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Leila's Books
The Sanity of William Blake
The Sanity of William Blake
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Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure.
***
William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".
Robert Burns may have brought poetry back from artifice and decorum to the warm and homely life of earth, but Blake escaped from that world almost altogether into the free air of spiritual mysticism. Burns restored passion to the lyric; Blake summoned to its inspiration the long-exiled imagination.
"All things exist in the human imagination," was a strange, brief, pregnant saying of his. People called William Blake insane ; so perhaps in a sense he was; but there are those who think that his madness knew more truth than the sanity of his age.
Blake was a little London boy; and his father, gave him small education beyond reading and writing. But the child had no lack of experiences. Once he came home from his walk and told his parents that he had seen a tree full of angels. His father whipped him, but he would not take it back. All his life long he was haunted by visions. "When the sun rises," said some one to him, "do you not see a round disk of fire something like a guinea?" "Oh, no, no," he replied; "I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying,
'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.'"
"We are led to believe a lie
When we see with, not through, the eye,"
he says again, and those who know what he means in this couplet will understand his poetry.
It was natural that this vision-seeing boy should have turned to the arts that render beauty visible. He was fascinated by painting and by Gothic architecture, and became himself an artist, though most of his work was in the unambitious branch of engraving. Blake's work in art was valued more highly by the nineteenth century than by his contemporaries. Some of it, like his illustrations for the Book of Job, has an imaginative power at times sublime.
Most of the poems of Blake which we care for today are in two little volumes, the "Songs of Innocence" and the "Songs of Experience." He printed them himself, as he did nearly all his books, and they can still be seen at the British Museum and elsewhere. Sunset colors flush across their pages, and they are full of melodies, sweet as those of Burns, but with more elfin undertones. The "Songs of Innocence " is a book of verse about children. Children had not interested the eighteenth century, but they interested Blake. It seems as if he had caught and translated for us the first tremblings of consciousness in a baby's soul in some of these verses; in nearly all we feel that he has given us the true spiritual secret in the heart of the child. What a journey from Gray's Pindaric odes to these little songs! Yet they are not so far separated in time. The "Songs of Experience" correspond to the "Songs of Innocence," but where the first give the fair light, these give the shadow. We have the tiger for the lamb, we have sorrow for joy, and instead of innocence, a shuddering perception of sin throbs through his verses.
***
William Blake (1757 – 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".
Robert Burns may have brought poetry back from artifice and decorum to the warm and homely life of earth, but Blake escaped from that world almost altogether into the free air of spiritual mysticism. Burns restored passion to the lyric; Blake summoned to its inspiration the long-exiled imagination.
"All things exist in the human imagination," was a strange, brief, pregnant saying of his. People called William Blake insane ; so perhaps in a sense he was; but there are those who think that his madness knew more truth than the sanity of his age.
Blake was a little London boy; and his father, gave him small education beyond reading and writing. But the child had no lack of experiences. Once he came home from his walk and told his parents that he had seen a tree full of angels. His father whipped him, but he would not take it back. All his life long he was haunted by visions. "When the sun rises," said some one to him, "do you not see a round disk of fire something like a guinea?" "Oh, no, no," he replied; "I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying,
'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.'"
"We are led to believe a lie
When we see with, not through, the eye,"
he says again, and those who know what he means in this couplet will understand his poetry.
It was natural that this vision-seeing boy should have turned to the arts that render beauty visible. He was fascinated by painting and by Gothic architecture, and became himself an artist, though most of his work was in the unambitious branch of engraving. Blake's work in art was valued more highly by the nineteenth century than by his contemporaries. Some of it, like his illustrations for the Book of Job, has an imaginative power at times sublime.
Most of the poems of Blake which we care for today are in two little volumes, the "Songs of Innocence" and the "Songs of Experience." He printed them himself, as he did nearly all his books, and they can still be seen at the British Museum and elsewhere. Sunset colors flush across their pages, and they are full of melodies, sweet as those of Burns, but with more elfin undertones. The "Songs of Innocence " is a book of verse about children. Children had not interested the eighteenth century, but they interested Blake. It seems as if he had caught and translated for us the first tremblings of consciousness in a baby's soul in some of these verses; in nearly all we feel that he has given us the true spiritual secret in the heart of the child. What a journey from Gray's Pindaric odes to these little songs! Yet they are not so far separated in time. The "Songs of Experience" correspond to the "Songs of Innocence," but where the first give the fair light, these give the shadow. We have the tiger for the lamb, we have sorrow for joy, and instead of innocence, a shuddering perception of sin throbs through his verses.
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