Essay: The Life And Career Of William Blake

William Blake was a poet and artist who was born in London, England in 1757. He lived 69 years, and although his work went largely unnoticed during his lifetime, he is now considered a prominent English Romantic poet. Blake’s religious views, and his philosophy that “man is god”, ran against the religious thoughts at the time, and some might equate Blake’s views to those of the hippie movement of the 20th century.

Blake was one of the foremost poets in the Romantic Era. Blake valued the unattainable as much as the other poets of his time did. The main goal, although impossible to attain was, "the Ideal, a state in which a perfect union between nature and human comprehension was accomplished" ( Marcotte 16).

For example, in “Infant Joy,” Blake demonstrates the child’s eye and sense of wonder that we find in the incorruptibility of infants. Blake presents a truly pure creature in the first stanza:

Although both men are both devout Christians, they have different views. For instance, William Blake wrote his poems in order to teach children the necessity of being in church and accepting Christ as a personal savior. Many of his poems stress how important it is to know God and how their faith can save them from their worries. An example of this is in the poem "The Chimney Sweeper" when the little boy had a dream about an angel setting free men that were trapped in a black coffin. Throughout his poetry, Blake uses many nouns to indicate the biblical meaning of something. For instance, in the poem "The Lamb", he uses the lamb as a metaphor for Jesus Christ to show that he too was a humble lamb. This metaphor showed that Jesus is close to us humans by using the word lamb to describe both children and Jesus Christ. However, in Wordsworth's poems, the topic of religion is seen through a more naturalistic view. In other words, William Wordsworth viewed that in order for religion to be truly appreciated it must be in nature where God truly is. This view is seen in his poem "We are Seven". The setting of the poem takes place outside of a churchyard in which the narrator and a little cottage girl are discussing her family members. Wordsworth did not use his poetry to show the importance of going to church or being a Christian like Blake did, however, he did use children to show that they are the ones closest to God. In Wordsworth's poetry, the child is what is able to be free in nature, and since nature is where God is that meant that the child was the closest to God. Not only were children used to show the importance of religion to Wordsworth but is also shown through the capitalization of some of the words throughout his poems. Words such as Boy, Girl, and Creature were all capitalized to show that God created all things, and these nouns were capitalized to show that God was

Romanticism is described as the period across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, that enlightened artists and philosophers developed and expressed revolutionary responses to injustices at the time. On such revolutionary was poet artist William Blake. Blake lived and wrote in England at a time when the Christian Church and Industrialisation held utmost power over people. The philosophic writer saw such values and attitudes as crimes against nature and human nature and sought to protest. William Blake, in his protesting works like Garden of Love and A Little Boy Lost, through the use of irony, sarcasm, aesthetic and metaphor, expresses concerns of corrupted 18th and 19th century Britons.

From a young age, Blake spoke of seeing apparitions. On one of his many trips to the countryside, Blake started to ramble about seeing " a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars." After hearing him babbling about his visions of mystical and heavenly creatures, Blake’s parents tried to discourage him from his ‘lying.’ But Blake continued his ‘stories,’ none of which amused his parent. In the end, he was saved from some beatings though his mother’s pleadings, who saw and understood that he was different from his peers. All of Blake’s apparitions would have a profound, lasting effect on his work, from rich imagery to prophetic

William Blake was one of several transitionary writers between the Age of Reason and the Age of Romanticism. He saw the poverty and suffering that surrounded him and was a supporter of the French Revolution in its early days. He could not accept the neoclassical idea of a stable, orderly hierarchy in the universe, but instead viewed existence as a blending of opposite poles - good and evil, innocence and experience, heaven and hell. His magnum opus Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is the epitome of how his work embodied his beliefs.

It was known that Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood. His poems relate to his background because it was said that Blake was once considered mad for his, “idiosyncratic views.” This means that when he was young, he had many visions of extraordinary images. It was rumored that at such a young age Blake would, “see a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” His parents were not amused of such story and then other people began to realize he wasn’t kidding about his visions and they also realized that Blake had a special talent within

Because of his influence of art and religion in the late eighteenth century, William Blake excessively used symbols and archetypes through his words of poetry and through his visual art to examine different pieces of humankind. He was extremely famous for his romantic twist on artwork and for being one of the best “romantics” of his time. William Blake distinguished a fine line between what “the language of art” meant and of art itself and explaining it. In Stephen Behrendt’s The Moment of Explosion, he states that “William Blake recognized what the artist gains forever is indeed a language- a language of tradition.

Initially this romantic poem is an experience poem that Blake has written. How it has experience is that it shows what the child and children that he is with has gone through. He's not innocent he has seen the cruelness of the world, the fact that he was sold to work cleaning chimneys shows experience. He and the others have to live the hardships of working to survive getting up early before the sun rises and get started on cleaning the chimneys all around. There innocence was taken away from them as soon as

William Blake’s collection of poetry reflects greatly on the distressed life he had. The view that he had of the world, 18th century Europe in particular, affected many people throughout literatures history. He spoke of innocence but also of experience which gave the impression he was once deeply involved with each, although they are very different.

William Blake’s poem “London” takes a complex look at life in London, England during the late seventeen hundreds into the early eighteen hundreds as he lived and experienced it. Blake’s use of ambiguous and double meaning words makes this poem both complex and interesting. Through the following explication I will unravel these complexities to show how this is an interesting poem.

Blake uses traditional symbols of angels and devils, animal imagery, and especially images of fire and flame to: 1) set up a dual world, a confrontation of opposites or "contraries" which illustrate how the rules of Reason and Religion repress and pervert the basic creative energy of humanity, 2) argues for apocalyptic transformation of the self "through the radical regeneration of each person's own power to imagine" (Johnson/Grant, xxiv), and 3) reconstructs Man in a new image, a fully realized Man who is both rational and imaginative, partaking of his divinity through creativity. The form of the poem consists of "The Argument," expositions on his concepts of the "contraries" and of "expanded perception" which are both interspersed with "Memorable Fancies" that explicate and enlarge on his expositions, and concludes with "A Song of Liberty," a prophecy of a future heaven on earth.

Blake was engaging a belief in which people should look within themselves, instead of looking for God on some remote pedestal. When asked by a friend about the divinity of Jesus, Blake responded “He is the only God; And so am I and so are you!” In this response, Blake is turning accepted ideas on their head and saying humans have this enormous capacity for greatness, which in a way makes them divine. Engagement with elements of mysticism was apparent not only in “Proverbs of Hell” but in a majority of William Blake’s work. It is perhaps his particular childhood and mystic abilities that influenced Blake’s work in an effort to change societies perceptions by forcing them to critically analyze the world around them and themselves. Once man looks inside himself and discovers what they are truly capable of, as Blake notes in “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” (line 35), the abilities of man seem immeasurable as “One thought, fills immensity” (line

William Blake is one of England’s most famous literary figures. He is remembered and admired for his skill as a painter, engraver, and poet. He was born on Nov. 28, 1757 to a poor Hosier’s family living in or around London. Being of a poor family, Blake received little in the way of comfort or education while growing up. Amazingly, he did not attend school for very long and dropped out shortly after learning to read and write so that he could work in his father’s shop. The life of a hosier however was not the right path for Blake as he exhibited early on a skill for reading and drawing. Blake’s skill for reading can be seen in his understanding for and use of works such as the Bible and Greek classic literature.