William Blake (William Blake, 1757~1827) was a nineteenth-century poet and the first important Romantic poet in Britain.
Main poems include poetry collections "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience". The early works are concise and lively, while the later works tend to be mysterious and obscure,
full of mystery.
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In 1757, he was born in a poor sock merchant family in London. Because his personality was too unique, he did not like the oppressive atmosphere of orthodox schools and refused to enroll, so he did not receive formal education. He has been fond of painting and poetry since childhood.
He entered painting school for three years at the age of 11 and showed extraordinary artistic talent. His father intended for him to continue his studies under a famous painter, but for the sake of the future of his family and younger siblings, he voluntarily gave up this opportunity and became an apprentice in a woodblock printing workshop.
He became an engraving apprentice at the age of 14, and later entered the Royal College of Art in 1779 to study fine arts.
Married in 1782. Soon after, Blake printed his first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches.
In 1784, after his father's death, Blake began working with the famous publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson's collaborators included many outstanding figures in Britain at that time, such as: Joseph Presley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine and so on. Blake soon became friends with Mary Wollstonecraft and was invited to illustrate her works.
After 1788, he published four collections of poems.
Beginning in 1825, Blake suffered from illness. After that, he determined to complete the illustration work for Dante's "Divine Comedy" before his death. However, he failed to complete this huge project until his death. . Until a few days before his death in August 1827, he was still working, "asking people to spend the last few shillings to buy charcoal pencils", and after finishing the last painting, he put it down and said, "I did my best." .
Throughout his life, he and his wife depended on each other and made a poor living from the wages of painting and engraving. At the same time, he continued to write poetry that he had started at the age of 12 and published it with his own illustrations. William Blake's life was extremely simple, with nothing to write home about, just a continuation of simple facts and urgent artistic creative activities.
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He is a complex and multiple character: in addition to a poet, he is also a painter and sculptor. One side of his art influences the other. He used a method of his own invention to engrave the poems he wrote and the illustrations he drew on copper plates, then used the copper plates to print book pages and then colored them. A closer look at Blake's works reveals that they are a whole composed of images and texts. The text does more than illustrate the picture, and the picture does more than represent the original text. Both require interpretive or speculative reading.
Talking about William Blake must clarify the many speculations and accusations about him. Some people say that he was a madman and a fabricator and spreader of devil beliefs, like the ghosts and ghosts that people can hear coming out of the cemetery at night in London. Of course, Blake cannot think or clarify the secular world as thoroughly as Rabelais and Aledino. Maybe he is the fog of faith, but that is also the "purple" full of pain and love. "Fog," Blake pioneered a kind of thinking through hallucinations facilitated by imagination, and in this regard he inspired Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, and even Arthur Rimbaud. Blake is a prophet of imagination and a faithful recorder of experience. We would rather regard him as the best apprentice who has purified his senses and emerged from the "devil's workshop".
From childhood, Blake was filled with a vivid imagination and often experienced fantasies. He said he had seen trees studded with angels, met the ancient saints buried in Westminster Abbey, and had painted pictures of them. He expressed everything he saw in paintings and poems. Most of his paintings are carefully thought-out deformations of human bodies or representations of characters he saw in hallucinations. For example, the illustrations he made for his poem "Europe: A Prophecy" (1794) were derived from his hallucinations. It is said that while Blake was living in Lambeth, he once stood at the top of a staircase and saw a similar vision appear in the sky. It can be seen from this picture: Chaos has just begun. A naked old man with white hair and white beard is lying in a round object with yellow edges and red edges. He stretches out his left hand and measures the area below with a huge compass. Deep darkness. This mysterious old man is apparently the God of the Bible, Jehovah. There is a passage from "Wisdom" in the "Old Testament Proverbs" that can support this. Not only does the composition and color of this painting have a dreamlike and mysterious feel, but the intention is not to describe the greatness of God. It expresses the evil of God because He created a dark world, and the compass looks like the lightning of a thunderbolt on a dark stormy night. So he can only be the god of evil.
In addition to writing and painting himself, Blake often painted other people's poems. The painting titled "Pity" is an illustration he made for Act 1, Scene 7 of Shakespeare's masterpiece "Macbeth". When Macbeth is about to kill the king and seize the throne, he is full of hesitation and contradiction.
He said: "Mercy is like a naked newborn baby floating in the strong wind, and like a heavenly infant walking on the air, it will expose this abominable behavior in everyone's eyes, causing tears to drown the wind." Blake A mythical scene is conceived here: under the deep night, "Mercy", a compassionate figure, rides a flowing white horse "Taixu Messenger" and flies silently across the night sky. Lying on the ground was a mother who had just given birth. She was too weak to care for her newborn baby. Mercy leaned down with concern and opened its arms to welcome a new life. And this tiny but energetic newborn jumped up from Mother Earth and threw herself into the arms of "Mercy". Behind "Mercy", there is a messenger of the night, flying with open arms, quietly passing through the night sky. The whole picture looks so peaceful and deep, full of the mystery and broad tolerance of the night. The boundless night covers countless sins, misfortunes, joys, sorrows, life and death, gentleness and ferocity... Everything is silent under its tolerance, forming an unfathomable mysterious content.
Black never received official or public appreciation throughout his life. In the eyes of people at that time, he was an anti-rationalist, a dreamer and a mystic, a person who was far away from the world and a paranoid. His work was not taken seriously. It was not until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries when Yeats and others re-edited his collection of poems that people were surprised by his innocence and profundity. Then came the publication of his letters and notes, and the growing popularity of his apocalyptic paintings, and Blake's status as poet and painter was firmly established.
To this day, many critics rank Blake as one of the six greatest poets in the history of British literature, along with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. . Since his paintings after the Renaissance opened up a new path of not focusing on appearance but on spiritual power, he was praised as "one of the most important figures in British art". The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge has opened a special museum for Blake, and the collection is very rich; in the course schedule of the English Department of Cambridge University in the 2002 Michaelmas Term alone, there are three courses on Blake studies, they are : "William Blake", "Blake'sCompositeArt" and "Blake'sMinuteParticulars". Blake's achievements and charm are evident from this. As Professor Wang Zuoliang asserted: For latecomers, Blake is inexhaustible - whether starting from ideas, symbols, myths, or from meter, poetry or painting art, there are a lot of things in his works. Something worth delving into.