Samarkand state institute of foreign language faculty of english language II

Actuality of the investigation. Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, including Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of eighteenth-century Neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions.
Aim of the investigation is to expend reader's knowledge about William Blake as a Romantic writer and The Romantic theory in Willial Blake’s works
The following objectives have been settled related William Blake’s works:
- to analyze theoretical material on the problem of investigation;
- to give general information about Willliam Blake’s life;
- to give general information about William Blake’s place on English Literature;
- to get acquainted with famous works written by William Blake
The object of the investigation is Wiliam Blake and his early life .
The subject of the investigation is the Romantic theory in William Blake’s works
The scientific novelty of the investigation includes learning about the notions of Romantic theory in William Blake’s literary works
Structure of the course paper consists of four major parts - Introduction, Main part which consists of two chapters, Conclusion, and List of used literature.

Chapter I. A brief information about William Blake

1. 
   Early life and works of William Blake
   

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God “put his head to the window”; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels. Although his parents tried to discourage him from “lying,” they did observe that he was different from his peers and did not force him to attend a conventional school. Instead, he learned to read and write at home. At age ten, Blake expressed a wish to become a painter; so, his parents sent him to drawing school. Two years later, Blake began writing poetry. When he turned fourteen, he apprenticed with an engraver because art school proved too costly. One of Blake’s assignments as apprentice was to sketch the tombs at Westminster Abbey, exposing him to a variety of Gothic styles from which he would draw inspiration throughout his career. After his seven-year term ended, he studied briefly at the Royal Academy [2.56]
In 1782, Blake married an illiterate woman named Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her to read and write, and also instructed her in draftsmanship. Later, she helped him print the illuminated poetry for which he is remembered today; the couple had no children. In 1784, Blake set up a print shop with friend and former fellow apprentice, James Parker; but this venture failed after several years. For the remainder of his life, Blake made a meager living as an engraver and illustrator for books and magazines. In addition to his wife, Blake also began training his younger brother, Robert, in drawing, painting, and engraving. Robert fell ill during the winter of 1787, having probably succumbed to consumption. As Robert died, Blake saw his brother’s spirit rise up through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.”[3.43]. He believed that Robert’s spirit continued to visit him and later claimed that in a dream Robert taught him the printing method that he used in Songs of Innocence and other “illuminated” works [3.67].
Blake’s first printed work, Poetical Sketches, is a collection of apprentice verse, mostly imitating classical models. The poems protest against war, tyranny, and King George III’s treatment of the American colonies. He published his most popular collection, Songs of Innocence, in 1789 and followed it, in 1794, with Songs of Experience. Some readers interpret Songs of Innocence in a straightforward fashion, considering it primarily a children’s book, but others have found hints at parody or critique in its seemingly naive and simple lyrics. Both books of Songs were printed in an illustrated format reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates, and each picture was finished by hand in watercolors [3.89].
Blake was a nonconformist who associated with some of the leading radical thinkers of his day, including Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. In defiance of eighteenth-century Neoclassical conventions, he privileged imagination over reason in the creation of both his poetry and images, asserting that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. He declared in one poem, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” Works such as “The French Revolution”, “America, a Prophecy”, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”, and “Europe, a Prophecy” express his opposition to the English monarchy, and to eighteenth-century political and social tyranny in general. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen . In the prose work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he satirized the oppressive authority of both church and state, as well as the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish philosopher whose ideas once attracted his interest [4.35].
In 1800, Blake moved t the seacoast town of Felpham, where he lived and worked until 1803 under the patronage of William Hayley. He taught himself Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, so that he could read classical works in their original language. In Felpham, Blake experienced profound spiritual insights that prepared him for his mature work, the great visionary epics written and etched between about two decade. Milton; Vala, or The Four Zoas; rewritten after; and Jerusalem have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor meter. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence—the human spirit triumphing over reason.
Blake believed that his poetry could be read and understood by common people, but he was determined not to sacrifice his vision in order to become popular. In 1808, he exhibited some of his watercolors at the Royal Academy and, in May 1809, he exhibited his works at his brother James’s house. Some of those who saw the exhibit praised Blake’s artistry, but others thought the paintings “hideous” and more than a few called him insane. Blake’s poetry was not well known by the general public, but he was mentioned in A Biographical Dictionary of the Living Authors of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1816. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been lent a copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, considered Blake a “man of Genius,” and William Wordsworth made his own copies of several songs. Charles Lamb sent a copy of “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence to James Montgomery for his Chimney-Sweeper’s Friend, and Climbing Boys’ Album, and Robert Southey (who, like Wordsworth, considered Blake insane) attended Blake’s exhibition and included the “Mad Song” from Poetical Sketches in his miscellany, The Doctor.
Blake’s final years, spent in great poverty, were cheered by the admiring friendship of a group of younger artists who called themselves “the Ancients.” In 1818, he met John Linnell, a young artist who helped him financially and also helped to create new interest in his work. It was Linnell who, in 1825, commissioned him to design illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, the cycle of drawings that Blake worked on until his death in 1827.
English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The First Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem. The dating of Blake’s texts is explained in the Researcher’s Note: Blake publication dates. These works he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” and the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton, which has become a kind of second national anthem in Britain. In the early 21st century, Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or dismissed as mad [5.67].
Blake was born over his father’s modest hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London. His parents were James Blake and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. His father came from an obscure family in Rotherhithe, across the River Thames from London, and his mother was from equally obscure yeoman stock in the straggling little village of Walkeringham in Nottingham shire. His mother had first married a haberdasher named Thomas Armitage, and in 1748 they moved to 28 Broad Street. In 1750 the couple joined the newly established Moravian church in Fetter Lane, London. The Moravian religious movement, recently imported from Germany, had had a strong attraction to the powerful emotions associated with nascent Methodism (see Moravian church). Catherine Armitage bore a son named Thomas, who died as a baby in 1751, and a few months later Thomas Armitage himself died [6.90].
Catherine left the Moravians, who insisted on marriages within the faith, and in 1752 married James Blake in the Church of England chapel of St. George in Hanover Square. James moved in with her at 28 Broad Street. They had six children: James, who took over the family haberdashery business on his father’s death in 1784; John; William, the poet and artist; another John Blake (born 1760, died by 1800), whom Blake referred to in a letter of 1802 as “my Brother John the evil one” and who became an unsuccessful gingerbread baker, enlisted as a soldier, and died; Richard, called Robert, a promising artist and the poet’s favourite, at times his alter ego; and Catherine Elizabeth (1764–1841), the baby of the family, who never married and who died in extreme indigence long after the deaths of all her brothers.
William Blake grew up in modest circumstances. What teaching he received as a child was at his mother’s knee, as most children did. This he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool[9.78.]”
"The Tyger" from the combined volume of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake, ca. 1825; relief etching printed in orange-brown ink and hand-colored with watercolor and gold.
Visions of eternity
Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote:
I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’
Messengers from Heaven Daily & Nightly.” These visions were the source of many of his poems and drawings. As he wrote in his “Auguries of Innocence,” his purpose was
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour” [10.68].
He was, he wrote in 1804, “really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” Blake’s wife once said to his young friend Seymour Kirkup, “I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.”
Some of this stress on visions may have been fostered by his mother, who, with her first husband, had become a Moravian when the group was in its most intensely emotional and visionary phase. In her letter of 1750 applying to join the Moravians, she wrote that “last Friday at the love feast Our Savour [sic] was pleased to make me Suck his wounds” [7.78].
Blake’s religion
Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” he wrote that “the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being,” whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as “The Accuser who is The God of This World.” To Robinson “He warmly declared that all he knew is in the Bible. But he understands the Bible in its spiritual sense.” Blake’s religious singularity is demonstrated in his poem “The Everlasting Gospel” [8.18].
“The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White”[11.12].
But some of the orthodox not only tolerated but also encouraged Blake. Two of his most important patrons, the Rev. A.S. Mathew and the Rev. Joseph Thomas, were clergymen of the Church of England.
Blake was a religious seeker but not a joiner. He was profoundly influenced by some of the ideas of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, and in April 1789 he attended the general conference of the New Church (which had been recently founded by followers of Swedenborg) in London. Blake’s poem “The Divine Image” (from Songs of Innocence) is implicitly Swedenborgian, and he said that he based his design called The Spiritual Preceptor (1809) on the theologian’s book True Christian Religion. He soon decided, however, that Swedenborg was a “Spiritual Predestinarian,” as he wrote in his copy of Swedenborg’s Wisdom of Angels Concerning the Divine Providence (1790), and that the New Church was as subject to “Priestcraft” as the Church of England.
Blake loved the world of the spirit and abominated institutionalized religion, especially when it was allied with government; he wrote in his annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible (1797), “all […] codes given under pretence [sic] of divine command were what Christ pronounced them, The Abomination that maketh desolate, i.e. State Religion” and later in the same text, “The Beast & the Whore rule without control.” According to his longtime friend John Thomas Smith, “He did not for the last forty years attend any place of Divine worship.” For Blake, true worship was private communion with the spirit.
Education as artist and engraver.
From childhood Blake wanted to be an artist, at the time an unusual aspiration for someone from a family of small businessmen and Nonconformists (dissenting Protestants). His father indulged him by sending him to Henry Pars’s Drawing School in the Strand, London [13–72].
The boy hoped to be apprenticed to some artist of the newly formed and flourishing English school of painting, but the fees proved to be more than the parental pocket could withstand. Instead he went with his father in 1772 to interview the successful and fashionable engraver William Wynne Ryland. Ryland’s fee, perhaps £100, was both “more attainable” than that of fashionable painters and still, for the Blakes, very high; furthermore the boy interposed an unexpected objection: “Father, I do not like the man’s face; it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” Eleven years later, Ryland was indeed hanged—for forgery—one of the last criminals to suffer on the infamous gallows known as Tyburn Tree.
The young Blake was ultimately apprenticed for 50 guineas to James Basire , a highly responsible and conservative line engraver who specialized in prints depicting architecture. For seven years [17.79] Blake lived with Basire’s family on Great Queen Street, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. There he learned to polish the copperplates, to sharpen the gravers, to grind the ink, to reduce the images to the size of the copper, to prepare the plates for etching with acid, and eventually to push the sharp graver through the copper, with the light filtered through gauze so that the glare reflected from the brilliantly polished copper would not dazzle him. He became so proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire trusted him to go by himself to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments there for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the last quarter of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain.
Career as engraver
On the completion of his apprenticeship , Blake began to work vigorously as an independent engraver. His most frequent commissions were from the great liberal bookseller Joseph Johnson. At first most of his work was copy engraving after the designs of other artists, such as the two fashion plates for the Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book. He also engraved important plates for the Swiss writer John Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy , for the English physician Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, and for his friend John Gabriel Stedman’s violent and eccentric Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, which included illustrations titled A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows and Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave.
Blake became so well known that he received commissions to engrave his own designs. These included 6 plates for Original Stories from Real Life (1791), a collection of narratives for children by Johnson’s friend Mary Wollstonecraft, and 43 folio plates for part one of Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts (1797), with a promise, never fulfilled, for a hundred more. Blake’s style of designing, however, was so extreme and unfamiliar, portraying spirits with real bodies, that one review in The British Critic; of Gottfried August Bürger’s Leonora) called them “distorted, absurd,”[12.45] and the product of a “depraved fancy.”
Because of the éclat with which they were published, the best-known engravings after Blake’s own designs were those for Robert Blair’s poem The Grave (1808). In 1805 the entrepreneur Robert Hartley Cromek paid Blake £21 for 20 watercolours illustrating Blair’s poem and agreed to publish folio (large-format) prints after them engraved by Blake. The number of designs was whittled down, without notifying Blake, from 20 to 15 to 12. Worst of all, the lucrative commission for engraving them, worth perhaps £300, was taken from Blake, without informing him, and given to the fashionable Italian engraver Luigi Schiavonetti.
To add critical insult to commercial injury, when the work was published in 1808, the radical weekly The Examiner mocked the absurdity of “representing the Spirit to the eye,” and the reactionary Antijacobin Review not only deplored the designs as “the offspring of a morbid fancy,” which “totally failed” “ ‘to connect the visible with the invisible world,’ ” but also mocked Blake’s poetical dedication of the designs “To the Queen”:
Should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat. Whatever licence we may allow him as a painter, to tolerate him as a poet would be insufferable.
The frontispiece to the work was an engraving after Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Blake (above), which became the best-known representation of the artist. It shows him with a pencil in his hand, indicating, truthfully, that he is an artist, and wearing a waistcoat and an elegant frilled stock, suggesting, falsely, that he is a gentleman. The most remarkable feature of the portrait, however, is the prominent eyes. According to Blake’s acquaintance Allan Cunningham, at the sitting Blake and Phillips talked of paintings of angels, and Blake said that the Archangel Gabriel had told him that Michelangelo could paint an angel better than Raphael could. When Blake demanded evidence that Gabriel was not an evil spirit, the voice said,
“Can an evil spirit do this?’ I [10.57] looked whence the voice came, and was then aware of a shining shape, with bright wings, who diffused much light. As I looked, the shape dilated more and more: he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe. An angel of evil could not have done that—it was the arch-angel Gabriel.” The painter marvelled much at this wild story; but he caught from Blake’s looks, as he related it, that rapt poetic expression, which has rendered his portrait one of the finest of the English school.
Pastorals of Virgil
Later important commissions included plates for William Hayley’s biography of the poet William Cowper (1803–04), for sculptor John Flaxman’s illustrations for the Iliad and the works of Hesiod, and for the Wedgwood ware catalogue, as well as marvelously modest and poignant little woodcuts after his own illustrations for a school edition of Virgil published in 1821 by the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton.
Blake also published his engravings of his own designs, though mostly in very small numbers. One of the best known is Glad Day, also called Albion Rose, depicting a glorious naked youth dancing upon the mountaintops. Even more ambitiously, he invented a method of printing in colour, still not clearly understood, which he used in 1795 to create his 12 great folio colour prints, including God Judging Adam and Newton. The latter shows the great mathematician naked and seated on a rock at the bottom of the sea making geometric designs. These were printed in only two or three copies apiece, and some were still in his possession at his death.
Satan leaving God's presence
More publicly visible were Blake’s engravings of his enormous design of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1810), his 22 folio designs for the Book of Job (1826), and his 7 even larger unfinished plates for Dante (1826–27). Though only the Chaucer sold well enough to repay its probable expenses during Blake’s lifetime, these are agreed today to be among the greatest triumphs of line engraving in England, sufficient to ensure Blake’s reputation as an engraver and artist even had he made no other watercolours or poems.
Marriage to Catherine Boucher
In 1781 Blake fell in love with Catherine Sophia Boucher (1762–1831), the pretty, illiterate daughter of an unsuccessful market gardener from the farm village of Battersea across the River Thames from London. The family name suggests that they were Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France.
According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, at their first meeting he told her how he had been jilted by Polly Wood, and Catherine said she pitied him from her heart.
“Do you pity me?” asked Blake.
“Yes, I do, most sincerely.”
“Then,” said he, “I love you for that.”
“Well, and I love you.”[14.24]
Blake returned to Soho to achieve financial security to support a wife, and 12 months later, on Aug. 18, 1782, the couple married in her family’s church, Saint Mary’s, Battersea, the bride signing the marriage register with an X.
It was an imprudent and highly satisfactory marriage. Blake taught Catherine to read and write (a little), to draw, to colour his designs and prints, to help him at the printing press, and to see visions as he did. She believed implicitly in his genius and his visions and supported him in everything he did with charming credulity. After his death she lived chiefly for the moments when he came to sit and talk with her.
Not long after his marriage, Blake acquired a rolling press for printing engravings and joined his fellow apprentice James Parker in opening a print shop in 1784. Within a year, however, Blake had left the business and returned to making rather than selling prints.
Death of Robert Blake
One of the most traumatic events of Blake’s life was the death of his beloved 24-year-old brother, Robert, from tuberculosis in 1787. At the end, Blake stayed up with him for a fortnight, and when Robert died Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy,’” as Alexander Gilchrist wrote. The occasion entered into Blake’s psyche and his poetry. In the epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas (manuscript 1796?–1807?), he writes, “Urizen rose up from his couch / On wings of tenfold joy, clapping his hands,” and, in his poem Milton, plates 29 and 33 portray figures, labeled “William” and “Robert,” falling backward as a star plunges toward their feet. Blake claimed that in a vision Robert taught him the secret of painting his designs and poems on copper in a liquid impervious to acid before the plate was etched and printed. This method, which Blake called “Illuminated Printing,” made it possible for Blake to be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all his published poetry thereafter, from Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem (1804[–20?]).
Career as an artist
While pursuing his career as an engraver, in 1779 Blake enrolled as a student in the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts; he exhibited a few pictures there, in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, and 1808. His greatest ambition was as an artist; according to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson, “The spirit said to him, ‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity.’” His materials were watercolours and paper, not the fashionable oil on canvas, and he painted subjects from the Bible and British history instead of the portraits and landscapes that were in vogue. And increasingly his subjects were his own visions.
His friends were artists such as the Neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, the book illustrator Thomas Stothard, the sensationalist painter Henry Fuseli, the amateur polymath George Cumberland, and the portrait and landscape painter John Linnell. Blake’s patrons were mostly concerned with his art, and most of his correspondence was about engravings and paintings. Only Cumberland bought a significant number of his books.
Blake’s first really important commission, which he received in about 1794, was to illustrate every page of Edward Young’s popular and morbid long poem Night Thoughts—a total of 537 watercolours.
For these he was paid £21 by the ambitious and inexperienced young bookseller Richard Edwards, brother of the illustrated-book publisher James Edwards. From these 537 designs were to be chosen subjects for, as a promotional flyer touted, 150 engravings by Blake “in a perfectly new style of decoration, surrounding the text” for a “MAGNIFICENT” and “splendid” new edition. The first of a proposed four parts was published in 1797 with 43 plates, but it fell stillborn from the press, and no further engraving for the edition was made. Its failure resulted at least in part from the fact that its publisher was already preparing to go out of business and neglected to advertise the book or almost even to sell it. The work was largely ignored or deplored, and its commercial failure had profound consequences for Blake; he wrote to George Cumberland in 1799, “I am laid by in a corner as if I did not Exist, & Since my Youngs Night Thoughts have been publish’d Even Johnson & Fuseli have discarded my Graver.”
Pity
Most of his large commissions thereafter were for watercolours rather than engravings. For John Flaxman, he painted 116 designs illustrating Thomas Gray’s poems; for his faithful patron Thomas Butts, a functionary in the office of the Commissary General of Musters, he created 135 temperas and watercolours illustrating the Bible; and he executed 8 watercolours for Milton’s Comus, 6 for Shakespeare, 12 for Paradise Lost , and 6 for Milton’s ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, all for the Rev. Joseph Thomas of Epsom, not far from the village of Felpham (where Blake lived for a while). Later Butts commissioned 12 watercolours for Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and 12 for Paradise Regaine; Linnell had Blake create 6 watercolours for the Book of Enoch, plus 102 illustrations for Dante and 11 for what began as an illuminated Genesis manuscript; 29 unfinished watercolours for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress were still in Blake’s possession at his death. Blake also drew scores of “Visionary Heads” of the mighty or notorious dead, which were fostered and often commissioned by the artist and astrologer John Varley.
Of all these commissions, only illustrations for Job (1826) and Dante (1838) were engraved and published. The rest were visible only on the private walls of their unostentatious owners. Blake’s art and his livelihood were thus largely in the hands of a small number of connoisseurs whose commissions were often inspired as much by love for the man as by admiration for his art.
Patronage of William Hayley and move to Felpham
Upon the commercial failure of his Night Thoughts engravings, Blake accepted an invitation from Flaxman’s friend the genteel poet William Hayley to move to the little seaside farm village of Felpham in Sussex and work as his protégé. Blake’s work there would include making engravings for Hayley’s works and painting tempera portraits of literary notables for Hayley’s library and miniature portraits for his friends. Blake rented for £20 a year a charming thatched cottage, which he and Catherine found enchanting, and on arriving he wrote, “Heaven opens here on all sides her Golden Gates.” He worked industriously on Hayley’s projects, particularly his Designs to a Series of Ballads—published for Blake’s benefit and Hayley’s biography of his friend the poet William Cowper, with engravings printed by Catherine. “Mr Hayley acts like a Prince,” Blake wrote on May 10, 1801; Blake’s host gave him commissions, found him patrons, and taught him Greek and Hebrew.Hayley’s well-meant efforts to foster Blake’s commercial success, however, strained their relationship. In Blake’s manuscript notebook, he expressed his resentment thus: :
When H---- finds out what you cannot do
That is the very thing he[’]ll set you to.
Blake had already determined to return to London when he was beset by legal troubles.
Charged with sedition
When the peace established in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens broke down in 1803, Napoleon massed his army along the English Channel. British troops were rushed to the Sussex coast, with a troop of dragoons billeted in the pub at Felpham. On Aug. 12, 1803, Blake found one of the dragoons, named John Schofield, lounging in his garden and perhaps tipsy. Blake asked him to leave and, on his refusal, took him by the elbows and marched him down the street to the Fox Inn, 50 yards (46 metres) away. In revenge, Schofield went to his officer with his comrade Private John Cock, and they swore that Blake had “Damned the King of England.” The complaint was taken to the magistrate, a charge was laid, and Blake was forced to find bail and was bound over for trial for sedition and assault first at the quarter sessions in Petworth (Oct. 4, 1803), where a True Bill was found against Blake, and then at Chichester (Jan. 11, 1804). (The words “True Bill” are written on a bill of indictment when a grand jury, after hearing the government witnesses, finds that there is sufficient cause to put a defendent on trial.) Despite the fact that the magistrates were all country gentlemen—one of them, the duke of Richmond, who commanded all troops in the south of England, was, Hayley wrote, “bitterly prejudiced against Blake”—with the support of Hayley as a character witness and of the lawyer whom Hayley had hired, Blake was, according to The Sussex Weekly Advertiser, “by the Jury acquitted, which so gratified the auditory, that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations.” He later incorporated his accusers and judges into his poems Milton and Jerusalem.
Blake’s exhibition
There were few opportunities for a wider public to view Blake’s watercolours and his temperas. He showed work at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water-Colours (1812) and exhibited some pictures at the Royal Academy of Arts, but these works were greeted with silence.
Blake’s most determined effort to reach a wider public was his retrospective exhibition of 16 watercolours and temperas, held above the Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810. The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. The painting, now lost, was said to have been 14 feet (4.3 metres) wide by 10 feet (3 metres) tall—the largest picture Blake ever made, with what an advertisement for the exhibition described as “Figures full as large as Life.” The young art student Seymour Kirkup said it was Blake’s “masterpiece,” and Henry Crabb Robinson called it “his greatest and most perfect work.”
The first three pictures listed in the exhibition catalogue—The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (1805?), and Sir Jeffrey Chaucer and the Nine and Twenty Pilgrims on Their Journey to Canterbury defined the style of the pictures and the expectations of the viewers. In his Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures , Blake said that he “appeals to the Public,” but he scarcely attempted to accommodate his rhetoric to his audience. The works on display, he wrote, were “copies from some stupendous originals now lost…[which] The Artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen.” Blake also inveighed against fashionable styles and artists, such as the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens—whom he called “a most outrageous demon” (i.e., villain)—and “that infernal machine called Chiaro Oscura” a technique of shading, see chiaroscuro[14.24].
Blake’s profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. According to Blake’s friend John Thomas Smith, “He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed […] to possess original and extraordinary merit.” In 1783 Harriet Mathew’s husband, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake’s friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading simply, “By W.B.” It contained an “advertisement” by Reverend Mathew that stated, “Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a poetic originality which merited some respite from oblivion.” They gave the sheets of the book, uncut and unsewn, to Blake, in the expectation that he would sell them or at least give them away to potential patrons. Blake, however, showed little interest in the volume, and when he died he still had uncut and unstitched copies in his possession.
But some contemporaries and virtually all succeeding critics agreed that the poems did merit “respite from oblivion.” Some are merely boyish rodomontade, but some, such as “To Winter” and “Mad Song,” are exquisite. “To the Muses,” lamenting the death of music, concludes,
How have you left the antient love
That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few![15.56]
Eighty-five years later, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote that in these lines “The Eighteenth Century died to music.”[15.78]
Blake never published his poetry in the ordinary way. Instead, using a technology revealed to him by his brother Robert in a vision, he drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his devoted wife, printed them, coloured them, stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers, and offered them for sale. He rarely printed more than a dozen copies at a time, reprinting them when his stock ran low, and no more than 30 copies of any of them survive; several are known only in unique copies, and some to which he refers no longer exist.
After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion and All Religions Are One, Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered: Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children—in “Infant Joy” only three words have as many as two syllables—and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own. In “The Chimney Sweeper,” for example,
[16.67]the Angel told Tom if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father & never want joy.
And so Tom awoke and we rose in the dark
And got with our bags & our brushes to work.
Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm.
So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.
Sustained by the vision, “Tom was happy & warm” despite the cold.
In one of the best-known lyrics, called “The Lamb,” a little boy gives to a lamb the same kind of catechism he himself had been given in church:
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb
I a child, & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name[16.89].
The syllogism is simple if not simplistic: the creator of child and lamb has the same qualities as his creation.

2.