William
Blake 1757-1827
It was from Blake's Marriage
of Heaven and Hell that a sensationally trangressive rock band
of the 1960s, the Doors, took their name:
If the doors of perception
were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is: In-
-finite.
But unlike the Doors, Blake
needed no pharmaceutical assistance in cleansing his vision. His eccentricity
and imaginative intensity, which seemed like madness to more than
a few contemporaries, emerged from a childhood punctuated by such
events as beholding God's face pressed against his window, seeing
angels among the haystacks, and being visited by the Old Testament
prophet Ezekiel. When his favorite brother died in 1787, Blake claimed
that he saw his "released spirit ascend heavenwards clapping its hands
for joy" Soon after, he reports, this spirit visited him with a critical
revelation of the method of "Illuminated Printing" that he would use
in his major poetical works.
Rebellious, unconventional,
fiercely idealistic, Blake became a celebrity in modern counterculture
- Allen Ginsberg and many of the Beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s
cited him as a major influence. But for a good part of the nineteenth
century, he was known only to a coterie. He did not support himself
as a poet but got by on patronage and commissions for engraving and
painting. . . . .
The Angel Gabriel Appearing to Zacharia, 1799-1800 |
The Ghost of a Flea, ca. 1819-20 |
Oberion, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing, ca. 1785 |
Pity, 1795 |
Metropolitan
Museum William Blake Exhibiiton
- The complete biography
of William Blake begins on page 104 of The Longman Anthology
of British Literature.
Text and notes taken
from The Longman Anthology of British Literature copyright ©1999 by
Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.
Image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Exhibit of William Blake's
works, www.metmuseum.org
Site copyright© Joan Bahamonde, George Justice, and Susan Soto
|
