William Blake

Perhaps no British literary figure is so hard to classify as William Blake.  For one thing, he was a much a visual artist as a poet and it's impossible to study the one aspect of his art independently of the other.  Then again, there is the deliberate veil of ambiguity - in the manner of his self-assumed role of prophet - that he placed over almost all his works, which ranged from the children's Songs of Innocence to the theological opus The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  While the period in which he lived coincided with the Romantic era and his work sometimes exhibited that movement's preoccupations, he had little in common with the great Romantic poets and no association with any of them.  To the extent he was known at all to his contemporaries, he was viewed as eccentric to the point of madness.

The large format study simply entitled William Blake, edited by  Robin Hamlyn, Marilyn Butler, Michael Phillips, was originally published to accompany a 2000-2001 exhibit at London's Tate Gallery and accordingly concentrates on the visual work while at the same time seeking to place it in the context of his writings.  It begins with two short essays by Peter Ackroyd and Marilyn Butler and is then divided into four parts that deal respectively with his interest in the Gothic ("One of the Gothic Artists"), the development of his visionary art in the 1790's ("The Furnace of Lambeth's Vale"), the outline of his personal mythology ("Chambers of the Imagination") and finally an overview of his illustrated books ("Many Formidable Works").

Blake began his career as an engraver's apprentice and part of his training required him to spend long hours at the British museum making copies of masterpieces from classical antiquity.  He became expert at the etching process, a detailed description of which is included at the beginning of the second section, and managed to produce with this method vividly colored "illuminated prints."  Blake did not limit himself to this medium, however, and many of the illustrations he completed are in the form of watercolors or pen and ink.  As for painting in oils, he identified that with the Renaissance rather than with the Gothic period to which he was most drawn and so did not make use of them.

Blake was an extreme individualist and, as such, determinedly at odds with almost all forms of organized religion.  This can be seen clearly in his illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy.  For example, Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo are shown embracing in the light of the sun rather than suffering in hell as Dante depicted them.  Blake's outspoken views on religion and personal freedom put him in danger of imprisonment during the time of the French Revolution when the English government under William Pitt clamped down on any form of expression that might conceivably be considered seditious.  Print shops were especially singled out as sources of objectionable material.  Blake had already in 1780 taken part in a mob attack on Newgate Prison.  In 1803 he was accused by a soldier of assault and of having cursed the king.  He was eventually exonerated at trial.

The real draw of this book, published by Abrams, is the excellent quality of the reproductions.  No matter what one may think of Blake, there is no denying the compelling quality of his artwork.  Perhaps because he stood so far outside the margins of his own era, his work speaks more directly to the modern sensibility than most of that produced in the early nineteenth century.  The visionary aspect is so imaginative that his illustrations at times appear to belong to the realm of science fiction (e.g., "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun").  At the same time, they possess a deep psychological penetration and occasionally operate on an almost existential level.

One curious feature of the book is that, although descriptions of all the works shown in the exhibit are included, many of the artworks themselves are not.  No explanation is given for their absence.  The Foreword mentions that the show was reduced in size when it traveled from the Tate to the Metropolitan Museum and perhaps the missing illustrations are those that were not included in the New York show.