‘Poet Artist Prophet’ says the stone laid by the Blake Society on William Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, London. Unusually, Blake was equally a writer and a visual artist. In their original form his most celebrated poems are extraordinary combinations of poetry and design, printed, hand-coloured and published in extremely limited runs by Blake and his wife, Catherine.
Born in 1757, in the midst of the ‘Age of Reason’, and as the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam, Blake worked all his life as a jobbing engraver, illustrating and engraving other artists’ illustrations for prints and books. He was profoundly religious and politically radical, and his poetry and artworks marry spiritual and social concerns, viewing the eternal via the contemporary events of Georgian London, and vice versa.
In his earlier poetry, in particular Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake is capable of communicating profound and challenging moral truths through apparently simple verse. His later poetry is an attempt to create his own mythology from the ground up, and consequently demands a little more of its readers (and more than Blake’s contemporaries were able or prepared to give). As Blake’s character Los, the Eternal Prophet says in Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, “I must Create a System, or be enslave’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”.
Blake’s mature poetry imagines fallen humanity as Albion, a sleeping giant divided into warring psychic components, the Four Zoas, and as such predicts modern psychological models of the fractured or unbalanced psyche. But his vision is ultimately a hopeful one, a cosmic narrative which culminates in humanity’s return to unfallen, eternal existence, and which stresses the centrality of Human Imagination as, literally, Divine
Loading
2 comments
Dinesh said:
‘Poet Artist Prophet’ says the stone laid by the Blake Society on William Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, London. Unusually, Blake was equally a writer and a visual artist. In their original form his most celebrated poems are extraordinary combinations of poetry and design, printed, hand-coloured and published in extremely limited runs by Blake and his wife, Catherine.
Born in 1757, in the midst of the ‘Age of Reason’, and as the Industrial Revolution was gathering steam, Blake worked all his life as a jobbing engraver, illustrating and engraving other artists’ illustrations for prints and books. He was profoundly religious and politically radical, and his poetry and artworks marry spiritual and social concerns, viewing the eternal via the contemporary events of Georgian London, and vice versa.
In his earlier poetry, in particular Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Blake is capable of communicating profound and challenging moral truths through apparently simple verse. His later poetry is an attempt to create his own mythology from the ground up, and consequently demands a little more of its readers (and more than Blake’s contemporaries were able or prepared to give). As Blake’s character Los, the Eternal Prophet says in Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion, “I must Create a System, or be enslave’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create”.
Blake’s mature poetry imagines fallen humanity as Albion, a sleeping giant divided into warring psychic components, the Four Zoas, and as such predicts modern psychological models of the fractured or unbalanced psyche. But his vision is ultimately a hopeful one, a cosmic narrative which culminates in humanity’s return to unfallen, eternal existence, and which stresses the centrality of Human Imagination as, literally, Divine
Dinesh said:
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
~ William Blake
A poem which we were taught in High School