William Blake was a quarrelsome troublemaker: a self-published author who was not well-liked in his own time.
William Blake is now a world-famous poet, best remembered for “The Tyger” (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night”) and other colorful children’s poems from his illustrated collection, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” We remember Blake as one of the leading voices of the Romantic Period. We recall that in his early years he associated with democratic idealists who admired the revolutionaries of America and France (prior to that ultimate “cancel culture,” the Reign of Terror with its bloody guillotine, which seems to have put Blake off his revolutionary aspirations.) We think of Blake as a man who was commissioned to illustrate a work by Mary Wollstonecraft, and thus as an idealist who was, arguably, actively involved in promoting early feminist thought.
We selectively forget that Blake’s strident views, eccentric temperament, and at times erratic behavior made him actively disliked by his contemporaries. He was bullied by the other students in his teens; he quarreled with his co-workers during his apprenticeship; he bickered with his wife; he grew angry with the wealthy patron who tried to help him reinvent himself; and to top it all off, he stood trial for sedition after a physical altercation with a soldier. (The soldier, it seems, was trespassing and exceedingly rude about it. After Blake pushed him down the street, the soldier took revenge by making false accusations that carried the death penalty: a behavior such as the evil-minded continue to do on social media to this day.)
William Blake was an engraver by trade. After completing his apprenticeship and his University studies, he ran his own printing press. Blake did not trouble himself with movable type: instead he etched his work on metal plates with acid. His work often focused more on illustration than on text: illustrations which he and his wife would color by hand after the line art came off the press. In addition to selling his own self-published books, Blake accepted commissions, illustrating and printing on behalf of the notables of his day. Unfortunately this occupation was not a path to riches, and Blake’s correspondence from his later years complains of ill health and apologetically rehearses the necessity of charging rather more than what would have been typical in those days for a printed volume.
Blake was self-righteous in his unconventional religious views. Although such poems as “Little Lamb” and “The Tyger” stress a traditional view of Jesus as savior and God the creator, Blake’s other work stridently challenged orthodoxy and, especially, organized religion of all stripes. He claimed to have experienced visions; his writings boldly questioned whether the Biblical prophets had actually spoken to God; he had little patience for the Church; and in his groundbreaking treatise, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” he argued (rather convincingly) that humanity has completely mixed up which side is “good” and which “evil.” Such arguments form a curiosity from our perspective, but one can imagine that they brought down upon him the wrath of his more conservative and moralistic neighbors.
In fact, William Blake was so widely disliked in his own time that when he approached an art dealer with a concept for illustrating Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the dealer totally screwed him over by using Blake’s concept but giving the commission to one of Blake’s friends instead, on the rationale that Blake himself was, as Wikipedia puts it, “too eccentric to produce a popular work.” Furious at the betrayal, Blake cut off his relationship with the friend in question.
There has been a good deal of speculation regarding Blake’s personal sexual morality, given his unorthodox views comparing monogamy to oppression, and his apparent interest in women other than his wife, as alluded to in his allegorical poem, “My Pretty Rose-Tree.” Although there is no indication that Blake ever actually had relations outside his marriage, just thinking about it seems to have probably fueled some of the couple’s famous marital spats.
In summary, William Blake was the very embodiment of the visionary thinker with an artistic temperament. He was brilliant, but perhaps difficult to be around at times.
Blake’s life story teaches us this one important lesson:
The work you create and the ideas you espouse are ultimately more important than your personal reputation; and this is as it should be. A quarrelsome eccentric may be immortalized for creating works of beauty and genius.
So don’t give up. Never give up.
Sources
Wikipedia. (retrieved 10-30-2020). “William Blake – Wikipedia.” Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake
William Blake, author; David V. Erdman, editor; Harold Bloom, commentary. (1988). The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. New York, NY: Anchor Books (Random House, Inc.)
Photo: “Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing” by William Blake, courtesy of Wikipedia.
