âWilliam Blake was a creative genius, one of the most original artists and poets who ever lived. Some of his works are widely known: the image of a majestic creator tracing the orb of the sun with a pair of compasses; the hypnotically powerful lyric âTyger tyger burning brightâ; the poem known as Jerusalem that was later set to music and became a popular hymn. But many years had to pass after Blakeâs death before he had any reputation at all. His poems were virtually unknown in his lifetime, and even as a visual artist, he was considered a minor figure, known mainly for engraving designsâusually by other artistsâto illustrate books. These jobs dwindled as the years went by, and his contemporaries would have been incredulous if they could have known that one day he would be recognized as a major figure in not just one art but two, and that the greatest museums and libraries would treasure works that he sold for absurdly low prices when he could sell them at all.
The disappointments of Blakeâs worldly career illustrate Schopenhauerâs saying that talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see. Blake was not only a superb painter and poet, one of the very few equally distinguished in both arts, but a profound thinker as well. Trenchantly critical of received values, he was a counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect of experience â social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic.
It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes overwhelming. During his life he was often accused of madness, but the artist Samuel Palmer, who knew him well, remembered him as âone of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.â And a Baptist minister replied, when asked if he thought Blake was cracked, âYes, but his is a crack that lets in the light.â
Throughout his life, Blake was bitterly aware that he was an outsider, not just with respect to society as a whole, but even in his chosen profession of graphic art. It was from a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness that his great myth emerged, in response to what Algernon Charles Swinburne called âthe incredible fever of spirit, under the sting and stress of which he thought and labored all his life through.â* In some sense, we are all outsiders, and his imaginative words and pictures speak to us with undiminished power.
Although Blake is never pious or doctrinal, his thinking is religious in the sense that it addresses the fundamental dilemmas of human existence â our place in the universe, our dread of mortality, our yearning for some ultimate source of meaning. His goal, he said, was to ârouse the faculties to act,â and he hoped that we would use his images and symbols to provoke a spiritual breakthrough. âIf the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought; if he could enter into Noahâs rainbow or into his bosom, or could make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder which always entreats him to leave mortal things, as he must know; then would he arise from his grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy.â The aspiration is both ambitious and touching: to change our lives and to make us happy. But it is a poignant fact that Blakeâs most powerful writing, as the years went by, was haunted by intractable barriers to happiness.
A little poem that Blake never published, entitled Eternity, condenses an important part of his message into four eloquent lines:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternityâs sunrise.
Blake believed that we live in the midst of Eternity right here and now and that if we could open our consciousness to the fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. That would not be a mystical escape from reality âhe was never a mystic in that sense âbut a fuller and deeper engagement with reality. Yet he also knew how hard it is to relinquish the self-centered possessiveness that kills joy instead of kissing it, and much of his work focuses on that struggle.â
~ Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch
Blessed are the outsiders, such as William Blake, for from their vision shall arise a new earth and a humanity more divinely attuned.
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