William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, the son of a small business hosiery dealer. Since childhood, Blake claimed to have seen visions. At age 4, he saw God "put his head on the window." When he was about 9 years old, he was walking in the countryside when he saw a tree full of angels. Despite his parents' efforts to stop him from "lying", they noticed that he was different from other children by not forcing him to go to a formal school and to teach himself at home. At the age of 10, Blake expressed a desire to become a painter, so his parents sent him to painting school. Two years later, he began to write poetry. At the age of 14, his father planned to send him to be an apprentice under a famous artist. But the tuition was very expensive. For the future of his family and his younger siblings, he voluntarily gave up this opportunity and became an apprentice in a woodblock printing workshop. During this time he was sent to Westminster Abbey to paint the monuments there, and the Gothic style of art influenced him deeply, from which he drew much inspiration later in his career.
After a seven-year apprenticeship, Blake studied at the Royal Academy for a brief but brief period. He started making watercolours and engraving illustrations for magazines. In 1782, Blake married the gardener's daughter, Catherine. Catherine was illiterate, and Blake taught her to read and write, as well as to draw and color. Catherine was a gentle woman who had always treated her husband with great respect, calling him Mr. Black. They lived together for more than forty years, had no children, and were loyal to each other. His wife's only complaint was: "Mr. Blake spends too little time with me. He always lives in heaven."
In 1784, Blake co-founded a printing shop. However, a few years later, his shop went bankrupt. In the years that followed, he lived mainly by carving and making illustrations for books and magazines, and his life was very difficult. But he was a very optimistic "maskless man". He has a secret source of joy that sometimes drives him to behave strangely: Once, he was seen sitting with his wife naked in the shade of a tree reading Paradise Lost, and someone came , he shouted happily, "Come in, this is Adam and Eve, you know."
In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his brother Robert to draw, paint, and sculpt. In the winter of 1787, Robert died of illness. When Robert died, Blake saw his brother's spirit rise through the roof and "clapped his hands with joy". He believed that Robert's spirit continued to see him, and later claimed that in a dream, Robert told him the unique method of printing - etching poems and illustrations on a copper plate.
In 1783, Blake's first collection of poems, Sketches of Poems, was published with the support of a friend, and mainly included his writing practice between the ages of 12 and 20. In 1789 he published "Songs of Innocence", a collection of poems and paintings. Blake first engraved words and drawings on a copper plate, and then Katherine hand-painted the book.
In 1794, he published "Songs of Experience". "Innocence" and "experience" are two opposing states of the human soul. "Song of Innocence" is the state of the human soul when it is not polluted. Babies in cradles, children who play freely, and shepherds wandering around are all the same innocence, joy, beauty, and freedom. They are one with nature, regardless of each other, in an untouched state. "Song of Experience" is a sinking scene of alienation of the soul. The true spirit of man and the reality of experience have split and conflicted with each other, full of scenes of poverty, injustice, misery and misfortune. In "Song of Innocence", the docile, peaceful, kind-hearted lamb becomes a wild, ferocious, and violent tiger in "Song of Experience". Blake witnessed the suffering of the times. The poem "London" describes the tragic picture of survival in his time. "I walked through every monopoly street/Wandered by the monopoly Thames/I saw every passerby/with a debilitated, pained face." This is a portrayal of the miserable picture of British society during the Industrial Revolution.
Blake hated the rationalism and materialism that prevailed in the 18th century. At one point he attended the Swedenborg Church in New Jerusalem, London, thinking that Newtonian science was superstitious nonsense. He once painted a picture of Newton, naked, sitting on a rough rock, with a compass in his hand, engrossed in making calculations. Newton's muscles were bulging and his eyes were sharp, the image of someone Blake hated. In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", he categorically denies God representing reason, and he predicts that the combination of heaven and hell will become an ideal world. Therefore, he praised the vitality of the flesh and Satan, who represented power, and believed that "power is the only life that comes from the body. Power is eternal joy." This announced the arrival of a new era of romanticism advocating passion and imagination.
Blake's poetry is full of dialectical spirit, "there is no process without opposites", and opposites can be unified, for example, "lamb" can sleep with "lion", "heaven" and "hell" can marry. He can also see the connection between things, such as "Looking at the world from a grain of sand/Looking at heaven from a flower/Taking eternity into an hour/Holding infinity in your hand." These verses require extraordinary imagination of.
Blake was very revolutionary, and he ardently supported the French Revolution. The first chapter of the long poem "The French Revolution" describes the sharp confrontation between the French king and the National Assembly. He was firmly on the side of Parliament. The famous publisher Joseph Johnson dared to print such radical works as Mary Wollstonecraft's In Defense of Women's Rights and Godwin's A Theory of Political Justice, but when he finished printing the first volume of Blake's The French Revolution After that, I dared not take it to the market and sell it. Other works such as "America: A Prophecy", "The Vision of the Daughters of Albion", "Europa: A Prophecy" all expressed his protests against the British monarchy and all the tyranny of the 18th century. In his essay "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," he satirized the repression and authority of the church. It can be said that Blake was a "Morro poet" earlier than Byron and Shelley.
Black, who was not a state religion, often befriended some of the radical thinkers of the era, such as Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. He was against most institutions of the era (and he was also paranoid) much like Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Lawrence later on.
In 1800 Blake moved to the small town of Fiffen in Sussex, where Blake produced illustrations for his then patron, the poet William Highley. He became progressively more thoughtful and prepared for his later mature works, and around 1804-1820 he wrote his epic poems full of great visions. Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by ordinary people, and he never sacrificed his illusions for the popularity of poetry. "I can't see the outer creation, it's a fetter that doesn't pique my interest." The poet once explained why his work is full of religious visions rather than the concrete things of everyday life. Few in his day recognized the genius of Blake's ability to see visions and perform them.
Blake returned to London in 1803 and continued to paint biblical watercolours, including for Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Milton's Paradise Lost and Restoration. Paradise" and other works to make illustrations. He was the first painter since the Renaissance to consciously defy conventional standards. His paintings are not depictions of the real world, but representations of his inner world. He destroys the reality of objects, but projects spiritual power, and it is his fantasy that controls everything. In 1809 his work was exhibited in the house of his brother Moss. Some people praise his art, some people think his paintings are too obscure, and more people call him crazy. Blake once sold a painting for £10 in exchange for a month's worth of food for the family, a price that excited him at the time. Today, each of his canvas paintings are worth millions. From 1818 he was adored by some young students. But Blake's final days were spent in obscurity. He never escaped poverty and was powerless to compete in the highly competitive engraving industry. In 1818, he met John Linnell, a young painter who, in order to help Blake, commissioned him to do a lot of work, such as making copper engravings for the Book of Job. In 1825, John Linnell commissioned him to create illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. He continued to do this work until a few days before his death in August 1827. Before his death, he also told people to use the last few shillings to buy charcoal pens. He finished the last painting and put it down, saying, "It's finally done, I can't do anything else." The meaning of his words is clear, that this is his last work. His wife turned away sadly.
William Blake died at home on August 12, 1827. On his deathbed, he was very serene, smiling and singing about what he had seen in the kingdom of heaven. With no money for a funeral, Catherine took out a loan, and Blake was buried on a non-Conformist hillside in London. Four years later, Catherine was also buried there, along with other notable infidels such as Defoe and Bunyan. Now, a sign of a grave is erected near their graves. In 1957, a monument was erected to Blake and his wife at Poets' Corner, Westminster, London.
Throughout his life, Blake received no official or public appreciation. In the eyes of the people at the time, he was an anti-rationalist, a dreamer and a mystic, an eccentric and paranoid. His nickname was "Holy Madman". While he was alive, only a few people, such as Wordsworth, noticed him and were influenced by him. It was not until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that Yeats and others recompiled his poetry collections, and people were surprised by his innocence and profoundness. Then came the publication of his letters and notes, and his divinely inspired paintings were gradually valued, so Blake's status as a poet and painter was established without a doubt. Blake was a forerunner of Romanticism, he wrote poetry from imagination or hallucinations, and in this sense he inspired Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, and even Arthur Rimbaud. At the same time, the transcendence, primitiveness, dreaminess and the pursuit of power and beauty of his poetry make it possess some characteristics of modernist art, which has far-reaching influence on later poets such as Yeats and Eliot. Today, many critics regard Blake as one of the six greatest poets in the history of English literature, along with Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth.
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