The Mastery of Imagination

November 28, 1757, William Blake was born in London.  At the age of fourteen Blake apprenticed with and engraver named James Basire.  At twenty-four he married Catherine Boucher and taught her to read.  He taught her engraving and printing; Catherine helped Blake with his work.

“Blake was a lyric poet interested chiefly in ideas, and a painter who did not believe in nature.  He was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion.  He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search.  He was a Christian who hated churches, a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals.  He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself a ‘mental prince’, and was one.” (Kazin)

Blake hated rational thinking; he loathed Newton and Voltaire and their philosophy.  Imagination and visions were most important to him.  Blake discovered a method of printing that he called “illuminating printing.”  He claims to have gotten the idea from a vision of his dead brother.  The process is very tedious, in which he engraves the illustration on a copper plate.  Acid was applied to the plate and the untreated copper was eaten away from the engraved section.  It was then colored with water colors.

Each design was an individual creative work of art.  The beautiful book was Blake’s idea of complete unity.  “The lettering, the decoration, the illustrations, the proportions of the page, the choice of paper, surpassed even the conceptions of the medieval scribes and miniaturists.” (Kazin)  Blake was not trying to create a “beautiful book.”  To Blake it was necessary to intertwine all the arts so he could give us the essence of his vision.  It was important to Blake to get all his vision down and use all of the arts that were open to him, and he wanted it done completely with his own hands.

Blake designed the illustrations of the “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” in such a way that the words and images seemed to grow like flowers.  “Blake never drew an object for its own sake.  He wrote and drew as he lived, from a fathomless inner window, to make what was deepest and most invisible capturable by the mind of man.  he used the thing created as a window, through which to look to what was still beyond.  ‘I look through the eye,’  he said, ‘not with it.’” (Kazin)

In 1794, Blake printed “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.”  The two groups of poems represent the world as it is envisioned by what he calls ‘two contrary states of the human soul.’” (Abrams)

Childhood can be seen as a lost world ~ it calls out to us from our depressed life.

     “Piping down the valleys wild,
      Piping songs of pleasant glee,

      On a cloud I saw a child,
      And he laughing said to me.

      Pipe a song about a Lamb!
      So I piped with merry cheer.

      Piper, pipe that song again,
      So I piped: he wept to hear.”

Innocence believes, experience doubts.  The symbolism of innocence seems to be the child that is lost becomes found.  The imagination that is lost to man will be found through human vision.  “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” seem to be contraries that exist in our minds, reflecting the inner struggles inside our minds.  The world of innocence we see the child speaking to the lamb, Jesus stands over the child and lamb and Jesus himself is a lamb, but in Experience we look into the fiery eyes of the Tyger and are “lost in the forests of the night.”  Possibly the tyger is the face of creation, Blake doesn’t see the tyger as evil.

     “When the stars threw down their spears,
      And water’d heaven with their tears.

      Did he smile his work to see?
      Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Did he smile his work to see?  Blake gives us no answer, instead he brings us back to the tyger.  Blake offers no moral he only leads us to the fact that the tyger exists.  “Blake does not let us off with any conventional religious consolation, nor does he let the creator off.  Had he believed in God, the contraries which are presented to man’s mind by experience would have been easy to explain.” (Kazin)  According to Blake if man continues to delude himself that his is a natural body and he keeps subjecting himself to society, and obeying the laws of a natural God, then man cannot help but get lost.

     “Do what you will, this life’s fiction
      And is made up of contradiction.”

“Blake was a born ironist who enjoyed mystifying his well-meaning but literal-minded friends and who took a defiant pleasure in shocking the dull and complacent ‘angels’ of his day by being deliberately outrageous in representing his work and opinions.” (Abrams)

Blake was a true Romanticist.  He mastered the art of imagination and he was truly a unique individual that was not afraid to stand alone.  Blake died in London in 1827, but his visions live on in the artwork and the writing he created with so much care and love.  His work is still a work of art that stands out on it’s own.

 Works Cited

Abrams, M.H.-General Editor and  Stephen Greenblatt – Associate General Editor.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed., vol 2.  W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, N.Y.. 2000. pp. 35-37.

Kazin, Alfred. “An Introduction to William Blake.”