Portal:William Blake
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Introduction
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham, he produced a diverse and symbolically rich œuvre, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God" or "human existence itself".
Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic". A committed Christian who was hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to almost all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions. Though later he rejected many of these political beliefs, he maintained an amiable relationship with the political activist Thomas Paine; he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised him as a "glorious luminary", and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".
Selected general articles
Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC (July 14, 1912 – January 23, 1991) was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry (1947), which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremost living student of Western literature." Frye's contributions to cultural and social criticism spanned a long career during which he earned widespread recognition and received many honours. Read more...
Los's Spectre torments him at his smithy in Blake's poem Jerusalem. This image comes from Copy E. of the work, printed in 1821 and in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art
The Spectre is one aspect of the fourfold nature of the human psyche along with Humanity, Emanation and Shadow that William Blake used to explore his spiritual mythology throughout his poetry and art. As one of Blake's elements of the psyche, Spectre takes on symbolic meaning when referred to throughout his poems. According to professor Joseph Hogan, "Spectre functions to define individuals from others [...] When it is separated [from Emanation], it is reason, trying to define everything in terms of unchanging essences." Thus, according to Samuel Foster Damon, Spectre epitomizes "Reason separated from humanity" and "Self-centered selfhood" or, as Alexander S. Gourlay puts it, Spectre is "characterized by self-defensive rationalization".
Spectre appears in several of Blake's works, including Jerusalem, Milton: a poem and The Four Zoas. Because of its widespread presence in Blake's more mythological works, scholars have reflected on Spectre through multiple critical approaches including Jungian archetypal analysis, as a means of mapping Blake's mythology within intellectual history and within his own biographical experience. Read more...
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes (/ˈkeɪnz/ KAYNZ; 25 March 1887, Cambridge – 5 July 1982, Cambridge) was an English surgeon and author. He began his career as a medic in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he made notable innovations in the fields of blood transfusion and breast cancer surgery. Keynes was also a publishing scholar and bibliographer of English literature and English medical history, focussing primarily on William Blake and William Harvey. Read more...
Europe a Prophecy is a 1794 prophetic book by the British poet and illustrator William Blake. It is engraved on 18 plates, and survives in just nine known copies. It followed America a Prophecy of 1793. Read more...
"The Garden of Love" is a poem by the Romantic poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection, Songs of Experience.
One reading on "The Garden of Love" is that it was written to express Blake's beliefs on the naturalness of sexuality and how organised religion, particularly the Christian church of Blake's time, encouraged repression of natural desires. Read more...- Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Since the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom has written more than forty books, including twenty books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. He has edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Bloom came to public attention in the United States as a commentator during the literary canon wars of the early 1990s. He was educated at Yale University, Cambridge University, and Cornell. Read more...
America a Prophecy is a 1793 prophetic book by the English poet and illustrator William Blake. It is engraved on eighteen plates, and survives in fourteen known copies. It is the first of Blake's Continental prophecies. Read more...- Samuel Foster Damon (February 12, 1893 – December 25, 1971) was an American academic, a specialist in William Blake, a critic and a poet. When remembered as a Blake scholar, he is often compared in importance to Northrop Frye and David V. Erdman. Read more...
All Religions are One is a series of philosophical aphorisms by William Blake, written in 1788. Following on from his initial experiments with relief etching in the non-textual The Approach of Doom (1787), All Religions are One and There is No Natural Religion represent Blake's first successful attempt to combine image and text via relief etching, and are thus the earliest of his illuminated manuscripts. As such, they serve as a significant milestone in Blake's career; as Peter Ackroyd points out, "his newly invented form now changed the nature of his expression. It had enlarged his range; with relief etching, the words inscribed like those of God upon the tables of law, Blake could acquire a new role." Read more...- "Night" is a poem in the illuminated 1789 collection Songs of Innocence by William Blake, later incorporated into the larger compilation Songs of Innocence and of Experience. "Night" speaks about the coming of evil when darkness arrives, as angels protect and keep the sheep from the impending dangers.
Songs of Innocence was written by William Blake in 1789 as part of his Illuminated Books. Blake's aim for his Songs was to depict the two contrary states of human existence: innocence and experience. The Songs speak upon the "innocence" of being a child and the "experience" gained over a lifetime. The Songs are separated into ten different objects, with each object offering a different situation and how it is viewed from a child's perspective. Read more...
Alicia Suskin Ostriker (born November 11, 1937) is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry.
She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet," by Progressive.. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018 she was named New York State Poet. Read more...
"Nebuchadnezzar", Tate impression
Nebuchadnezzar is a colour monotype print with additions in ink and watercolour portraying the Old Testament Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake. Taken from the Book of Daniel, the legend of Nebuchadnezzar tells of a ruler who through hubris lost his mind and was reduced to animalistic madness and eating "grass as oxen".
According to the biographer Alexander Gilchrist (1828–1861), in Blake's print the viewer is faced with the "mad king crawling like a hunted beast into a den among the rocks; his tangled golden beard sweeping the ground, his nails like vultures' talons, and his wild eyes full of sullen terror. The powerful frame is losing semblance of humanity, and is bestial in its rough growth of hair, reptile in the toad-like markings and spottings of the skin, which takes on unnatural hues of green, blue, and russet." Read more...
The Little Girl Lost is a 1794 poem published by William Blake in his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. According to scholar, Grevel Lindop, this poem represents Blake's pattern of the transition between "the spontaneous, imaginative Innocence of childhood" to the "complex and mature (but also more dangerous) adult state of Experience." Read more...
Hand painted copy B of William Blake's "A Poison Tree", 1794 currently held at the British Museum.
"A Poison Tree" is a poem written by William Blake, published in 1794 as part of his Songs of Experience collection. It describes the narrator's repressed feelings of anger towards an individual, emotions which eventually lead to murder. The poem explores themes of indignation, revenge, and more generally the fallen state of mankind. Read more...- Tiriel is the eponymous character in a poem by William Blake written c.1789, and considered the first of his prophetic books. The character of Tiriel is often interpreted as a foreshadowing of Urizen, representative of conventionality and conformity, and one of the major characters in Blake's as yet unrealised mythological system. Read more...
The Little Vagabond is a 1794 poem by William Blake in his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. His collection, Songs of Innocence was originally published alone, in 1789. The scholar, Robert Gleckner says that the poem is a form of transformation of the boy in the poem "The School Boy," from Songs of Innocence. Read more...
Introduction to the Songs of Experience is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was etched and published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. Read more...
William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job primarily refers to a series of twenty-two engraved prints (published 1826) by Blake illustrating the biblical Book of Job. It also refers to two earlier sets of watercolours by Blake on the same subject (1806 and 1821). The engraved Illustrations are considered to be Blake's greatest masterpieces in the medium of engraving, and were also a rare commercial and critical success for Blake. Read more...
In 1822, Blake completed a short two-page dramatic piece which would prove to be the last of his illuminated manuscripts, entitled The Ghost of Abel A Revelation In the Visions of Jehovah Seen by William Blake. Inscribed in the colophon of this text is "W Blakes Original Stereotype was 1788". It is almost universally agreed amongst Blakean scholars, that the "Original Stereotype" to which he here refers was All Religions are One and/or There is No Natural Religion.
During the 1770s, Blake had come to feel that one of the major problems with reproducing artwork in print was the division of labour by which it was achieved; one person would create a design (the artist), another would engrave it (the engraver), another print it (the printer) and another publish it (the publisher). It was unusual for artists to engrave their own designs, due primarily to the social status attached to each job; engraving was not seen as an especially exalted profession, and was instead regarded as nothing more than mechanical reproduction. Artists like James Barry and John Hamilton Mortimer were the exceptions to the norm insofar as they tended to engrave their own material. A further division in the process was that text and images were handled by different artisans; text was printed by means of a movable letterpress, whereas images were engraved, two very different jobs. Read more...
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy AA, 1826, object 54 (Bentley 54, Erdman 54, Keynes 54) "Introduction" (The Fitzwilliam Museum)
The Voice of the Ancient Bard is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789, but later moved to Songs of Experience, the second part of the larger collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794. Read more...
William Blake. Daughters of Los and Enitharmon in the Looms of Golgonooza. Jerusalem. Copy E, Plate 59 (cropped)
Golgonooza is a mythical city in the work of William Blake. Golgonooza is a City of Imagination built by Los, the spiritual Four-fold London, a vision of London and also linked to Jerusalem and is Blake's great city of art and science.
The city consists of the physical bodies of man and woman. There is Los's palace (the intellect) in the South and his forge with furnaces in the middle called Bowlahoola (the organs of the animal man). "In the North Gate, in the West of the North, toward Beulah" there is the golden hall of Cathedron that contains the Enitharmon's looms (the womb), where the physical body of man is woven. There is the Gate of Luban (the vagina) in the middle of the city. All these is surrounded with a moat of fire. Golgonooza is walled against Satan and his wars. Around the city there is the land of Allamanda (the nervous system of the vegetated man) in the forests of Entuthon Benython with the Lake of Udan Adan. Read more...
Copy L of "The Chimney Sweeper" in Songs of Innocence currently held by the Yale Center for British Art
"The Chimney Sweeper" is the title of a poem by William Blake, published in two parts in Songs of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of experience in 1793. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set against the dark background of child labour that was prominent in England in the late 18th and 19th century. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys, due to their small size. These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted at the time. In the earlier poem, a young chimney sweeper recounts a dream by one of his fellows, in which an angel rescues the boys from coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the later poem, an apparently adult speaker encounters a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow while his parents are at church or possibly even suffered death where church is referring to being with God.
The poem from Songs of Experience was set to music in 1965 by Benjamin Britten as part of his song cycle Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. Read more...
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, copy C, 1789, 1794 (Library of Congress), object 8, "The Lamb" currently held at the Library of Congress
"The Lamb" is a poem by William Blake, published in Songs of Innocence in 1776.
"The Lamb" is the counterpart poem to Blake's poem: "The Tyger" in Songs of Experience. Blake wrote Songs of Innocence as a contrary to the Songs of Experience – a central tenet in his philosophy and a central theme in his work. Like many of Blake's works, the poem is about Christianity. The lamb is a common metaphor for Jesus Christ, who is also called "The Lamb of God" in John 1:29. Read more...- Vala, or The Four Zoas refers to one of the uncompleted prophetic books by the English poet William Blake, begun in 1797. The titular main characters of the book are the Four Zoas (Urthona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas), who were created by the fall of Albion in Blake's mythology. It consists of nine books, referred to as "nights". These outline the interactions of the Zoas, their fallen forms and their Emanations. Blake intended the book to be a summation of his mythic universe but, dissatisfied, he abandoned the effort in 1807, leaving the poem in a rough draft and its engraving unfinished. The text of the poem was first published (without the accompanying illustrations), in 1893, by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats and his fellow collaborator, the English writer and poet Edwin John Ellis, in their three volume commentary book about William Blake's works, The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical. Read more...
An illustration of the relationship of the four Zoas from one of Blake's other works: Milton a Poem
Orc emerges from creative fires to challenge the forces of imperialism in plate 12 of America a Prophecy
Orc is a proper name for one of the characters in the complex mythology of William Blake. A fallen figure, Orc is the embodiment of rebellion, and stands opposed to Urizen, the embodiment of tradition.
In Blake's illuminated book America a Prophecy, Orc is described by his mythic opponent, "Albion's Angel" as the "Lover of Wild Rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law". He symbolizes the spirit of rebellion and freedom, which provoked the French Revolution. Read more...
William Butler Yeats photographed in 1903 by Alice Boughton
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as a Senator of the Irish Free State for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Read more...
John Sampson (1862–1931) was an Irish linguist, literary scholar and librarian. As a scholar he is best known for The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1926), an authoritative grammar of the Welsh-Romany language. Read more...
"The Echoing Green" (or Ecchoing Green) is a poem by William Blake published in Songs of Innocence in 1789. The poem talks about merry sounds and images which accompany the children playing outdoors. Then, an old man happily remembers when he enjoyed playing with his friends during his own childhood. The last stanza depicts the little ones being weary when the sun has descended and going to their mother to rest after playing many games. Read more...- "Auguries of Innocence" is a poem from one of William Blake's notebooks now known as The Pickering Manuscript. It is assumed to have been written in 1803, but was not published until 1863 in the companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist's biography of William Blake. The poem contains a series of paradoxes which speak of innocence juxtaposed with evil and corruption. The poem is 132 lines and has been published with and without breaks that divide the poem into stanzas. An augury is a sign or omen. Read more...
Nancy Bogen (born April 24, 1932) is an American author-scholar, mixed media producer, and digital artist.
Bogen has to her credit three serious novels of ideas: Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home (1980); Bobe Mayse, A Tale of Washington Square (1993); and the space satire Bagatelle·Guinevere by Felice Rothman (1995). Distinguished literary critic John Gardner made a spirited defense of Klytaimnestra after it came out. When a reviewer in Library Journal relegated Bogen's novel to the “popular fiction rack” with his own work, Gardner protested that Klytaimnestra merited a more respectful classification. Read more...- Har is a character in the mythological writings of William Blake, who roughly corresponds to an aged Adam. His wife, Heva, corresponds to Eve. Har appears in Tiriel (1789) and The Song of Los (1795) and is briefly mentioned in The Book of Thel (1790) and Vala, or The Four Zoas (1796-1803). Read more...
The Song of Los (written 1795) is one of William Blake's epic poems, known as prophetic books. The poem consists of two sections, "Africa" and "Asia". In the first section Blake catalogues the decline of morality in Europe, which he blames on both the African slave trade and enlightenment philosophers. The book provides a historical context for The Book of Urizen, The Book of Ahania, and The Book of Los, and also ties those more obscure works to The Continental Prophecies, "Europe" and "America". The second section consists of Los urging revolution. Read more...- The William Blake Archive is a digital humanities project first created in 1996. The project is sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Inspired by the Rossetti Archive, the archive provides digital reproductions of the various works of William Blake, a prominent Romantic-period poet, artist, and engraver, alongside annotation, commentary and scholarly materials related to Blake.
When publishing his poetry, William Blake would create print block illustrations for his book, print his books in black and white and then hand paint the illustrations within the prints. Furthermore, many of his works underwent multiple editions of printing, each with unique variations in the prints used to illustrate the poems and the poems themselves. Because of this complex process and the quality of his art, his art and poetry has been highly sought by collectors and scholars. The archive, as a digital humanities project, provides high quality digital copies of the facsimiles, providing scholars and students an opportunity to see the complexity of his published works often not available by viewing the scholarly print editions. Read more...
The most famous publication of the poem was by Robert Hartley Cromek, in part because it occasioned an initial friendship between Cromek and William Blake to turn to acrimony, and in turn because it led to Blake's Public Address, in which he criticized the work of engravers relative to that of illustrators for being as derivative as (amongst others) the translation of the works of Homer by Alexander Pope into rhyming couplets.
Cromek, making his first venture into publication after giving up a career as an engraver, commissioned Blake for a series of illustrations for an edition of The Grave that he was to publish in 1808. He commissioned from Blake, in 1805, forty illustrations, a selected twenty of which were to be engraved for the book. Blake understood that he was also to do those engravings. However, Cromek gave that work to Luigi Schiavonetti. Read more...
Copy A of Blake's original printing of The Tyger, c. 1795. Copy A is held by the British Museum.
"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake published in 1794 as part of the Songs of Experience collection. Literary critic Alfred Kazin calls it "the most famous of his poems", and The Cambridge Companion to William Blake says it is "the most anthologized poem in English". It is one of Blake's most reinterpreted and arranged works. Read more...
The Clod and the Pebble from Copy L of Songs of Innocence and of Experience held by the Yale Center for British Art.
The Clod and the Pebble is a poem from William Blake's 1794 collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Read more...
The Lamb is a choral work by British composer John Tavener composed in 1982. It is a setting to music of the William Blake poem The Lamb from Blake's collection of poems Songs of Innocence. It is one of Tavener's best known works.
The Lamb was performed shortly after its composition at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in Kings College Chapel, Cambridge on Christmas Eve 1982. The service was broadcast to a large international TV and radio audience and this gave the piece widespread exposure. Read more...
The birth of the four sons of Urizen, depicted in The Book of Urizen, copy G, collection the Library of Congress. Grodna appears in the bottom right
In the mythological writings of William Blake, Grodna is the third son of Urizen.
In Chapter VIII of The Book of Urizen his birth is described: Read more...
Copy B of William Blake's hand-painted print of "The Shepherd". This copy, printed and painted in 1789, is currently held by the Library of Congress.
The Shepherd is a poem from William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789). This collection of songs was published individually four times before it was combined with the Songs of Experience for 12 editions which created the joint collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). Blake produced all of the illuminated printings himself beginning in 1789. Each publication of the songs has the plates in a different order, and sixteen other plates were published posthumously
Ralph Vaughan Williams set the poem to music in his 1958 song cycle Ten Blake Songs. Read more...
The Book of Ahania is one of the English poet William Blake's prophetic books. It was published in 1795, illustrated by Blake's own plates.
The poem of the book consists of six chapters. The content concerns Fuzon, a son of Urizen, a Zoa or major aspect in Blake's mythology. Ahania of the title is Urizen's female counterpart. Read more...
Hand-coloured print, issued c.1826. A copy held by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
"The Sick Rose" is a poem by William Blake. The first publication was in 1794, when it was included in his collection titled Songs of Experience as the 39th plate. The incipit of the poem is O Rose thou art sick. Blake composed the page sometime after 1789, and presents it with the illuminated border and illustrations that were typical of his self publications. Most aspects of the original production were undertaken by the author, the composition of the poem and design, engraving, and promotion of the work. The printing was usually done by Blake's wife, Catherine, as well as any colouring not performed by Blake himself. Read more...
Poetical Sketches is the first collection of poetry and prose by William Blake, written between 1769 and 1777. Forty copies were printed in 1783 with the help of Blake's friends, the artist John Flaxman and the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, at the request of his wife Harriet Mathew. The book was never published for the public, with copies instead given as gifts to friends of the author and other interested parties. Of the forty copies, fourteen were accounted for at the time of Geoffrey Keynes' census in 1921. A further eight copies had been discovered by the time of Keynes' The Complete Writings of William Blake in 1957. In March 2011, a previously unrecorded copy was sold at auction in London for £72,000. Read more...
The Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus.” With selections from his poems and other writings is a two-volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863. The first volume is a biography and the second a compilation of Blake's poetry, prose, artwork and illustrated manuscript.
The book was largely written by Alexander Gilchrist, who had spent many years compiling the material and interviewing Blake's surviving friends. However, Gilchrist had left it incomplete at his sudden death from scarlet fever in 1861. The work was published two years later, having been completed by his widow Anne Gilchrist with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti. Read more...- Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-born British mathematician and historian. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man, which led to his regard as "one of the world's most celebrated intellectuals".
Bronowski's family moved to Germany and then to England while he was a child. In England won a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His interests have been described as ranging "widely, from biology to poetry and from chess to Humanism". During World War II he led the field of operations research and worked to increase the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO, and taught mathematics at the University College Hull between 1934 and 1942. Bronowski wrote poetry and had a deep affinity with William Blake. From 1950 to 1963 he worked for the National Coal Board in England. From 1963 he was a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, until his death in 1974 in East Hampton, New York, just a year after the airing of his Ascent of Man. Read more...
The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides, c. 1824–27. William Blake, Tate. 372×527 mm.
The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides is a pencil, ink and watercolour on paper artwork by the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827). The work was completed between 1824 and 1827 and illustrates a passage from the Inferno of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). The work is part of a series which was to be the last set of watercolours Blake worked on before his death in August 1827. It is held in the Tate Gallery, London.
Blake was commissioned in 1824 by his friend, the painter John Linnell (1792–1882), to create a series of illustrations based on Dante's poem. Blake was then in his late sixties, yet by legend drafted 100 watercolours on the subject "during a fortnight's illness in bed". Few of them were actually coloured, and only seven gilded. He sets this work in a scene from one of the circles of Hell depicted in the Inferno (Circle VII, Ring II, Canto XIII), in which Dante and the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) travel through a forest haunted by harpies—mythological winged and malign fat-bellied death-spirits who bear features of human heads and female breasts. Read more...- "A Dream" is a poem by English poet William Blake. The poem was first published in 1789 as part of Blake's collection of poems entitled Songs of Innocence. Read more...
A 1795 hand painted version of "A Dream" from Copy L of Songs of Innocence and of Experience currently held by the Yale Center for British Art - In the mythological writings of William Blake, Vala is an Emanation/mate of Luvah, one of the four Zoas, who were created when Albion, the primordial man, was divided fourfold. She represents nature while Luvah represents emotions. Originally with Luvah, she joins with Albion and begets the Zoa Urizen. In her fallen aspect, she is the wandering figure known as the Shadowy Female. After the Final Judgment, she is reunited with Luvah but placed under the dominion of the restored Urizen. Read more...
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Selected images
Sketch of Blake from circa 1804 by John Flaxman
Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of illustrations of Revelation 12.
The Ghost of a Flea, 1819–1820. Having informed painter-astrologer John Varley of his visions of apparitions, Blake was subsequently persuaded to paint one of them. Varley's anecdote of Blake and his vision of the flea's ghost became well-known.
William Blake's image of the Minotaur to illustrate Inferno, Canto XII,12–28, The Minotaur XII
The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in Blake's work. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecies.
The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve, c. 1825. Watercolour on wood.
Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.
Monument near Blake's (formerly unmarked) grave at Bunhill Fields in London. A gravestone to mark the actual spot was unveiled at a public ceremony on 12 August 2018.
Blake's "A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows", an illustration to J. G. Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Years' Expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796)
Blake's Lot and His Daughters, Huntington Library, c. 1800
"Head of William Blake" by James De Ville. Life mask taken in plaster cast in September 1823, Fitzwilliam Museum.
Blake in a portrait
by Thomas Phillips (1807)Blake's Ancient of Days. The "Ancient of Days" is described in Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel. This image depicts Copy D of the illustration currently held at the British Museum.
William Blake's portrait in profile, by John Linnell. This larger version was painted to be engraved as the frontispiece of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of Blake (1863).
Memorial marking Blake's birthplace in Soho, City of Westminster
The Night of Enitharmon's Joy, 1795. Blake's vision of Hecate, Greek goddess of black magic and the underworld.
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