Celebrating Blake

An unusual poet and artist, William Blake saw art and poetry as two sides of the same coin. KAUSALYA SANTHANAM writes of an exhibition on the works of a man who was neglected and derided when alive, but richly feted years later.

"And I know this world is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Everything I paint in this world but Everybody does not see alike. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. To me the world is all one continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination."

THIS unbridled power of imagination was what made William Blake (1757-1827) the most unusual of poets and artists. He was a phenomenon - a poet whose words conjured up a mystical world few have been given the gift to see and an artist whose works reflected a vision so extraordinary we are awed by its magnificent sweep.

An exhibition on the poet-prophet-printmaker at the Tate Britain gallery in London that concluded recently, paid tribute to Blake in a manner that would have made him exult. Richly sourced and imaginatively conceived, it was a splendid show that brought together his works from various museums, private collections and libraries in Britain and abroad. Room after room was filled with the etchings, engravings, paintings and illuminated books of a man who, neglected and derided as insane, yet believed steadfastly in his Visions and pursued his own truths.

"William Blake" is not an exhibition you can take in a few hours or even in a day. As the professor of medieval art history at Edinburgh University beside me remarks, "I've been here for five hours already and I need many more to absorb it all."

The paintings and sketches are filled with an immense vitality and seem to leap out of their frames to communicate the restless passion and power of a man charged with the creative, inner fire of genius. The perfectly proportioned naked forms remind us of the art of Michelangelo. Blake greatly admired the great Florentine artist as also Raphael and compared himself to them. Serene-faced angels who float among the fan vaulting, bearded patriarchs with wise eyes who look beyond, despairing men and women bent over in anguish, and terrifying evil creatures that threaten and taunt fill the walls with motion and energy. The subtle colouring, the radiant use of lighting and the arrangement of the figures distinguish Blake as one of the greatest artists of his time. But he was not regarded so then and died in poverty.

As for his poetry, from the lyrical Poetical Sketches to the complex and often incomprehensible epics "Milton" and "Jerusalem", Blake delights, bewilders and awes but seldom disappoints. It is this originality and individuality that appeals to his readers in the 21st Century.

Strangely enough, this great artist's chosen profession was engraving and not painting. Throughout his life, despite being acutely conscious of his own gifts, he considered himself an engraver first and hammered away on metal and sheet in his determined effort to concretise his vision.

Born to a hosier, Blake belonged to a family of Dissenters and this shaped his unconventional religious views. If his art overflowed later with winged angels and mythical forms, these had their origins in his childhood when he said he was first visited by angels. These visitations continued through his life. Blake was apprenticed to an engraver when he was 14. When his master sent him to the Westminster Abbey to draw the figures on the tombs, Blake fell under the spell of the Gothic that was to remain the predominant influence on him. The drawings of the efigies of the warrior king, Edward I and his saintly wife Eleanor, the unfortunate Richard II and his queen Anne, and others were executed by Blake for the book Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain. These sketches displayed in the exhibition reveal his fine sense of perspective.

Blake's vision is an essentially religious and spiritual one. "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion" was his earliest engraving. The image shows the legendary figure who was supposed to have brought Christianity and, according to Blake, art to ancient Britain which he called Albion. Blake regarded England as the womb of mankind.

To Blake, art and poetry were two sides of the same creative urge. As he engraved masterpieces such as "The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam", he wrote prophetic books such as Tiriel which he illustrated. Tiriel portrays the raging emotions of a tyrannical father, but the theme is interwoven with myth and metaphor.

Momentous historical events were taking place during Blake's youth. The American War of Independence had begun in 1775 followed by the French revolution 14 years later and in-between raged the Gordon riots of 1780 in London. Blake's radical views were shaped by these events and led to his major literary works and prophetic books, America, a Prophecy, The French Revolution and Europe, a Prophecy as also his book of aphorisms, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion. All these decried authoritarian forces using the language of his mythology.

When on a visit to Batersea in 1781, Blake fell in love with the simple and unschooled Catherine and married her a year later. It was the beginning of an enduring partnership. Blake taught Catherine to read, write and paint. Some of her paintings on display at the exhibition are very like his. In an unhappy life where few could understand him, Catherine believed in him implicitly and provided unfailing support and strength: it was natural that he should thank her, his "angel", on his deathbed.

Songs of Innocence and The Book of Thel were published in the year before the Blakes moved into Hercules buildings in Lambeth where they spent 10 happy years. ... Songs of Innocence contains some of his best loved and understood poems: "Piping down the valleys wild ...", "The Chimney Sweeper", "London" and "The Tyger". The images are sharp and beautiful and ring through your mind as the lines from "London" do when you walk through any city,

"And mark in ever face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe."

Songs of Experience, written a few years later, was meant to be read along with Songs of Innocence as "Two Contrary States of the Human mind".

Relief etching was the special method developed by Blake to illustrate his own poems. He called these exquisitely produced works, which he published himself, illuminated books. Here, word and image come together in a perfectly synthesised whole. The beautiful calligraphy and the brilliantly conceived figures painted in lovely, pastel hues are so attractive that you linger over them. The exhibition's organisers have placed an old, polished wooden printing press right in the middle of this room and it serves as the evocative motif of this section, "The printing house in hell".

Commercially unsuccessful despite advertising his work for sale, the poet-artist watched frustrated as his less talented contemporaries became well known and wealthy while he was forced to earn a living by illustrating the works of writers who did not possess a quarter of his talent. The poet Hayley, popular at that time, commissioned Blake to illustrate his poems and in 1800 the Blakes moved to Felpham, Sussex, to be near Hayley. Here too, Blake worked indefatigably. He found the materialism of the times stultifying and the science which gave rise to it revolting. His painting of Isaac Newton is awesome. The naked figure of Newton is seen seated on a rock in the sea, bent over a scroll which he measures with a compass. Equally impressive is his figure of Nebuchadnezzar.

The Bible was to the poet-artist "the embodiment of the whole history of mankind" and Biblical themes remained the well-spring of his creations - "The Raising of Lazarus", "The Agony in the Garden", "Christ in the Wilderness" and others, culminating in the magnificent "The Vision of the Last Judgment" which he laboured on till his death.

Hayley's patronising air and a charge of sedition proved too much for him and he returned to London. For the next few years he escaped being dragged into poverty by the patronage of those like the civil servant Thomas Butts. In 1808, he painted Chaucer's "The Canterbury Pilgrims" to counter the one executed by his rival, Thomas Stothard. Stothard's brilliantly coloured painting and Blake's in deeper, sombre colours in Gothic style hang side by side at the Tate.

Like others of his time, Blake thought Milton the greatest poet who lived, greater even than Shakespeare, Dante or Chaucer. At various points of his life, Blake illustrated the work of all four, giving his own interpretation to the plays and epics. Though he admired Dante and Milton, Blake the iconoclast differed with their religious views. He did not believe in a vengeful God.

"I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's," felt Blake. Blake was deeply influenced by the theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg and his rejection of organised religion. He went on to create a mythology which made his later poems, among them "The Four Zoas", "The Book of Urizen" and the "The Song of Los" incomprehensible to many. Among the characters that inhabit this mythological world are Urizen, standing for reason, Vala, the goddess of Nature, Urthona, representing the creative imagination of the individual and Luvah, representing love and sexual energy. To Blake, sexuality was a means of realising the divine and many of his erotic sketches exemplify this belief. But ultimately to many, Blake is a singer and seer, the writer of the beautiful preface to Milton:

"And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy lamb of God,

On England's pleasant pastures seen!"

The exhibition was complemented by a whole range of talks by scholars of literature and art, film shows and concerts and every conceivable way of celebrating Blake. If he were to see the steady stream of visitors to the galleries and the tributes pouring in, the eternal piper, once neglected and ignored, would surely feel vindicated and redeemed by this overwhelming recognition of his unusual gifts.

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