Happy Birthday, William Blake

He was a poet (virtually unknown in his own lifetime), and also an engraver (I’ve put some of his startling work in the extended entry – but if you want to see more of his work, check out this link). He did illustrations for children’s books, religious books, volumes of poetry … and now his stuff is considered priceless.

William Blake was born in 1757 in London, the third of five children. He went to school until he was 14 and then had to go to work. He got a job as an apprentice to an engraver, which is how he ended up making his paltry living. He lived in pretty much poverty for his entire life. He married at 25 the illiterate Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her how to read, and they ended up becoming collaborators in bringing out volumes of his poetry. He did engravings to illustrate his poems. Catherine was the one who bound the books, and got them ready for publication. The entire thing was a joint production. They did all the work themselves.

The two of them never had any children. They were extremely unconventional, and visitors tell of stopping by the Blake house to find the two of them sitting out in their back garden completely naked. Just hanging out, reading, working together, NUDE. They had a whole philosophy about nakedness, and sex, and innocence – that there was nothing dirty about any of that stuff. It actually all was quite holy, and it was human prudery that made celebration of the body a dirty thing.

William Blake had visions. He speaks about them openly and much of his work has a phantasmagorical religious feeling to it. When he was a young boy, he said he looked up into a tree and saw that it was full of winged angels.

His view of God, the Spirit, the Holy Trinity is so inspiring to me. It’s vital, it’s alive, and it seems to be all about love. There are not too many people I would call “genius” – but Blake I most certainly would.

However – again – William Blake, despite these astonishing works of poetry he put out during his lifetime – died unrecognized.

Now, though, he is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English language.

He’s one of my all-time favorites.

His poem about the little lisping chimney-sweep is in the “canon”. If you took any kind of sweeping Poetry 101 course, you probably would have encountered it. I’ll post it below. But it’s really his long form poems, especially the SPECTACULAR “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, where the guy literally has no equal. None. Blake has no peers.

Here’s the one about the chimney sweep, which is an indictment of the society in which he lives, a society that treats its most innocent members with brutality and uncaring indifference. He is a visionary poet, yes, but he did not turn his eyes away from earthly matters. Far from it.

“The Chimney Sweep” – from Songs of Innocence

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved: so I said,
“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.”

And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

And here … for those of you who are interested … is “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” in its entirety (accompanied by more of Blake’s engravings).

Just go with it. Just succumb.

As you can see, the guy was so ahead of his time that he is timeless. He predicts the Beat generation (and Allen Ginsberg was partially responsible for bringing Blake back into vogue), he predicts modernism, he would fit in with the poetry slams of today (except that he is, well, you know – GOOD). He was a man who plumbed his unconscious for material. He brought what was within him OUT. His poetry is the literary version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Van Gogh was not interpreting the sky. Van Gogh was actually painting what he saw. William Blake is the same way.

Thanks, Blake! Wish I could have visited you and your wife in your back garden, and sat around with you all, nude, drinking tea, and talking about angels.

Here are some quotes by and about William Blake. Enjoy!

“He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. one obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble.” — F.R. Leavis

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. — Blake

“I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bit excessive?”
“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake.”
Pause.
“William Blake?”
“William Blake!”
“William Blake???”
“William Blake!!!”
– Bull Durham

“I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse.” — William Blake

“The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life.” — Robert Graves

“In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin.” — Edward Thomas

“It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.” — T.S. Eliot

“Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.” — Blake

“He is very eighteenth century.” — T.S. Eliot

“The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.” — T.S. Eliot on “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”

“In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a ‘dark night of the soul sort of,’ his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him – ‘I wasn’t even reading, my eye was idling over the page of “Ah, Sun-flower,” and it suddenly appeared – the poem I’d read a lot of times before.’ He began to understand the poem, and ‘suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,’ he ‘heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn’t think twice, was Blake’s voice.’ This ‘apparitional voice’ became his guiding spirit: ‘It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.’ On Ginsberg this ‘anciency fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. ‘The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.’ Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg’s appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.” — Michael Schmidt, “Lives of the Poets”

“a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique … individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence.” — FR Leavis

“You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas.” — TS Eliot

“Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake’s ‘The Chimey Sweeper’, written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet’s dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep’s gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us.” — Camille Paglia, “Break, Blow, Burn”

Some of William Blake’s extraordinary engravings below:

Christ in the sepulcher guarded by angels – 1805

Whirlwind of Lovers (Illustration to Dante’s Inferno)

The Ancient of Days – 1794

Isaac Newton – 1795