William Blake(1757-1827)BY AHMAD HUSSAINDepartment of English,ABDUL WALI KHAN UNIVERSITY MARDAN

William Blake(1757-1827)

The most independent and original of all the romantic poets. He had love for children and nature. To Blake nature was a vast source of spiritual symbolism. Blake was a mystic poet. To Blake Imaginations and sensations of the heart were the sole guides to truth. As a child he had visions of God and angels looking in at his window. He was a Pantheist( the one who searches God in nature). As a man he thought he received visits from the souls of the great dead like

(Moses,Virgil,Homer,Dante and Milton.)

Life of Blake:

Blake was born in London; was a son of tradesman. Blake had no formal education. Blake was a strange imaginative child who spent his life with brooks and flowers and fairies than

with the crowd of the city streets. At ten years he began to copy prints and to write verses. In early years he seems to have acquaintance of the works of Shakespeare and John Milton. Blake had already read the Bible when he was a little child. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to an engraver. He was better known as an illustrator than as a writer throughout his life. Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word “Madman”.

Works of Blake:

First publication was The Poetical Sketches in 1783, a series of imaginative poems, in which he followed the manner of Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton.

Much of it was written in Boyhood. These were followed by two another great and famous works of Blake known as “Song of

Innocence(1789) and Song of Experience(1794)”, reflecting two widely different views of human soul.

These works contain some of the most orient gems of English lyricism. A critic observes: “His passion for freedom was, akin to that which moved Wordsworth, Coleridge

and Southey in their early years”. Swineburne calls Blake the only poet of “supreme” and simple poetic genius of the eighteen century.

The book of Thel(1790) , which embodies much the same spirit of love as his earlier works, was followed by the first series of revolutionary prophetic books The French Revolution(1791) and America(1793).

In these two political and revolutionary works, the contemporary political conflicts are seen as one step towards, not only political freedom, but freedom from the restrictions of convention and established morality.

In his another poem The visions of the Daughters of Albion(1793), there is a vigorous defense of the satisfaction of physical appetite, and an exposure of the wrongs to which woman is subject.

o In Song of Experience, there is less joyful note, spontaneous love and happiness revealed as in his early work Song of Innocence.

o These lyric poems have an intensity which are not to be found in Songs of Innocence.o In these poems, we see Blake presenting the two conflicting aspects of a nature which is so

beautiful yet cruel.

o Other minor works of Blake are: The first book of Urizen(1794), The song of Los(1795), Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Gates of Paradise, the Tiger and the Lamb.

Jerusalem and Milton was one of the latest works of William Blake. The conflict between imagination and reason is now thought to be resolved by

the coming of Christ. Blake spent the years 1800-3 at Eelpham in Sussex with his friend William

Hayley. And It was the stage of spiritual development in Blake’s life.

Prepared by Ahmad Hussain, Department of English, Abdul Wali khan University Mardan.

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