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Portrait of William Blake

Literature · Poets

William Blake

1757–1827 · English

Romanticism (early); visionary poetry and art

William Blake was a London engraver, painter and poet whose visionary works were largely ignored in his lifetime but are now central to English Romanticism. He produced his own "illuminated books" by relief etching, combining text and image, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His lines "And did those feet in ancient time", set by Parry as "Jerusalem", have become an unofficial English anthem.

How to spot them

  • ▸'Tyger Tyger, burning bright' and 'The Lamb'
  • ▸Songs of Innocence and of Experience; 'dark Satanic Mills'
  • ▸Illuminated printing by relief etching; paintings such as The Ancient of Days and Newton
  • ▸'To see a World in a Grain of Sand' (Auguries of Innocence); 'the doors of perception'

Key works

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789; combined 1794)

Paired lyrics 'shewing the two contrary states of the human soul', including The Lamb, The Tyger and London

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790–1793)

Prose-poem satire including the 'Proverbs of Hell' and the image of cleansing 'the doors of perception'

The Tyger (1794)

Songs of Experience lyric asking what immortal hand could frame the tiger's 'fearful symmetry'

And did those feet in ancient time (c. 1804–1810)

Preface poem to Milton: a Poem, set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 as 'Jerusalem'

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (c. 1804–1820)

His longest illuminated prophetic book, 100 plates

Auguries of Innocence (c. 1803 (published 1863))

Poem of paradoxes beginning 'To see a World in a Grain of Sand'

Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826)

Series of 21 engravings, his last completed major work

Key ideas

  • Contraries are necessary to progress: 'Without Contraries is no progression'
  • Imagination as divine; hostility to the rationalism of Newton, Locke and Bacon
  • Personal mythology with figures such as Urizen, Los, Orc and Albion
  • Said Milton wrote 'in fetters' of God and Heaven and was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Soho, London, son of a hosier; apprenticed to the engraver James Basire
  • •Claimed to have seen visions from childhood, including angels in a tree at Peckham Rye
  • •Invented 'relief etching', which he said his dead brother Robert revealed to him in a vision
  • •Tried for sedition at Chichester in 1804 after a quarrel with a soldier at Felpham, and acquitted
  • •Married Catherine Boucher, who helped him colour his books
  • •Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception (1954) takes its title from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
  • •Eduardo Paolozzi's sculpture Newton (after Blake) stands in the British Library piazza
  • •Buried in Bunhill Fields, London; a headstone marking the actual grave was added in 2018

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources