Life & Background
Blake was born in London in 1757 to a hosier's family and was apprenticed at fourteen to an engraver, the trade he practised all his life. He briefly attended the Royal Academy and quarrelled with its president, Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses he later annotated with contempt. He said he saw visions from childhood — a tree filled with angels at Peckham Rye — and treated them as fact. He married Catherine Boucher, taught her to read and to print, and the two produced his illuminated books together by a relief-etching method he devised, colouring each copy by hand. He supported the American and French revolutions, was tried for sedition in 1803 after an altercation with a soldier, and acquitted. He died in poverty in 1827, largely unknown; his reputation was made by Swinburne, Yeats, and the twentieth century.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Two sets of short lyrics, issued separately and then together, subtitled Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Innocence gives the Lamb, the piping shepherd, the chimney sweeper consoled by a dream of an angel, and a divine image of mercy, pity, peace, and love. Experience answers each: the Tyger burning bright, whose maker is asked whether he who made the Lamb made him; a second chimney sweeper, a little black thing among the snow, whose parents have gone to church to praise God and his priest and king; London, where the speaker walks by the chartered Thames and hears mind-forged manacles in every voice; and a human abstract in which pity would be unnecessary if we did not make somebody poor.
The two sets are not a fall from happiness into disillusion but a system of contraries — Blake's argument, stated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is that without contraries there is no progression. Innocence is not ignorance and Experience is not wisdom; each sees what the other cannot. The poems are printed with Blake's own designs, and the image frequently argues with the text, which is why reading them as words alone loses half the work. Behind the lyrics lies his opposition to institutional religion, to state power, and to what he called single vision and Newton's sleep — the reduction of the world to measurable matter, which the prophetic books elaborate into a full mythology of Urizen, Los, and Orc.
Why Blake Matters
Blake stands outside every period label, which is why he is examined constantly: too early for Romanticism as usually dated, too radical for the eighteenth century, and unread in his own time. London and The Tyger are among the most analysed short poems in English, and his integration of image and text makes him foundational for book history and visual studies as well as literature. His influence runs to Yeats, who edited him, to Ginsberg, and to a whole counter-tradition of visionary and antinomian writing.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Poetical Sketches1783
- Songs of Innocence1789
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell1790
- Songs of Experience1794
- The Book of Urizen1794
- Milton: A Poem1804–10
- Jerusalem1804–20