William Blake

           In 1781, Blake fell in love with a girl named Catherine Boucher. A classic case of love-at-first-sight, Catherine knew she had met her future husband and had to leave the room to keep from fainting. She reports that Blake was a striking looking figure, describing him as "stocky, with a big head and 'fiery eyes.'" He was, she says, "not handsome" but had a noble countenance, full of expression and animation." They were married the next year. Their marriage was a perfect fit both affectionately and professionally. Blake taught Catherine how to read, write, sketch, and paint. She soon became good enough to aid Blake with his work. She would often stay up late into the night and sit by Blake's side for hours to calm his thoughts. This displayed a genuine caring that few women would have been capable of.

           It must be hard to be a poetic genius but maybe even harder to live with one. Along with his great imagination, he had a terrible temper. His fuse was so short that his father opted to home school him instead of send him to school where his father was afraid that young William would be beaten often by both teachers and students. Later, Catherine had to deal with frequent spells of poverty because Blake couldn't hold a job. He continued to have violent outbursts of temper--in 1803, attacking a soldier who came to the door and then arrested for possible treason. All of this was aggravated by Blake's constant failure to reach an audience that could understand what he was doing. It was not until very late in his life that a few began to appreciate his work and ideas, he acquired a small London following.

           Despite his career as an engraver, poetry was his true passion. Instead of ditching his ability to engrave and focusing on poetry, he decided to incorporate the two. With the exception of his first work, "Poetical Sketches," all of his books were done in a style known as illuminated printing.  This was a process of engraving poems and related pictures on metal plates and then hand-coloring the prints made from them. His brilliant but unconventional paintings blended with his poetry, all heavy with symbolic meaning. His visionary poems and paintings are not always easy to understand because he invented his own mythology to express his ideas. However, once his work is understood, they reveal a powerful artistic imagination and gentle spiritual philosophy. Blake's poetry has been described as being "like the voice of wisdom in a child."

Blake's General Philosophy
            Perhaps those "fiery eyes" and that face "full of expression and animation" were the result of visions which he reports seeing throughout his life: When he was four, angels looked in his bedroom window from the trees outside; he was whipped for lying when he was eight after running to his parents screaming about angels in a field; he writes in a letter to a friend and colleague that he had seen Robert's, his youngest brother's, spirit rise from the deathbed when he was 30 (Letters, May 6, 1800). He even claimed to have once seen Ezekiel under a tree (Remember this when you read "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell").

           So you can see why he is considered to be one of the greatest visionary poet the English language has ever known. He held unconventional spiritual beliefs, advocated free love, and admired the democratic spirit of the French Revolution. All in all, he was one of the most inspired radical and poetic philosophers ever, believing even that the "Earth" itself was visionary.

           The visions come to us in two forms: One from a source other than the world we create for ourselves (call this God? Or Earth?), and then there is the vision of the flawed world which we created (call this society, education, world?)

           Blake believed that we have war, injustice, and unhappiness because our way of life is founded on a flawed and obscured vision of the "Earth." We know only a small part of reality through our five senses, yet we concern ourselves almost entirely with scientific truth and materialistic values gained through our senses. We shall not understand the vast reality beyond our senses and achieve full control of ourselves until we learn to trust our instincts, energies, and imaginations. For Blake, this was the basis of all personal, social, and religious truth.            

But it is also anti-scientific, anti-Christian, and anti-society--at least if you count science or Christianity or social authority as the ultimate source of all "Truth." Each one of these, according to Blake, attempts to substitute its own rigid and flawed vision of the world for one's own instinctual, energetic and imaginative vision. Think of it this way: Suppose one were to argue that women were inferior to men because they were "ruled by their passions," and only reasonable intellects (like those of men, the argument goes) are superior because only they can find the way to scientific truth. Now further suppose that this doctrine is taught by educators and religious leaders to be the truth. So, what we have here is a flawed vision based on assumptions like science is superior to the sensibilities of women, that women have a different character and different abilities than men. Furthermore, this vision is being planted in all of us so that when we look out into the world, it comes back to us distorted by science, religion, and social education.

           This, as a matter of fact, is the main topic of Blake's "Songs of Innocence;" each poem is portrait of a flawed vision. Each poem portrays a character who has been so trained to see the world in a certain way, that they can't see that something sinister and wrong lies behind the "innocent" vision they see. "Innocence," in this case means blindness and ignorance. So the question which needs to be asked about each poem is "what's wrong with this picture?" Are the values which these characters are being taught agreeable to me? What can I see that the characters in the poems cannot see? Is there anything wrong about the logic of the main character, at least from my perspective?

           Now this is, of course assuming that you are one who sees through experienced eyes. And that's what we get in "Songs of Experience," characters who have seen through the flawed vision of the world which they have been taught.