William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter and engraver. He is recognized as one of the most original of the Romantic poets, although his work, was largely ignored during his own lifetime.

Blake was born in 28 Broad Street, London, England on November 28, 1757, to a middle-class family. William did not attend school, and was educated at home by his mother Catherine Wright Armitage Blake.

On August 4, 1772, William became apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, for the term of seven years.

On October 8, 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period.

In June 1780, Blake was walking towards Basire's shop in Great Queen Street, when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that attacked Newgate Prison in London during the Gordon Riots of 1780. Although Alexander Gilchrist reported that Blake was forced to accompany the crowd, some biographers argued that he accompanied it impulsively, or supported it as a revolutionary act.

William Blake married Catherine Boucher on August 18, 1782 in St. Mary's Church, Battersea. Throughout his life she would prove an invaluable aid to him, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.

Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa 1783. After his father's death, William and his brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784, and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. In 1784 Blake also composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.

In 1793's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

In 1800, Blake moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex to take up a job illustrating the works of William Hayley, a minor poet. It was in this cottage that Blake began Milton: a Poem. Over time, Blake came to resent his new patron, coming to believe that Hayley was uninterested in true artistry.

Blake's trouble with authority came to a head in August 1803, when he was involved in a physical altercation with a soldier called John Schofield. Blake was charged not only with assault, but also with uttering seditious and treasonable expressions against the King. Schofield claimed that Blake had exclaimed, "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake would be cleared in the Chichester assizes of the charges.

Blake returned to London in 1804 and began to write and illustrate Jerusalem (1804–1820), his most ambitious work. He set up an independent exhibition in his brother's haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street in the Soho district of London. The exhibition was designed to market his own version of the Canterbury illustration (titled The Canterbury Pilgrims), along with other works. As a result he wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a "brilliant analysis" of Chaucer. The exhibition itself, however, was very poorly attended, selling none of the temperas or watercolours.

At the age of 65 Blake began work on illustrations for the Book of Job. Later in his life Blake began to sell a great number of his works, particularly his Bible illustrations, to Thomas Butts, a patron who saw Blake more as a friend than a man whose work held artistic merit; this was typical of the opinions held of Blake throughout his life.

The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the ultimate aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise, and only a handful of the watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form. Blake's illustrations of the poem are not merely accompanying works, but rather seem to critically revise, or furnish commentary on, certain spiritual or moral aspects of the text.

On the day of his death (August 12, 1827), Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died.

He was buried five days after his death – on the eve of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary – at the Dissenter's burial ground in Bunhill Fields, where his parents were also interred.

While Blake had a significant role to play in the art and poetry of figures such as Rossetti, it was during the Modernist period that this work began to influence a wider set of writers and artists. His poetry also came into use by a number of British classical composers such as Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who set his works.

Blake had an enormous influence on the beat poets of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s, frequently being cited by such seminal figures as beat poet Allen Ginsberg and songwriters Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Van Morrison.