William Blake

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William Blake was an English poet, painter, and engraver who claimed to see visions throughout his life and made them the matter of his art. Largely unread in his lifetime and dismissed by many who knew of him as mad, he is now counted among the major figures of English Romanticism — and, separately, among the most singular visionaries the modern West has produced. He is better understood not as a Romantic poet who happened to absorb older mystical sources, but as the principal English-language builder of a sustained visionary theology, carried out across an integrated body of etched books, manuscript epics, marginalia, and graphic art, on a scale comparable to the great theosophical systems of Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.

A London life

He was born in Soho, London, on 28 November 1757, the fourth child of James Blake, a Westminster hosier, and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. The family were Nonconformists of uncertain stripe; archival work by Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard, published in the scholarly periodical Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly in 2004, established that Blake’s mother had earlier belonged, with her first husband, to the Moravian Congregation of the Lamb at Fetter Lane, a radical community then deep in its controversial Sifting Time of blood-and-wounds piety, bridal mysticism, and hymn-based visionary devotion. Whatever passed to him through that channel, the city itself shaped everything he made. In August 1772 he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, who sent him to draw the Gothic monuments of Westminster Abbey — formative for the hard linear style that never left him. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1779, came to detest both the Academy and Joshua Reynolds, and in 1780 was swept along by the crowd at the burning of Newgate during the Gordon Riots.

He worked as a commercial engraver, a trade that fed him poorly and shaped his eye. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, illiterate at her marriage; he taught her to read, write, and color his prints, and she learned to engrave at his side, becoming indispensable to the workshop and, it appears, his first and steadiest believer. The bookseller Joseph Johnson — publisher of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Paine, and Priestley — was his principal employer and his conduit to the rational-radical dissenting world, an uneasy counterweight to his mystical sources. Only once did he live outside London: the Felpham years (1800–1803) under William Hayley’s patronage, which began in exaltation and curdled into resentment of a patron he came to call a corporeal friend and a spiritual enemy. There, in 1803, he ejected a soldier from his garden and was tried for sedition at Chichester for words the man swore he had spoken against the King; he was acquitted. He died on 12 August 1827 at Fountain Court off the Strand, still poor, reportedly singing of what he saw, and was buried in the dissenters’ ground at Bunhill Fields.

The visions, reported as fact

From childhood he saw things others did not, and spoke of them as plain experience rather than metaphor: a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, the prophet Ezekiel beneath a bush, the soul of his brother Robert rising at his death with arms outspread, clapping its hands for joy. These were not, in his telling, figures of speech but perceptions — sight directed through the eye rather than merely with it. The category of the angel in his work is therefore not borrowed iconography but reported encounter, and his confidence in it underwrote the whole of his practice. He insisted that the imagination was not fancy but the organ of true vision, the divine faculty itself, and that the world disclosed to it was more real, not less, than the measured world of the natural philosophers.

Illuminated printing

Robert’s death in 1787 was decisive. Blake reported that his brother returned in a dream to reveal a method of printing — relief etching, in which text and image are drawn together on the copper plate in an acid-resistant varnish and the surrounding metal bitten away, so that the design stands up to take the ink. From around 1788 he used it to produce his illuminated books, etching word and picture as one, printing them himself, and hand-tinting the impressions with Catherine. The first trials were the aphoristic sheets All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion; then Songs of Innocence in 1789. The method let him bypass the publishing trade entirely — author, designer, engraver, printer, colorist, and seller in one workshop — and it fused the doctrine to its form. In an illuminated book the argument is inseparable from the way it looks; the page is the theology.

The lyric and prophetic books

The early lyric collections, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), are his most accessible work, set out as the two contrary states of the human soul. Behind them grew something far stranger. The continental prophecies — America: A Prophecy (1793) and Europe: A Prophecy (1794) — read the American and French revolutions as eruptions of a cosmic fire named Orc against the frozen order of the lawgiver. The Lambeth books of 1794–95, chief among them The First Book of Urizen, generate a fall-cosmogony that parodies Genesis: a creation gone wrong from the start. The long manuscript epic Vala, or The Four Zoas, worked over from the late 1790s and never published in his lifetime, attempts the whole system at once. The two late epics, Milton (begun c. 1804) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (etched and revised c. 1804–20, a hundred plates in four chapters), integrate everything into a single redemption-narrative. Within Milton sits the brief lyric beginning And did those feet, written as a preface and quite unlike anything around it in fame. The prophetic books are, in proportion to their ambition, among the least read poems in the language — Blake assembled in them a complete private mythology, and to enter it is to learn a vocabulary that exists nowhere else.

The Four Zoas

The cast of that mythology is a divided being. Albion is the fallen primordial human in whom all of humanity is contained — a cosmic man comparable to the Adam Kadmon of Kabbalah and to Swedenborg’s Grand Man. His four faculties, the Zoas — Greek for the living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation — were one in his unfallen state and warring after the fall. Urizen is reason and limit, the cold lawgiver who mistakes himself for God and casts a net of religion over the world. Luvah is love and passion, manifest in time as the revolutionary Orc. Tharmas is the body and the unity of sensation, fallen into a chaotic sea. Urthona is imagination and prophecy, who in time becomes Los, the prophet-blacksmith laboring at his furnaces to give error a shape so it can be cast off. Each male figure trails a female counterpart Blake called an emanation — Urizen’s Ahania, Luvah’s Vala, Los’s Enitharmon — projected from him in the fall and to be rejoined in redemption. Around this fourfold psychology Blake builds a graded ontology of vision, from the fourfold sight of Eden down through Beulah and Generation to Ulro, the single vision of dead matter and abstraction. Across the whole he sets the principle that states change while individual identities never finally do: error belongs to the state, not to the person, which grounds his fierce doctrine of forgiveness against the inherited moral law.

A combative religion

Blake’s relation to organized religion was combative and idiosyncratic, but it was the relation of a critical inheritor, not an outsider. He engaged Swedenborg with unusual precision. On 13 April 1789 he and Catherine signed the minute book of the first general conference of the New Jerusalem Church — the only religious institution he is documented to have attended — endorsing Swedenborg’s writings as revealed truth. He owned and annotated the Swedenborgian volumes, at first sympathetically and then with mounting anger, and turned on Swedenborg sharply in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, charging him with conventionality and with having written, for all his visions, none of them new. Yet the break was with the New Church as a hardening sect — its catechisms, set prayers, and clerical garments — not with the doctrine of correspondences or the cosmology of degrees, both of which persist in his later books and shape his map of Eden, Beulah, Generation, and Ulro. He read Boehme almost entirely through the four-volume English Law edition and praised its engraved diagrams to the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson; the dialectic of contraries that opens The Marriage of Heaven and Hell tracks Boehme’s wrath and love closely, and the imperative of self-annihilation answers to Boehme’s notion of the self-will that must die. He absorbed a Neoplatonic architecture of descent and return through Thomas Taylor, the English Platonist whom he likely met through John Flaxman, and whose translations of Plotinus, Porphyry, and the Orphic hymns gave him both the structure of the soul’s fall and recovery and the very category of the emanation. He revered Jesus while rejecting most of the institutional Christianity around him, identifying Christ with the imagination and with the forgiveness of sins against the moral law, and arriving in his last writings at a frankly antinomian gospel. He set imagination above reason as the divine faculty and attacked Isaac Newton, John Locke, and Francis Bacon as the prophets of a deadening materialism — the single vision of Ulro, the world seen as inert measurable stuff. His famous color print of Newton, bent double over a compass at the bottom of the sea, is the indictment made image.

The disputed shape of the myth

The overall shape of his myth — a creation gone wrong, a true humanity asleep within the fallen one, redemption as the awakening of vision — has often been read as recognizably gnostic in structure, and Harold Bloom in particular pressed the resemblance. The architecture does rhyme with Gnosticism: a botched cosmos, a divine spark forgetting itself, a deliverance that is recognition rather than reward. But the case is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is about sources. Urizen is not the Gnostic demiurge Ialdabaoth; he is a fallen faculty whose redemption is part of Albion’s, and the texture of Blake’s system is closer to Boehmean theosophy and English antinomian Christianity than to second-century Sethian myth. Whether Blake drew on any such source or arrived at the pattern on his own is hard to settle, because his reading is hard to trace; he taught himself Hebrew in middle age, and the question of how much Kabbalah reached him — directly, or filtered through Boehme and Swedenborg’s Grand Man — divides his interpreters. He was, in the end, an integrator: Christian heterodoxy, antinomian dissent, Swedenborgian correspondence, Boehmean dialectic, Neoplatonic return, and Kabbalistic anthropos brought together into one visionary architecture, with no single stream accounting for the whole.

Recovering the work

Blake was almost unknown at his death; his executor Frederick Tatham, who inherited the manuscripts, is reported to have burned a quantity of them as heretical. The Victorian rediscovery began with Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus” (1863), completed by his widow Anne Gilchrist after his death and supplied with selections edited by Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti — still the indispensable starting point, and freely readable in full on Wikisource. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s critical essay of 1868 was the first sustained reading; the three-volume Ellis and Yeats edition of 1893 first tried to reconstruct the prophetic books as one symbolic system, with W. B. Yeats reading Blake through the lens of his own occult interests. The modern critical tradition divides into streams that still organize the field: Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947), the great archetypal reading; David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire (1954), the historical-political one; Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition (1968), the esoteric-Neoplatonic one; and Bloom’s Gnostic-revisionist Blake’s Apocalypse (1963). S. Foster Damon’s A Blake Dictionary (1965) remains the standard reference. The archival recovery continues: Keri Davies and Marsha Keith Schuchard’s account of the Blake family’s Moravian past, published in Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly in 2004, reset the question of his maternal inheritance. Blake’s own writing and art are in the public domain worldwide; the canonical digital edition is the William Blake Archive, which presents high-resolution color facsimiles of the illuminated books alongside a reliable text. Much of the twentieth-century scholarly apparatus, by contrast, remains in copyright.

He died as he had lived, reporting rather than inventing. Scholarship has spent the years since assembling his scattered work and debating how far his mythology forms a coherent system as against a body of inspired improvisation. What is not in dispute is that he meant it. He wrote and engraved as though setting down what was shown to him, and left the strangeness intact for whoever came after.

→ In the library: Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs

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