Blake, William

(1757–1827)



English poet and artist, prophet of a highly individual apocalypse.
Blake spent most of his life in London as a professional engraver and book illustrator. He was familiar with the doctrines of the scientist and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and his thinking owed something to several contemporary eccentrics, among them Richard Brothers, the pioneer British-Israelite, John Varley, one of the few active astrologers at that time, and Owen Pughe, a follower of Joanna Southcott—especially Pughe, who had unusual notions about British antiquity, druids, and related matters. Blake, however, ranged far beyond any of these influences. His well-known lyrical poems constitute only a fraction of his output. In a series of Prophetic Books, with which much of his artistic work is associated, he built up a complex mythology of the human condition.
He saw himself as a prophet in the biblical sense, though, for him, divinity inhered in humanity and not in a transcendent God. The exact nature of his inspiration is uncertain: he may have had visionary experiences in a “hypnagogic” state between waking and sleep and developed these afterward in writing. The finished product, however arrived at, is in unrhymed verse, which, in his later work, is barely distinguishable from prose. His “prophesying” is mainly in the old sense of inspired utterance, not prediction. However, it leads up to an apocalyptic climax that is regarded as future.
The Prophetic Books are extremely difficult. It has been said that their meaning is not so much “what they say” as “what you arrive at for yourself by a sustained effort to understand them,” aided, of course, by commentators who have made the same effort and reached a degree of consensus. The central idea is that the human race was formerly united, wise, and creative. Then came a fall (not the biblical Fall), and humanity became divided, inwardly as well as outwardly, declining from its ancient heights into error, disorganization, spiritual blindness, and constriction. Hence false religions, false ideologies, wars, persecutions, and other evils. But the creative imagination, which has never ceased to manifest itself in art and literature, will eventually triumph, bringing a rebirth. Vision and unity will be recovered, all that was lost will be reinstated, the pristine integrity will return.
Blake invents a group of symbolic characters, some of whom represent aspects of
human nature. In his vast final work, Jerusalem (not the short poem often called so), composed during the period from 1804 to 1820, he brings his mythology to a focus in the figure of Albion. Albion is the earliest name of Britain. Blake’s Albion stands for Britain but also for humanity as a whole. This identification depends on one of the unorthodox theories current in his time—that Britain was the original fountainhead of all wisdom and culture, worldwide. Humanity, in everything that matters, derives from Britain; therefore, Britain, personified under its ancient name Albion, can stand for humanity.
In Blake’s primordial past, Albion becomes self-alienated from the divine vision. He sinks into a deathlike sleep, and that is the fall. But he will wake up, and that will be the rebirth, ushering in a new era of exuberant freedom, creativity, and illumination. After the multiple obscurities of Jerusalem, Blake describes Albion’s awakening in a passage that is unexpectedly simple and moving.
Blake is a patriot, though in a semimystical style of his own, rejecting most of the paraphernalia of conventional patriotism. His Albion is more than a literary construct. He naturally takes a deep interest in Britain’s history and legends and even in Britain’s topography; he mentions numerous places. His most ambitious painting, taking hints from Pughe, was called The Ancient Britons. This is lost, but a long accompanying note survives. In it, Blake says: “The stories of Arthur are the acts of Albion, applied to a prince of the fifth century.” Arthur, the glorious king who passed away but will return, is an image in a particular time and place of the great overarching theme that Albion’s life span embodies.
Blake’s myth of long-lost glory, decline, and apocalyptic rebirth is his own expression of a persistent syndrome, as it may be called, that is expressed also in the glory, the passing, and the return of Arthur. The motif of reinstating a past golden age has inspired actual historical movements of reform and revolution. Thus, Christian Reformers in the sixteenth century appealed to the purity of the primitive Church and claimed to be disinterring it from corruption; French revolutionaries under Rousseau’s influence theorized about a free and equal ancient society that could reassert itself when tyrannies were destroyed; Gandhi aimed to revive a long-ago ideal India of village communes and saints and sages, by ending the foreign domination that had suppressed it. The return of Arthur mythifies, in a British setting, a way of looking at things that has had profound effects. Blake universalizes this in Albion’s awakening.