Poetical

Sketches was published.

William's Father Dies. William's father's death was

March 17, 1784 very devastating for him because his father
inspired him to be artistic and to do what he did.

Tried his hand on a new style of printing involving

1788 copper plates that were etched; His popular
works titled “All Religions are One” and “There is
No Natural Religion” was published.
(Relief Etching)

1789 “Songs of Innocence” was published.

August 4, 1791 William Became a Professional Engraver. At age

21 William Blake became a professional
engraver.

Published some more of his famous contributions

titled “For Children: The Gates of Paradise”, “The
1793 Marriage of Heaven and Hell” as well as
“America: A Prophesy” and Visions of the
Daughters of Albion.

1794 “Europe: A Prophesy”, “The Book of Urizen” and

“Songs of Innocence and of Experience” were
published.

“The Song of Los”, “The Book of Los” and “The

1795 Book of Ahania” were published. He also came
up with color-printed illustration and drawings.
 1800 Moves to Felpham, Sussex, to work for patron
William Hayley.

Indicted on charges of sedition (October) as a

1803 result of a quarrel with a soldier, John Scolfield,
whom he had evicted from his garden (August).
Returns to London.

1804 Acquitted of sedition charges (January).

1811 His reputed work “Milton: A Poem” was

published.

Meets John Linnell.

1818 Begins sketching "Visionary Heads" for John
Varley.

1820 He published “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the

Giant Albion”

1824 Begins illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy and

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

1826 Publishes 21 engraved Illustrations of the Book of

Job.

August 12, 1827 Blake died at the age of 69.

Early Life:
William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.) in Soho,
London. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Blake's father, James, was a
hosier. The Blakes were dissenters, and believed to have belonged to the Moravian Church. Blake
was baptized at St James's Church, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, Piccadilly, London. He
attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of ten, and was
otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake.

The Bible had an early, profound influence on Blake, and it would remain a lifetime source of
inspiration, coloring his life and works with intense spirituality. At an early age, Blake began
experiencing visions, and his friend and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that Blake saw God's
head appear in a window when Blake was 4 years old. He also allegedly saw the prophet Ezekiel
under a tree and had a vision of "a tree filled with angels." Blake's visions would have a lasting effect
on the art and writings that he produced.
Henry Pars’ Drawing School:
Blake's artistic ability became evident in his youth, and by age 10, he was enrolled at Henry
Pars’ drawing school, where he sketched the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient
statues.

Apprenticeship to Basire:
Four years later, Blake began his apprenticeship with James Basire, the official engraver to the
Society of Antiquaries. Blake continues to work with Basire for seven years creating numerous
sketches and drawings of various paintings, monuments and statues as part of his assignments. He
gained immense knowledge on gothic art and architecture and also developed a keen interest in
the medieval era. During this time Blake met many influential and prominent artistic, literary and
intellectual figures of London. Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and
monuments, where his lifelong love of gothic art was seeded.

Royal Academy:
On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House,
near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his
own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the
unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president,
Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his
pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to
abstractions, to generalizing and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake
responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is
the Alone Distinction of Merit". Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to be a
form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical precision of
his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much from
the president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater value than
landscape and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his ideals into practice."
Certainly Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, submitting works on six occasions
between 1780 and 1808.
`Blake became a friend of John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland during
his first year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining
the Society for Constitutional Information.

Marriage:
In 1782, Blake entered into marriage with an illiterate woman, Catherine Sophia Boucher. Blake
taught her how to read and write and the marriage was largely a happy one. He also helped her to
experience visions, as he did. Catherine believed explicitly in her husband's visions and his genius,
and supported him in everything he did, right up to his death 45 years later. The couple lived in
harmony and worked together on many of Blake’s publications.

Poetical Sketches:
Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between
1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John
Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The
book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author
and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey
Keynes' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The
Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957. In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at
auction in London for £72,000.

Relief etching:
In 1788, aged 31, Blake 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. Illuminated printing involved writing the text
of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations
could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the
plates in acid to dissolve the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief (hence the
name).
This is a reversal of the usual method of etching, where the lines of the design are exposed to
the acid, and the plate printed by the intaglio method. Relief etching (which Blake referred to as
"stereotype" in The Ghost of Abel) was intended as a means for producing his illuminated books more
quickly than via intaglio. Stereotype, a process invented in 1725, consisted of making a metal cast
from a wood engraving, but Blake's innovation was, as described above, very different. The pages
printed from these plates were hand-coloured in water colours and stitched together to form a
volume. Blake used illuminated printing for most of his well-known works, including Songs of
Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem.

Felpham:
In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham, in Sussex (now West Sussex), to take up a job
illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake began Milton a
Poem (the title page is dated 1804, but Blake continued to work on it until 1808). The preface to this
work includes a poem beginning "And did those feet in ancient time", which became the words for
the anthem "Jerusalem". Over time, Blake began to resent his new patron, believing that Hayley was
uninterested in true artistry and preoccupied with "the meer drudgery of business" (E724). Blake's
disenchantment with Hayley has been speculated to have influenced Milton: a Poem, in which Blake
wrote that "Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies". (4:26, E98)

Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a
physical altercation with a soldier, John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but with
uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the king. Schofield claimed that Blake had
exclaimed "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake was cleared in the Chichester assizes of
the charges. According to a report in the Sussex county paper, "[T]he invented character of [the
evidence] was ... so obvious that an acquittal resulted". Schofield was later depicted wearing "mind
forged manacles" in an illustration to Jerusalem.

Return to London:
Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804–20), his
most ambitious work. Having conceived the idea of portraying the characters in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales, Blake approached the dealer Robert Cromek, with a view to marketing an
engraving. Knowing Blake was too eccentric to produce a popular work, Cromek promptly
commissioned Blake's friend Thomas Stothard to execute the concept. When Blake learned he had
been cheated, he broke off contact with Stothard. He set up an independent exhibition in his
brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in Soho. The exhibition was designed to market his
own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a
result, he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt called a
"brilliant analysis" of Chaucer and is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism. It also
contained detailed explanations of his other paintings. The exhibition was very poorly attended,
selling none of the temperas or watercolours. Its only review, in The Examiner, was hostile.
Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of
illustrations of Revelation 12.
 Also around this time (circa 1808), Blake gave vigorous expression of views on art in an
extensive series of polemical annotations to the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, denouncing the
British Academy as a fraud and proclaiming, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot".
In 1818 he was introduced by George Cumberland's son to a young artist named John Linnell.
A blue plaque commemorates Blake and Linnell at Old Wyldes' at North End, Hampstead. Through
Linnell he met Samuel Palmer, who belonged to a group of artists who called themselves the
Shoreham Ancients. The group shared Blake's rejection of modern trends and his belief in a spiritual
and artistic New Age. Aged 65, Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job, later admired
by Ruskin, who compared Blake favourably to Rembrandt, and by Vaughan Williams, who based his
ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing on a selection of the illustrations.
In later life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to
Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit;
this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

Dante's Divine Comedy:

The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the aim
of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 cut short the enterprise, and only a handful
of watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Even so,
they have evoked praise:

'[T]he Dante watercolours are among Blake's richest achievements, engaging fully with the
problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even
higher level than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the
three states of being in the poem'.

Blake's illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works, but rather seem to
critically revise, or furnish commentary on, certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.
Because the project was never completed, Blake's intent may be obscured. Some indicators
bolster the impression that Blake's illustrations in their totality would take issue with the text they
accompany: In the margin of Homer Bearing the Sword and His Companions, Blake notes, "Every
thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation
of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost." Blake seems to dissent from Dante's admiration of
the poetic works of ancient Greece, and from the apparent glee with which Dante allots
punishments in Hell (as evidenced by the grim humour of the cantos).
At the same time, Blake shared Dante's distrust of materialism and the corruptive nature of
power, and clearly relished the opportunity to represent the atmosphere and imagery of Dante's
work pictorially. Even as he seemed to near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish
work on the illustrations to Dante's Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he
possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.

Engravings:
Although Blake has become most famous for his relief etching, his commercial work largely
consisted of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the 18th century in which the
artist incised an image into the copper plate, a complex and laborious process, with plates taking
months or years to complete, but as Blake's contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such engraving
offered a "missing link with commerce", enabling artists to connect with a mass audience and
became an immensely important activity by the end of the 18th century.
Blake employed intaglio engraving in his own work, most notably for the illustrations of the
Book of Job, completed just before his death. Most critical work has concentrated on Blake's relief
etching as a technique because it is the most innovative aspect of his art, but a 2009 study drew
attention to Blake's surviving plates, including those for the Book of Job: they demonstrate that he
made frequent use of a technique known as "repoussage", a means of obliterating mistakes by
hammering them out by hitting the back of the plate. Such techniques, typical of engraving work of
the time, are very different to the much faster and fluid way of drawing on a plate that Blake
employed for his relief etching, and indicates why the engravings took so long to complete.

Death:
On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported,
he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is
said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been
an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to
sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always,
Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the house, present at his expiration, said, "I have
been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."
Catherine paid for Blake's funeral with money lent to her by Linnell. He was buried five days
after his death – on the eve of his 45th wedding anniversary – at the Dissenter's burial ground in Bunhill
Fields, where his parents were interred. Present at the ceremonies were Catherine, Edward Calvert,
George Richmond, Frederick Tatham and John Linnell. Following Blake's death, Catherine moved into
Tatham's house as a housekeeper. She believed she was regularly visited by Blake's spirit. She
continued selling his illuminated works and paintings, but entertained no business transaction without
first "consulting Mr. Blake". On the day of her death, in October 1831, she was as calm and cheerful as
her husband, and called out to him "as if he were only in the next room, to say she was coming to
him, and it would not be long now".
On her death, Blake's manuscripts were inherited by Frederick Tatham, who burned some he
deemed heretical or politically radical. Tatham was an Irvingite, one of the many fundamentalist
movements of the 19th century, and opposed to any work that smacked of blasphemy. John Linnell
erased sexual imagery from a number of Blake's drawings.
Since 1965, the exact location of William Blake's grave had been lost and forgotten as
gravestones were taken away to create a lawn. Blake’s grave is commemorated by a stone that
reads "Near by lie the remains of the poet-painter William Blake 1757–1827 and his wife Catherine
Sophia 1762–1831". The memorial stone is situated approximately 20 metres away from the actual
grave, which is not marked. Members of the group Friends of William Blake have rediscovered the
location and intend to place a permanent memorial at the site.

Blake is recognized as a saint in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was
established in his honour in Australia in 1949. In 1957 a memorial to Blake and his wife was erected in
Westminster Abbey.

BACKGROUND OF THE TYGER:

“The Tyger” is one of Blake’s most loved and most quoted poems. It appeared in Songs of
Experience, first published in 1794 as part of the dual collection Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Songs of Innocence was published first, alone, in 1789; when the combined Songs of Innocence and
Experience appeared, its subtitle, “shewing the two contrary states of the human soul,” explicitly
indicated the author’s intention to pair the two groups of poems.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It

appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in
1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of
Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-
mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to
coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time and
a state of protected "innocence," but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world
sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a
state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political
corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's
"Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence,
Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The
Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems such as The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy display
Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "dark
satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution'.

THE TYGER
William Blake (Songs of Experience)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright What the hammer? what the chain?
In the forests of the night, In what furnace was thy brain?
What immortal hand or eye What the anvil? what dread grasp
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

In what distant deeps or skies When the stars threw down their spears,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes? And watered heaven with their tears,
On what wings dare he aspire? Did he smile his work to see?
What the hand dare sieze the fire? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

And what shoulder, & what art. Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? In the forests of the night,
And when thy heart began to beat, What immortal hand or eye
What dread hand? & what dread feet? Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Poem Analysis:

FACTS ABOUT WILLIAM BLAKE

 Blake wrote several poems n mythology, satires, politics and prophecies.

 Blake was considered mad because he predicted several things and was always doing it
unwarranted.
 Blake told people that he had mystical visions in his life. When he was only four years old, he
said he had seen God, who had put up his head on the window; and when he was nine years
old, he saw a tree full of angels. Many people who heard him speak this way thought that he
was delusional.
 Blake married the illiterate Catherine Boucher and then he taught her how to read and write
and also make drafts so that they could work together. He even had plans to publish along
with her.
 Blake actually credits most of his works to his dead brother Robert. Blake also learnt several
languages like Hebrew, Latin, Italian and Greek so that he could read the literary works in the
original language.
 When William Blake died, Wordsworth, the renowned poet, said he had no doubt that Blake
was mad, but in his madness he could see something of interest that was more than what the
 sanity of the likes of Lord Byron and Walter Scott had to offer. This may sound strange to many
current-day Blake fans, but this was the common opinion of Blake's peers, friends and readers.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT WILLIAM BLAKE

 Blake had a unique style of writing and he would always use two contradictory words in his
works. For example, heaven and hell, spirit and reason and so on. His work had a unique
dichotomy. Today, several poets copy this style in their own poetry.
 Blake as a person loved poetry and in order to read poetry in their own languages, he learnt
Hebrew, French, German and Latin. He soon mastered these languages.
 Blake usually credited his works of poetry to his dead brother Robert.
 Blake was considered as delusional because he often spoke of meeting God. This started
when he just four years old. He claimed to have seen God, who put His head by his window.
He also said that when he was nine years old he saw a tree full of angels. People thought he
had a vivid imagination.
 Blake married a woman who was illiterate and then took the time to teach her how to read
and write so that he and she could work together.
 When Blake passed away, his so-called insanity was praised by William Wordsworth, who said
that there was more to Blake's insanity than Lord Byron's or Walter Scott's sanity. Surprisingly,
many of his fans, peers and friends who knew him well had a similar opinion.