“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake was a visionary. The suffering and injustice he saw in 18th-century London filled him with anger and sorrow. Blake recognised that the dark forces inside each of us – greed, arrogance, jealousy, fear, repression of vital energy – must be overcome if we are to live with freedom and compassion. So Blake created art and poetry that inspire transformation. He begins with The Songs of Innocence and Experience, poems that contrast a free childlike way of being with the consciousness of someone who has suffered, and now has knowledge of good and evil.
Here is an example of one of the poems of Innocence:
The sun descending in the west,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest.
And I must seek for mine.
The moon, like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight
Sits and smiles on the night.
In his poems of Experience Blake wrestles with violence:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
and with suffering:
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
Blake was born in 1757. He studied drawing from age ten and was apprenticed to an engraver before going on to study at the Royal Academy. Blake made copies from classical Greek sculpture and copied Gothic masterpieces in Westminster Abbey. He developed a linear style inspired by Michelangelo and Raphael that has similarity with contemporaries such as John Flaxman, but his mature work is unique, a composite art where words are wedded to images of brilliant colour. To do this, Blake invented a technique called “relief etching” or “illuminated printing”.
Blake’s personality was as eccentric as his art. His visions began as a child when he saw “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” He had conversations with his brother Robert’s spirit at the dinner table, and sat naked with his wife reciting Paradise Lost in his back garden. While some people considered him mad, Blake was arguably the first poet of the Romantic movement. He blazed the way for Wordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Whitman.
The Romantics believed in individual freedom, passion and artistic genius. They rejected all forms of repression and conformity. Blake sharply criticised organised religion, class hierarchy and the rigidity of the English education system. Long before Freud and Jung, he highlighted the dangers of psychological repression:
“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
and followed with The Proverbs of Hell, including:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Exuberance is Beauty
Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
In our study The Visionary Art of William Blake we will look at Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as well as a variety of Blake’s artworks such as The Dance of Albion.
This 2010 article by Tom Lubbock in The Independent reflects on the picture and the paradox of Blake’s art: “His colour schemes are unheard of. His images are stuck in a sealed-off, home-made system. His human figures are always spiritual symbols – and in the process, his art becomes a comprehensive experiment with the human body whose only parallel is in Picasso.”
Blake also painted a series of watercolours inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy including his famous image of Paolo and Francesca:
Blake and Dante had very different world views, but both were visionary artists, each exploring psychological and spiritual transformation in a revolutionary way. This autumn, in addition to Blake I will also lead a study of Dante’s Purgatorio, a work considering how humans might free themselves from pride, greed and lust. After passing through fire Dante arrives at the top of the mountain and enters the Garden of Eden.
I can’t promise we will enter Eden, but I hope you will consider joining me to read some inspired, challenging and beautiful poetry by Blake, Dante or both. You can book The Visionary Art of William Blake and Purgatorio individually, but for a limited period we are also offering a 15% discount on the price for anyone who books the two studies together. Click here for details.
