| At the age of ten, William Blake is reputed
to have seen a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye, so perhaps it's not surprising
that the word most often associated with this extraordinary poet and artist is
visionary. In his own lifetime, and for a good while afterwards, he was regarded
as gifted but mad. The son of a London hosier, Blake received little in the way
of a formal education, although he did study at the Royal Academy of Art after
completing his apprenticeship to an engraver, a trade he pursued with considerable
skill. He began writing his own verse and evolving what was finally to become
a highly distinctive personal mythology, whilst engraving for numerous London
Booksellers and a circle of supportive patrons. (Blake intended all of his poems
to be read with the, now celebrated, illustrations he prepared for them.) His
debut, Poetical Sketches, was produced in 1783. However,
it was with Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel, published and
engraved in 1789, that Blake's mysticism found its first true, if nascent, expression.
Some of his earlier poems, such as Tyger Tyger ('that one about a tiger,'
as Charles Lamb, stumped for a title, once put it) and The Sick Rose from
Songs of Experience, 1794, appear deceptively simple; yet they are richly
suggestive and serve to illustrate Blake's mastery of the lyrical form. His poetry
and art became increasingly complex and allegorical, and it was a great disappointment
to the poet that his later, prophetic works, Milton and Jerusalem, failed
to reach an understanding audience.
The poet's final years were spent
in obscurity, but in the century after his death his reputation soared. The discovery
of many previously unpublished and neglected poems, essays and engravings resulted
in a major reassessment of his oeuvre. Blake emerged as not only an apocalyptic
seer but as a writer of witty epigrams, an impressive critic and a freethinker,
whose rejection of the materialism of his times was far from insane. William
Wordsworth on Blake
'There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but
there is something in the madness of this man that interests me more than the
sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.' | 
