[William Blake - Night]
William Blake called his 'Spiritual life' "varied, free and dramatic." Blake appears to be a creative person, even having attended art school for much of his life and then going on to open an engraving business. Marrying young and to a jealous, possessive female, he suffered bouts of violence, which he then incorporated into his writings.
Blake sought a more conservative career as an artist, preferring though, a more unconventional career as an art teacher who gave art lessons, while drawing illustrations for books, allowing his spirit to remain free. But an altercation with a soldier left him with a court battle and heresy of disrespecting the king, which forever changed his life. Thus, his view of the world and his perceptions of people changed. In the course of all the changes he was experiencing, Blake began to imagine that "ominous forces were at work in the contemporary world and led him to complicate the opinions that he expressed in his poems." (Greenblatt, p. 1406)
Blake began indulging himself with the past - archaeology and literary history and began sketching and writing about it. Disillusioned by the decline of morals and manners, "the bard's of Blake's later Prophetic Books retain and association with the imagined version of the primitive past." Moreover, Blake's creative spirit prompted him to create and publish his own illuminated books which cites, "to read a Blake poem without the pictures is to miss something important." Blake's personal experiences and thoughts regarding human history prompted him to go even further until he wrote his own mythology. One of Blake's mythical characters announces, "I must Create a system or be enslaved by another Man's." Blake was so reveres in his time that he illustrated the books of other poets, even Yeats modeled a system of mythology after his. Blake defines himself as sort of a prophet bard. His cryptic, prophetic books were written in the viewpoint of "the bard, who, Present, Past, and Future Sees," and cites his work as "visionary or imaginative." (p. 1407)
Blake writes in manner not too unlike his metaphysical predecessors. In his style of writing, you have to look beyond the literal meanings of his words or passages in order to grasp how he uses common, every day symbols and words to mean something much, much deeper, than what can been seen on the surface.
The Complete Work of The Prophetic Books of William Blake : Jerusalem.
Images of William Blake's Illuminations.
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books.
Work Cited:
Greenblatt, S. et al. (Eds.) The Norton Anthology of American Literature: The Romantic Period through the twentieth Century and After. (8th ed., Vol. B). pp. 1406-07. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.