William Blake - Imagination over reason

Compiled by Ishara Mudugamuwa

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William Blake, an English poet, painter and printmaker was born on 28 November 1767, in London, where he spent his entire life, save for the years between 1800 to 1803, when he lived in a cottage at Felpham, near the seaside town of Bongnor, in Sussex.

At the age of fifteen, Blake apprenticed as an engraver, making plates from which pictures for books were printed. He later went to the Royal Academy, and at 20, was employed as an engraver to a book seller and publisher.

When he was 25, he married Catherine Bouchier. They had no children but were happily married for almost 45 years. In 1784, a year after he published his first volume of poems, Blake set up his own engraving business.

Blake illustrated the songs and other works with designs that demanded an imaginative reading of the dialogue between words and the picture.

Blake created his illustrations by writing the words and drawing the pictures for each and every poem on a copper plate.

Blake is one of the major romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of romanticism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European culture.

His writing combines a variety of styles; he is at once an artist, a lyric poet, a mystic and a visionary, and his work has fascinated, intrigued and sometimes bewildered readers ever since.

Blake's work can be difficult to interpret at times, mainly because the reader is offered, Blake's visions in Blake's own terms. Blake draws on a highly powerful, but essentially personal, mythological system of his own devise, but one that also draws on a variety of poetic and philosophical sources.

Blake created a unique form of illustrated verse, His poetry inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric and prophetic in the language. Blake's most popular poems are Songs of Innocence, eloquent lyrics that make fresh, direct observations.

In 1794, disillusioned with the possibility of human perfection, he issued Songs of Experience. Both series of poems take on deeper resonances when read in conjunction. William Blake has been called a preromantic because he rejected the neoclassical literary style and modes of thought.

His graphic art also defied 18th century conventions. Always stressing imagination over reason, he felt that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions.

William Blake died on 12 August 1827.