January 19, 2002, “The Ballad of William Blake” performance text, Naropa Institute

Published in the Uncategorized

The Ballad of William Blake

John Thomas Smith published a profile of William Blake in 1829, two years after Blake’s death, beginning with the words “I believe it has been invariably the custom of every age, whenever a man has been found to depart from the usual mode of thinking, to consider him of deranged intellect, and not infrequently stark staring mad…. Bearing this stigma of eccentricity, William Blake, with most extraordinary zeal, commenced his efforts in art under the roof of no. 28 Broad St., in which house he was born,” and where his father ran a prosperous hosiery business. The date was November 28^th, 1758, and the house on Broad Street was in London, but it was a London that didn’t look much like what we’d call a city today. Even the center of London in Blake’s time included hayfields, cattle pastures, and large forests.

Blake was raised as a Protestant in a religiously non-conformist household back in the days when the word “protest” in it really meant something, although Blake reportedly never entered a church in his life. The Blakes were also early supporters of both the American and French revolutions, and opponents of the slave trade, something some Americans would still be fighting to prolong a century later. His father was decidedly anti-royal, although solidly middle-class. In fact, Blake’s support of the poor and downtrodden became a source of tension between the two as the elder Blake became richer and his son identified more and more with society’s outcasts and the poor.

By all accounts Blake was an argumentative and irritable child. His visions began shortly after an older brother died in infancy—for instance, when he was four years old he woke the household with his screaming, which he told them was provoked when God poked his head into his nursery window to say hello. Blake also told his father that he saw angelic beings flying over the hayfields and perched in the trees like stars. Shortly thereafter, his father decided that it would be best if he kept Blake home from school, and he was taught to read and write by his mother. It was customary for the eldest male—in this case his older brother, James—to inherit the family business, which he eventually did.

When he was ten, Blake’s father sent him to drawing school, where he studied for the next five years. At the same time his father began giving him money to collect prints, and Blake was drawn to those by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Durer. Until the end of his life, Blake was known for his extraordinary print collection.

In August, 1772, at the completion of his schooling, at the age of fifteen, it was time to arrange for his apprenticeship. At the time, being an engraver was thought to be a more commercial career than to be a painter. Illustrated books were something of a fad and painting was something reserved for the very rich.

His first appointment was with William Ryland, the official engraver to King George, the most famous, and modern, engraver of the time. But upon first meeting him, Blake had a vision of Ryland’s body hanging from a scaffold, which gave the official engraver to the king quite a laugh. But within ten years Ryland would be hanged at the city gates when it was discovered that he had been counterfeiting official bank notes.

And so Blake began his apprenticeship instead with the engraver James Basire. An apprenticeship with Basire was cheaper than most because he had not kept up with the modern style of engraving, and was considered an “old-time” engraver. New techniques—such as mezzotint and aquatint—had created a desire for subtle shading in book illustrations, and the bold, strongly lined designs of Basire, inspired by Durer, were considered out of date.

Blake, who did not get along well with his fellow apprentices, was soon sent off to Westminster Abbey to practice his drawing alone. Here he also discovered medieval illuminated manuscripts in its library. He spent entire nights in the gloomy catacombs, sketching the faces of heroes and gargoyles, including his first engraving in 1773 at the age of 15, featuring Joseph of Arimathea. When he emerged into the daylight after a night in the tombs, he often felt himself to be a man out-of-time with his contemporaries and much preferred the drama of the Gothic to the “modern style.”

While still a student, he illustrated a book called “A New System of Mythology,” where he learned of the common elements in much of the world’s religions, from ancient Egypt to modern Christianity. He also began to see everything as essentially sacred and believed that the inability to see the sacredness of the world and all living things—especially by kings and priests and teachers and lawyers—was responsible for most of the suffering in the world. Blake began to believe that there must be one true, all-encompassing, everlasting religion that time and mistranslation and our blindness had splintered in warring factions. He also believed that it was possible to reclaim our holiness, but only after we had overthrown everything that oppressed us. And so upon graduating from his apprenticeship at the age of 21, you could say that Blake was nearly fully formed.

At this point he became a professional engraver, but had difficulty adjusting the style he’d learned from his study of antiquities to the current images considered fashionable in cosmopolitan London. He also entered the Royal Academy of Art, where he studied with the most famous portrait painter of his age—Sir Joshua Reynolds. But after some moderate, but ill-taken criticism from Reynolds that Blake should simplify his extravagance and correct his drawing, Blake left the Academy. He wrote that Reynold’s insistence on “copying nature” was to become a slave to memory, whereas he preferred the vigor of his own Divine Imagination. Rather than gazing at an object and then painting “backward” from memory, Blake’s active sense of imagination relied upon intense seeing. He believed that by staring at an object he could actually enter it and that it would then begin to converse with him.

At this time Blake also joined a group of the most radical political thinkers of his day, including William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose salon would later host such Romantics and political revolutionaries as Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron. He also joined the mob that burned Newgate Prison, an act inspired by the storming of the Bastille, and it was Blake who, by some accounts, was the one who alerted his friend Thomas Paine to flee England when soldiers were en route to arrest him.

In the latter days of King George’s rule, the word “sedition” was taken very seriously by the king and the courts and one of Blake’s early publishers had gone to prison for it. The French Revolution was killing people, for instance, and at this point it was still only kings, queens, and noblemen who were losing their heads. Even though it was considered politically dangerous, Blake went so far as to wear an emblematic red bonnet in sympathy for the French Revolution on the streets of London. 

At about this time, Blake befriended the publisher Joseph Johnson, and one of Blake’s first professional jobs was to illustrate a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson was primarily a political publisher—he was ready to print Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man,” for instance, but cancelled its publication when he was warned he would be charged with sedition if he did. The threat was real, and the pamphlet’s second publisher was arrested and jailed for publishing it. At that time, Johnson was also advertising the imminent publication of Blake’s “French Revolution,” a book of 7 parts, but Johnson and Blake thought better of it and cancelled publication after Part I was set into type, for fear that if it were published they would both end up in jail.

At the time, Blake believed he was living in the end days, and that the American and French Revolutions were the purifying violence that was prophesied in the Bible as a prelude to a new heaven on earth. He saw his prophetical works such as “America” and “Europe” as being in line with the Hebrew prophets. In fact, Blake made much of the fact the he was born in 1757, the year that the Christian mystic Swedenborg had predicted would be the time of the Last Judgment and the coming of the kingdom of heaven. Like most people, he reconsidered his position vis a vis the French Revolution after Reign of Terror began, and for the next 13 years he would write no more prophetical books. But late in life Blake would tell friends that although he wrote almost exclusively in religious terms, he meant for his writings to be read as political tracts, and it was only his obscurity that saved him from prison.

By the late 1790s, France had embraced the despot Napoleon and England had become even more repressively grim—the poor could no longer afford bread, for instance, and many Londoners spent their waking lives in factories in order to make their owners rich, while the factories themselves worked night and day manufacturing tools for the wars that were orchestrated by commercial interests, and in which mostly the poor fought and died. England’s war with France, for example, was blatantly an economic war, fought to secure overseas colonies. And it was at this point that Blake’s earliest hero—fiery Orc, the spirit of revolution—was transformed into the more human, Los, emblem of the imagination. In Blake’s later work he wrote that the revolution that was necessary was a revolution in consciousness, via the imagination, not a violent political revolution.

Among his friends at this time was A.S. Matthew and his wife, who raised funds to publish Blake’s first volume of poetry, Poetical Sketches, in an edition of 50 copies. It contained poems written between the ages of 12 and 20 in Shakespearean blank verse, and also included his first songs. It was at this time that Blake’s curious history of bad reviews from unlikely sources began, in this case within the preface of his own book, written by Mr. Mathews: “The following sketches were the production of untutored youth—he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.”

It is also at this time that Blake is described by guests of the Mathews as singing his poems at parties: “There I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.” Even so, and despite that fact that Blake was a friend and collaborator with publishers all his life and certainly showed his work to them, Poetical Sketches remained the only commercial publication of Blake’s writing in his lifetime.

Blake was 5 foot, 5 inches tall, had yellow-brown hair which tended to radiate around his head, and was usually described as having an unkempt appearance. At the age of 23, recuperating from a broken heart, he left London to stay near his father’s relatives in Battersea, where he met Catherine Boucher, the illiterate daughter of a farmer, and married her one year later, when she signed the marriage certificate with an X. His marriage displeased his father, who thought William was marrying beneath him. But they were lifetime companions, and Blake taught his wife not only to read and write but how to paint as well. Twenty years later their friend William Hayley wrote that Catherine helped to print and color his works, and that “she draws, she engraves, and sings delightfully & is so truly the Half of her good Man, that they seem animated by One Soul.”

Two years after his marriage, his father died and Blake started a print shop with another engraver, investing the little money he’d inherited from his father’s estate. But he quickly quarreled with his partner, and made only two original etchings in the two years he worked there. At the same time one of the first high-profile commissioned works he’d illustrated, Young’s Night Thoughts, was a disastrous failure, abandoned after the first volume, and many blamed Blake’s idiosyncratic and archaic etching style. One review wrote of Blake’s illustrations: “Nothing would be more easy than to produce such. They were like the conceits of drunken fellow or a madman.” Blake was labeled “non-commercial” and what little work he’d had dried up. When the business went under, he was considered a failure by his family, and his eldest brother refused to have any contact with him for the remainder of their lives.

At this time, his younger brother, Robert, also an artist, came to live with the young childless couple. Whereas Blake was difficult and singular, Robert was outgoing and loving, and whereas Blake attempted to make a living out of his art, Robert remained true to his own personal dreams and visions. At the same time that Blake’s print shop was going out of business, Robert, then 19 years old, was dying in Blake’s arms of tuberculosis. Blake spent the last two weeks of Robert’s life at his bedside, refusing to leave even to eat or sleep. At the moment of his brother’s death, Blake saw his “released spirit ascend heavenward, clapping its hands for joy.” After Robert died, Blake slept for 3 days and 3 nights and woke with great sadness that he had slept through his brother’s funeral and internment. Upon Robert’s death, Blake inherited Robert’s notebook which was filled with his fantastic and spirited drawings, and suddenly Robert’s visionary nature began to become more prominent in Blake’s own work.

At this time Blake joined a Swedenborg cult, at least partially in hopes that he might contact his dead brother’s spirit. Followers of Swedenborg claimed that they could raise the dead, that the Virgin Mary came to sit with them, and that they could converse with Jesus and God. Later, when he became disenchanted with the Swedenborgians, he joined an underground heretical Christian sect that believed that the words of the Sermon on the Mount should be taken literally. Their Jerusalem would have no king but Jesus Christ, but this was a Christ who was, as the Gnostics had taught as well, a new God, and one who had come to earth to free us from the Old Testament Jehovah. They believed in the imminence of a heaven on earth, and opposed private property, war, any established church, formal government, and laws. They also believed that the industrial revolution had turned men and women (and more horrifically children) into slaves, who worked to feed the machinery on the machinery’s schedule. In this Blake predated Romantics such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, who were still considered revolutionaries for similar ideas a century later.

Following Robert’s death, Blake commonly talked to his brother and other angels and Biblical figures. He was, he said at the time, “under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily and Nightly.” Blake’s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, collected first-hand reports of how Blake would often stare off into space, his eyes moving quickly back and forth, describing, in elaborate detail, the apparitions who came to visit him. In current psychiatric parlance, Blake was in this sense an “eidetic” thinker, someone whose mental images are seen in great detail as if suspended outside their heads. In his later years, he even set visiting hours between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. daily for any spirit who wanted to drop by for a portrait or a chat. He believed that “Spirits are not as modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapor or a nothing. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.” These were observed not with the material eye but within the imagination heightened to a vision. In his career he would often paint his visions—including the Ancient of Days, which he claimed appeared to him and hovered over his head at the top of the stairs—and a series of Visionary Heads, including Canute, who came to instruct him in art and philosophy. He was also twice visited by the spirit of a Flea. These spirits also included personages from the past, such as the poet John Milton. In fact Blake claimed his long poem “Milton” was dictated to him by angels with occasional assistance from Milton himself with the intent to correct an error Milton had made. “I saw Milton in imagination, and he told me to beware of being misled by his “Paradise Lost.” In particular he wished me to shew the falsehood of his doctrine that the pleasure of sex arose from the Fall. The Fall could not produce any pleasure.”

In addition, the list of people Blake dined with on “the bread of sweet thought and the wine of delight”—included Michelangelo, Paracelsus, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets. When he also claimed to have had many conversations with Voltaire, his friend Crabb Robinson asked him how he could have communicated with Voltaire, who spoke only French, and Blake said “To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key—he touched it probably in French, but to my ear it became English.”

In a letter to Thomas Butts, he explained the compositional process of one of these long, dictated poems: “I have written this Poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without Premeditation & even against my Will; the Time it has taken in writing was thus render’d non Existent, & an immense Poem Exists which seems to be the Labour of a long Life, all produc’d without Labour or Study.” But, interestingly enough, Blake’s manuscripts—including such dictated works such as “Vala” and “Milton”—show a considerable amount of deletions and revisions, proving that the dictation of these spirit guides was not apparently foolproof.

Blake’s habit of invoking the members of the Holy Family whenever it suited his purpose was not without humor to his friends. Once his painter friend Henry Fuseli was looking at a new painting that Blake had assured him had been described as one of his best ever. Fuseli, unconvinced, enquired of Blake “Now someone has told you this is very fine?” “Yes,” Blake answered, “the Virgin Mary appeared to me and told me it was very fine. Now what can you say to that?” “Well,” Fuseli replied, “I can say nothing, other than that her Ladyship has not an immaculate taste.”

            Blake’s visual art was also subject to the dictations from other worlds—he didn’t paint landscapes or seascapes or conventional portraits as they would be seen through our senses and were defined and determined by them, but rather he painted a spiritual world, somewhat symbolic, that he saw in his Divine Imagination. He painted only what was eternal, and what was eternal did not reside in the features of a face or in the details of the moment or in any particular vista before the eyes. In fact, he felt that to paint the world visible to the senses would only encourage us to continue to freeze our experience on the lower level perceptible to our senses. But he also believed that it was only through this world—through the sunflower or the grain of sand or whatever—that we could see this informing world, this active world, beyond the world of our senses once, as he put it, the doors of perception were cleansed and we could see the things of our senses as they were in essence—that is, infinite and eternal.

            Blake described this visionary process as follows: “I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation & that to me it is a hindrance & not Action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. “What,” it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a [coin]?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.”

In a letter he describes this visionary process as being able to see four different levels of reality simultaneously. For instance, his first level of vision might see a thistle. This single vision he refers to as “Newton’s sleep.” But Blake’s second level of vision would see as well an old man, perhaps, somewhat inside of it; and his third level of vision would see the essence of the thistle. This he described as a passion in a constant state of erotic excitement. And finally his fourth level of vision would see as well a flame of Divine Imagination pouring through the thistle from above and beyond.

Blake’s visions also occurred to him in dreams, and were often of a practical nature. For instance, after Robert died, Blake had a dream about how to print books combining text and illustrations without using set type (although it has been pointed out that a description of a very similar process can be found in a letter to Blake from one of his artist friends years before). Drawing backwards on a copper plate with an acid-resistant medium, he would then use acid to etch the uncovered areas around the words and illustrations. The resultant words and illustrations were raised and Blake would paint them individually in watercolors before printing. Blake named this process “illuminated printing” and used it for the rest of his career. Since he handpainted several versions of his texts at very different times in his career (there are dozens of versions of his Songs of Innocence, for example), each of them shows remarkable variations in color and tone. In addition, his earliest printings in this manner are translucent, but later he often jeweled them with gold paint, imitating the illuminated manuscripts he’d loved as a child.

Beginning with his first work printed in this manner, all of his written work is designed as part of a visual design. To read his work as set type, such as in literary anthologies, is to miss the point entirely. In addition, his songs are meant to be sung to arrangements common to any hymnal, especially those by Isaac Watts. It is also interesting to me how much of his visual art prefigures such future art movements as surrealism, expressionism, and dadaist collage.

After his mother died, Blake moved to Lambeth, something of a suburb of London, for the next 7 years. It was cheaper there and the Blakes could even afford a housekeeper. His publisher friend Joseph Johnson was able to get Blake lots of work, to the point that Blake actually began to worry that his affluence would remove him from the cares of the poor.

This concern with London’s poor was already evident in many of Blake’s earliest songs in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, including his two songs about chimney sweeps, a daily sight on the streets of London. In Blake’s day, children, often orphans, were sold into service as chimney sweeps, because their size made it possible for them to actually enter the chimneys and clean them from the inside. Most of these chimney sweeps died while still children until finally, in 1788, the English Parliament passed legislation that prevented chimney sweeps from being apprenticed until the age of eight, that they were to be allowed to wash once a week, and that they could not be forced to be sent up an ignited chimney.

Similarly, another book of Blake’s, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, was written as a protest to slavery, the buying of children for employment, the creation of prostitution by wealthy hypocritical males, and England’s oppressive marriage laws, which prevented women from owning their own property. Some believe that his sensitivity to women’s rights was fostered by an affair with Mary Wollstonecraft (hinted at by Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer), author of the first political pamphlet on “The Rights of Women.”

But the days in Lambeth were mostly happy days for the Blakes. One of my favorite Blake stories comes from when his painter friend Thomas Butts dropped by and found Mr. and Mrs. Blake naked in their country garden wearing helmets and reciting Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The Blakes were not the least embarrassed and asked their friend to pull up a chair and join them.

For these 7 years, beginning in 1793, Blake maintained an almost unbelievable level of inspiration and creation. He wrote and illuminated the texts of many of his best-known works, including “The Book of Los,” “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “America, a Prophecy,” “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” “The Songs of Experience,” “The Book of Ahania,” and “The Song of Los.” His engravings from this time include “God Judging Adam” and his illustrations to “Europe, a Prophecy” and “The Book of Urizen,” as well as many paintings such as his most famous, “Glad Day.” Most of the works he wrote at this time were written in his long prophetic line and cadence, which he himself described as “The march of long resounding strong heroic verse.”

But in 1793 Blake lost his friendship with the publisher Johnson, most probably due to an argument, and with it most of his engraving work. At this point he begins his long practice of self-publishing, and announced his latest venture with the following broadside, addressed “To the Public,” in October: “The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius…. No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them for sale at a fair price.”

During this period Blake also invented a new method of affixing his tempera colors. Usually these were bound with gum, but Blake began using carpenter’s glue instead, calling the process “fresco painting.” He claimed this process was revealed to him by the subject of his first etching—Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus’ carpenter dad. Unfortunately, Saint Joseph did not give Blake an infallible technique, and many of these paintings have now cracked and darkened, some of them beyond the powers of restoration. In fact, after realizing that the process was a failure, he changed his adhesive from carpenter’s glue to scraps of parchment.

At this time Blake also began his most dramatic watercolors, painting, for instance, Newton undersea, as someone so focused on the point of his compass that he is ignorant of everything else; a dark, underground, three-headed Hecate, conjuring from an ancient text and surrounded by her mythic animal guides; and Nebuchanezzer as much a slave to his senses and passions as any bear in a cave. Then there was the painting of pity inspired by a line in Macbeth where it was described as a naked newborn babe.

At the end of this amazing 7-year period, the lack of interest in his art and literature led Blake to a profound depression. The year 1800 was also a plague year in London—there was no bread for the poor and new laws designed to control discontent led to renewed and worsening political repression and the loss of most of England’s civil rights. So, for the first time, Blake left life in the capital for the rural town of Felpham on the Sussex Coast, to live near the uninspired and demanding artist, poet, and biographer William Hayley, who would be his patron for the next three years. At the time Blake had become unemployable in London due to savage reviews, such as this one, which appeared in the local papers following the publication of his illustrated version of “Leonora”: “This edition is embellished with a frontispiece, in which the painter has endeavoured to exhibit to the eye the wild conceptions of the poet, but with so little success, as to produce an effect perfectly ludicrous, instead of terrific.” Another review ended: “Nor can we pass by this opportunity of execrating that detestable taste, founded on the depraved fancy of one man of genius, which substitutes deformity and extravagance for force and expression, and draws men and women without skins, with their joints all dislocated; or imaginary beings, which neither can nor ought to exist.”

Blake’s response to such criticism was to make grander and grander statements defending himself, such as the following: “I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my Brain are studies & Chambers filld with books & pictures of old, which I wrote & painted in ages of Eternity before my mortal life; & whose works are the delight & Study of Archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality? The Lord our Father will do for us & with us according to his Divine will for our Good.” Blake’s friend John Flaxman, concerned for Blake’s grandiosity, wrote to Hayley that he should keep Blake occupied with small projects such as illustrating Hayley’s broadside ballads like “The Horse,” rather than grand works which Flaxman thought Blake was “not qualified [for] either by habit or study.”

Blake was relatively happy in the rural seacoast town, at least at first, and often saw the daughters of inspiration descending from the tops of trees and discovered fairies living amongst his vegetables. At a party he once asked a woman seated next to him, “Have you ever seen a fairy’s funeral?” and, when she admitted that she hadn’t, he went on to describe in graphic detail the one he’d witnessed just that afternoon in his garden.

But one day Blake came upon a soldier who had been sent to weed Blake’s somewhat untidy yard. Chasing him off his property, Blake was heard to remark, “Damn the King, and damn all his soldiers, they are all slaves.” This was enough to get Blake arrested and charged with sedition. Although he was later found innocent, he was forced to leave Phelpam forever.

In 1803, Blake returned to London and rented rooms on the first floor of a boarding house at 17 Molton Street, south of the Thames in the worst part of the city. He was 45 years old and nearly destitute with very little hope that things would change for the better. For one thing, Blake’s difficult and unprofessional reputation was well deserved. For instance, before he left Phelpam in 1803, Blake was commissioned by Hayley to produce an engraved portrait of the artist Romney, and Blake wrote to Hayley in January of 1804 that he was working briskly on it. Five months later he wrote to Hayley again, this time asking for 30 pounds—double the amount originally agreed upon—in order to finish the engraving, which he claimed was almost finished. Three months later Blake wrote again to ask for another 10 pounds. Then, at the close of the year, he requested another 10 pounds, telling Hayley he was very far from completing it. He actually never did finish the portrait, and the task was eventually assigned to another artist.

Despite his extreme poverty, Blake was relieved to be back in London after his “3 years slumber on the banks of the Ocean.” “Now I may say to you, what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else: That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy’d, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals; perhaps Doubts proceeding from Kindness, but Doubts are always pernicious, Especially when we Doubt our Friends. Christ is very decided on this Point; ‘He who is Not With Me is Against Me.’ There is no Medium or Middle state; & if a Man is the Enemy of my Spiritual Life while he pretends to be the Friend of my Corporeal, he is a Real Enemy….”

Blake’s two major written works after his return to London are “Vala” and “Jerusalem.” He had begun “Jerusalem” while still in Felpham, and it is something of an epic sacred history, although by then Blake had abandoned allegory for a vision where present-day Oxford Street co-exists with a heavenly Jerusalem. In it the mercenary world where a poet and painter such as Blake can not make a living is transformed into a heaven on earth, filled with Divine Love. Ironically, when Blake showed the poem to Robert Southey in 1811, the poet, who would later become Britain’s poet laureate, told Blake that he had written “a perfectly mad poem.”

Also at this time Blake saw an immense exhibition of paintings in London arranged by Joseph, Count of Truchsess, that included over 900 canvasses by mostly European artists, including works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Durer. These were the artists who first inspired Blake when he began collecting prints as a child. He wrote in a letter to Butts that he experienced an altered state of consciousness while at the exhibition and became drunk with intellectual vision. “I thank God,” he wrote, “that I have courageously pursued my course through darkness.” “I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, & which has for exactly 20 years been closed from me as by a door…. [Seeing these images again has been] my restoration to the light of Art.”

But returning to his earliest etching style had its costs. Originally commissioned by his friend Robert Cromek to illustrate “The Grave,” the advertisements for the book first announced 20 new etchings by Blake, which was later reduced to 15, and finally to 12, before Cromek hired another artist to illustrate the text in a brighter, more modern manner, and wrote to a friend that Blake would be successful as an artist if he would “condescend to give … attention to his worldly concerns which everyone does that prefers living to starving.”

Blake answered Cromek’s complaints in a letter: “The value of genius is considerably enhanced by its rarity—it is by no means a common thing…. As there can be but few Men of Genius so, I grant, to be one of them, is to be, as far as relates to this World, unhappy, unfortunate: the Mock & scorn of Men; always in strife & contention against the World & the World against him; but, as far as relates to another World, to be one of these is to be Blessed! He is a Pilgrim & stranger upon Earth, traveling into a far distant Land, led by Hope & sometimes by Despair but—surrounded by Angels & protected by the immediate Divine presence. He is the light of the World. Therefore Reverence thyself, O Man of Genius!”

In 1809, he mounted what would be his final attempt to make a name for himself as a serious artist. He arranged for an exhibit in London of his watercolors, featuring his most recent and to his mind the best of all, and certainly his largest—“Chaucer’s Pilgrims.” He also published “A Descriptive Catalogue” in which he wrote such counter-contemporary ideas as “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the art.”

Not one painting sold in the two years the paintings hung, and the reviews were scathing. One described Blake as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement. The poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober characters by caricature representation, and the whole blotted and blurred and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.”

During the following eight years, from 1810-1817, even his friends considered him insane. Catherine told visitors that she had “very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.” Visitors often describe him as dirty and poor, and his wife’s dresses as filthy. One day he showed a visitor a painting he claimed was his version of the last judgment on a sheet of paper that had been so over-painted that it appeared completely black. In 1815 he told friends that he had had a violent dispute with his angels and had driven them away. By 1816, Blake’s entry in the “Biographical Dictionary of the Living Artists of Great Britain and Ireland” described him as an eccentric and a legendary shadow.

Blake’s own doubts at this time are evident in his paintings. In his early paintings Blake sees life as a battle of wills, where in order for good to conquer, evil must be beaten and controlled. But now, during his deepest depressions—when he believed that he had betrayed himself by working for Hayley and forsaking his visionary, prophetic work—he painted the monster as triumphant, forcing what is good and natural to submit to his temporal power. It would only be at the conclusion of his last great illustrated poem “Jerusalem” that Blake would come to the realization that we can never reattain our state of innocence, but that we also do not have to succumb to the disappointments of experience. He would paint as the end of “Jerusalem” his image of the crown of age—that at the end of our journey we will come to realize that our days here have been to learn how to embody the divine on earth, if only via our imagination.

Shortly afterwards, in 1818, Blake commenced the happiest period of his life. He became a mentor to a group of young artists who called themselves the Ancients. These painters, fifty years his junior, found inspiration in his visual art but told Blake his poetry was indecipherable. Perhaps not coincidentally it was also at this point that Blake abandoned poetry, claiming that his ideas were better expressed visually.

One of these Ancients, the painter John Linnell, commissioned Blake’s last two major works: a series of illustrations to the Book of Job, and an illustrated edition of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” At the time he met Linnell, Blake was earning on average 50 pounds a year, while Linnell, a hack portrait artist of dukes and duchesses, was earning the equivalent of Blake’s yearly income every 10 days.

In 1826, Linnell had Blake’s edition of “Job” printed and, once again, the book’s illustrations were considered the reason for its failure. Blake had been painting scenes from the story of Job throughout his career, but in his last completed work he used Job’s story to tell perhaps the greatest, and certainly his clearest, version of the story of his spiritual transformation.

When the story begins, Blake paints himself as Job surrounded by the children of his spiritual crisis—painting, poetry, and music. Their musical instruments are hung on the tree behind them, and they are gathered together to pray to God for material comfort. But instead, Job suddenly suffers a series of horrifying and overwhelming catastrophes—he loses his family, all of his possessions, and even his health and sanity. This continues until Job has a vision where he sees that the one who is causing these torments is Jehovah, the same God he prayed to when his suffering began. But he sees that this God has the cloven hoof of the devil, and that it his “mind-forg’d” enslavement to this false God that has led him down into the material world and its suffering. In his suffering he sees through the world’s falsity and gives birth to a new god—a personal God, a living Christ—inside of him, from whom he can never be separated. And thus at the end of this journey—that has taken place within his Divine Imagination—Blake and his children are reunited. And they take down their instruments to sing of real truths with real joy and thanksgiving, having paid the price for their heavenly wisdom.

Blake’s last great work, his illustrations to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” were left incomplete at the time of his death, but included over 100 paintings and 7 etchings, an amazing amount of work for a man to commence when he’s nearly 70 years old, which Linnell reported at the time were designed “during a fortnight’s illness in bed.”

But, as with “Paradise Lost” and the Bible, Blake believed that the “Divine Comedy” had come into his hands in order for him to correct Dante’s mistakes. While working on the illustrations, he wrote on the back of one of his watercolors: “Dante saw devils where I see none—I see only good.”

His argument with the “Divine Comedy” was that Dante was cruel, and took obvious pleasure in casting his enemies into hell and torment. Blake did not believe in an eternal hell—he believed that heaven and hell were mental states that were experienced subjectively and thus they existed eternally as possibilities, but that we passed through them and would leave them behind. Blake’s version of the “Divine Comedy” is more like the story of his poem “The Mental Traveller,” where the spiritual journey begins in our tomb or grave in this world, and then it begins an ascent through a series of experiences straight out of the “Pugatario.” It is by suffering and eventually experiencing the false nature of all of the temptations of this world that we purify ourselves until we are born as new spiritual beings who can withstand, and contain, spiritual light. As he wrote in a letter to Butts, “I do not consider either the Just or the Wicked to be in a Supreme State, but to be every one of them States of Sleep which the soul may fall into in its deadly dreams of Good & Evil when it leaves Paradise following the Serpent.”

In 1821, Blake moved again to 3 Fountain Court, an even less expensive apartment, where he lived in two rooms in a house with his sister-in-law. His friend Crabb Robinson visited him at this time and wrote in his journal that “nothing could exceed the squalid air both of the apartment and his dress.” “He was at work, engraving, in the small bedroom’s light, looking out on a mean yard. Everything in the room [was] squalid, indicating poverty, except himself…. There was but one chair in the room, besides that on which he sat. On my putting my hand to it, I found that it would have fallen to pieces if I had lifted it.” One evening when they sat down to dinner Catherine brought an empty platter to their table.

At this time Blake’s vision was also beginning to fail, but he continued to etch and paint. The sole print he’d retained through all of his years of poverty had been the one he still worked beneath at his etching table ever since the days of his apprenticeship—namely, Durer’s “Melancholia.” It’s also at this time that his plaster lifemask was cast, when Blake was 66 years old. Although he is frowning, several people have reported it is because he found the process disagreeable and that in his last years Blake constantly possessed a gentle sweetness. Also at this time there begin to be new reports of Blake singing his poems to his own melodies, although now his voice is described as being tremulous with age.

There is an interesting story told of this time, verified by several people present. One day Blake was entertaining several of the Ancients when Samuel Palmer, one of the them, left in a coach to return home. About an hour later Blake put his hand to his head and said “Palmer is coming. He is walking up the road.” Everyone present considered this an example of Blake’s confusion or madness, and explained a bit condescendingly that, no, Samuel had left and was well on his way home by now. A while later Blake pointed to the closed door—“He is coming through the wicket.” Once again his guests explained the Samuel had left and would not be returning tonight. But a moment later the door opened and Palmer walked into the room. His coach had broken down on its way home and Palmer had returned to Blake’s apartment to arrange another ride home.

In 1826, the year before he died, Blake wrote of death: “I cannot consider death as any thing but removing from one room to another.” And later, even closer to death, he wrote “That in my imagination I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish body decays.” He’d suffered from gallstones since 1824, and they would eventually kill him on August 12^th, 1827. His last day was recorded by his friend Frederick Tatham. Blake began the day in bed, working on a new painting based on “The Ancient of Days.” Then “He made a drawing [of Catherine], which though not a likeness is finely touched and expressed. He then threw that down, after having drawn for an hour and began to sing Hallelujahs and songs of joy and triumph which Mrs. Blake described as being truly sublime in music and in verse…. The walls rang and resounded with the beatific vision. It was an overture to the choir of heaven. It was a chant for the response of angels.”

Blake died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave. Catherine inherited only his artworks, which she sold as well as she could, until her death four years later. She was taken in as a housekeeper—first by Linnell and then by another friend of her husband’s, Frederick Tatham—until her death four years later. Many of his works were destroyed by friends who found his writings and drawings sacrilegious or politically dangerous. Other works were simply lost—his long poem ‘Vala, or the Four Zoas,” for instance, was only rediscovered in manuscript form by the poet William Butler Yeats in 1889, 62 years after the poet’s death. And it wasn’t until 100 years after his death that a simple gravestone was erected for him in a London chuchyard.

A reappraisal of Blake began in 1861, with Alexander Gilchrist’s biography. Shortly afterwards Swinburne, the most popular poet of his time, wrote an essay praising Blake, and Yeats edited the first major edition of his poetry in 1893. But the road was not without resistance. In the 1920s, for example, the most popular poet of his time, T.S. Eliot, dismissed Blake in a major essay as a crank, an eccentric, and a failure, and, following Eliot’s lead, Roger Fry, the modern art apostle, described the work as having “the wavy unresistance of seaweed,” and that the poet and painter were both deranged.

But by the centenary of Blake’s death in 1927, the re-evaluation of Blake was complete, although even after World War II the esteemed art critic Milton Klonsky could write that “Entering his mythic world is like being immersed in an oceanic soup or stew of the imagination swarming with the minute particulars of someone else’s nightmare.” Yet his poem “Jerusalem” remains one of the most popular British hymns to this day and a book published in the 1990s claimed that Blake’s “Tyger” is the most published English poem in history.

Two hundred and fifty years after Blake’s death, Allen Ginsberg, a young poet from Paterson, New Jersey, heard the voice of the bard reciting Blake’s “Ah Sunflower, weary of time,” and simultaneously had a vision of eternity in the skyline of New York City that stayed with him, and informed all that he did, for the rest of his life. Years later, on a bus ride through California after holding Neal Cassady’s ashes in his hand, he heard a choir of angels singing lines from Blake in his head, and realized that Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience were songs, and meant to be sung. He then taught himself music in order to sing Blake’s songs wherever and whenever he could, and he’d often end the evening by singing Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” from “Experience,” along with the audience—and for a moment we’d stop thinking whatever we were thinking, and the distinction between active performer and passive listener would disappear, and we would hear ourselves and everyone around us singing the song’s final line—“and all the hill echoed.” And as we sang Allen would get more and more animated and he would wiggle and write in his chair trying to hit higher and higher notes, and he would sing louder and louder and more and more animated and then, when he sensed it was just the right moment, he would begin to sing a little quieter and bring the song down until we were just whispering. And then he would stop singing and prolong the last note on his harmonium until it ran out of air and disappeared, and we would just sit there for a moment in the silence, slightly vibrating, out head humming, having gone somewhere but not sure of exactly where.