Whatever else can be said about the poet, artist, and mythopoeic
visionary William Blake (1757–1827), he is certainly the most
forbidding of the English Romantic poets. “He approached everything
with a mind unclouded by current opinions,” T. S. Eliot remarked in
his essay on Blake.
Eliot understood that if Blake’s more esoteric poetry is
unpleasant, it nonetheless “has the unpleasantness of great poetry.”
Blake’s poetry possessed a terrible honesty. And “in a world too
frightened to be honest,” such blunt honesty naturally makes him
seem “peculiarly terrifying.” That is to say, Blake affected
nothing: his manifold idiosyncrasies and obscurities
were entirely sincere. If, as Eliot argues, they
ultimately kept Blake from being a “classic,” they nevertheless
imbued his work with an unforgettable individuality and
determination.
Most people who read Blake find themselves charmed by the limpid
songs and poems in his early Poetical Sketches (1783). Among the
engraved and hand-colored “illuminated works,” some of the Songs of
Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and a handful of
epigrams from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.
1790–1793) have fixed themselves indelibly in the public
imagination. (“Little Lamb who made thee,” “Tyger Tyger, burning
bright,” “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” etc.)
This side of Blake’s work is distinguished by a fetching lyric
purity, an intense transparency of feeling and diction.
Almost everything else—above all the epics and
“prophecies”—remains pretty much a closed book. Blake compared his
longest and most ambitious poem, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the
Giant Albion, to “Homer’s Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost.” But his
first biographer anticipated most future readers when he described
it as “not only abstruse but according to common rules of criticism
as near ridiculous, as it is heterogeneous.” Nevertheless, Blake has
always appealed to the spiritually unorthodox, and has included
among his admirers giants like
Swinburne, Yeats, and Shaw as well as
poseurs like Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats.
Blake made his living, such as it was, as an engraver and book
illustrator. He managed to sell fewer than two hundred copies of his
own illuminated books during his lifetime. So obscure a figure was
he that, in 1818, he was actually pronounced dead by a publisher
who had appropriated one of his engravings for the frontispiece of a
collection of sacred music, inscribing the plate “Drawn by the late
W. Blake Esq. RA.”
Blake’s accomplishment as an artist was just as idiosyncratic—and
just as robustly individual—as his poetry. I remember one scholar,
faced with an exhibition of Blake’s art, concluding in exasperation
that he was “a second-rate poet and a third-rate artist.” The
ambitious exhibition of Blake’s artwork now on view at the Yale
Center for British Art—a celebratory event meant to commemorate the
Center’s twentieth anniversary—does not support that judgment. But
it does not exactly contradict it, either. Yale’s incomparable
collection of Blake’s works, assembled over the years by Paul
Mellon, has allowed the curator, Patrick Noon, to mount a
comprehensive exhibition of Blake’s oeuvre. The three hundred
objects on view cover the entire range of Blake’s art, his
hand-colored illuminated manuscripts, his engravings, his
watercolors, his illustrations of the Bible, of The Divine Comedy,
of Thomas Gray’s poems, and Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. This is
Blake at his best, and his worst.
The curious thing about Blake is that the one is often so close to
the other. When they work, Blake’s drawings and engravings have a
rude, mesmerizing power; when they fail, they seem merely crude, at
times almost laughable. It is easy to dislike Blake’s art. Once
seen, however, it is impossible to forget. What Eliot said about
Blake’s poetry holds true of his art as well: “His philosophy, like
his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own, and
accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it than an
artist should.” It made Blake unmistakably Blake; it also made him
eccentric and “inclined to formlessness.” Much of Blake’s artwork
was so bound up with his mythopoeic imaginings that, apart from the
vision, it seems unintelligible or–worse–downright silly. In one of
his most famous epigrams, Blake wrote that “I must Create a System,
or be enslav’d by another Man’s.” Blake succeeded in creating his
own system, all right. But, as this exhibition reminds us, it is
possible to be enslaved by a system of one’s own devising, too.
A catalogue of the exhibition, by Patrick Noon, has been published
by the Yale Center for British Art and Yale University Press
(87 pages, $35; $15.95 paper).