from Old Icelandic and Welsh and author, in 1757, of 'The Bard,' a poem about the English conquest of Wales; Thomas Percy, the editor of the ballad collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); and James Macpherson, who came before the public in the 1760s claiming to be the translator of the epic verse of a third- century Gaelic bard named Ossian. Like these figures, Blake located the sources of poetic inspiration in an archaic native tradition that, according to the prevailing view of national history, had ended up eclipsed after the seventeenth century, when French court culture, manners, and morals began their cultural ascendancy. Even in their orientation to a visionary culture, the bards of Blake's later Prophetic Books retain an association with this imagined version of a primitive past.
Poetical Sketches was the only book of Blake's to be set in type according to customary methods. In 1788 he began to experiment with relief etching, a method that he called 'illuminated printing' (a term associating his works with the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages) and used to produce most of his books of poems. Working directly on a copper plate with pens, brushes, and an acid-resistant medium, he wrote the text in reverse (so that it would print in the normal order) and also drew the illustration; he then etched the plate in acid to eat away the untreated copper and leave the design standing in relief. The pages printed from such plates were colored by hand in water colors, often by Catherine Blake, and stitched together to make up a volume. This process was laborious and time-consuming, and Blake printed very few copies of his books; for example, of Songs of Innocence and of Experience only twenty-eight copies (some of them incomplete) are known to exist; of The Book ofThel, sixteen; of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, nine; and of Jerusalem, five.
To read a Blake poem without the pictures is to miss something important: Blake places words and images in a relationship that is sometimes mutually enlightening and sometimes turbulent, and that relationship is an aspect of the poem's argument. In this mode of relief etching, he published Songs of Innocence (1789), then added supplementary poems and printed Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). The two groups of poems represent the world as it is envisioned by what he calls 'two contrary states of the human soul.'
Gradually Blake's thinking about human history and his experience of life and suffering articulated themselves in the 'Giant Forms' and their actions, which came to constitute a complete mythology. As Blake's mythical character Los said, speaking for all imaginative artists, 'I must Create a System or be enslaved by another Man's.' This coherent but constantly altering and enlarging system composed the subject matter first of Blake's 'minor prophecies,' completed by 1795, and then of the major prophetic books on which he continued working until about 1820: The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem.
In his sixties Blake gave up poetry to devote himself to pictorial art. In the course of his life, he produced hundreds of paintings and engravings, many of them illustrations for the work of other poets, including a representation of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, a superb set of designs for the Book of Job, and a series of illustrations of Dante, on which he was still hard at work when he died. At the time of his death, Blake was little known as an artist and almost entirely unknown as a poet. In the mid- nineteenth century he acquired a group of admirers among the Pre-Baphaelites, who regarded him as a precursor. Since the mid-1920s Blake has finally come into his own, both in poetry and in painting, as one of the most dedicated, intellectually challenging, and astonishingly original artists. His marked influence ranges from William Butler Yeats, who edited Blake's writings and modeled his own system of mythology on Blake's, to Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and the graphic novels of the present day.
The explication of Blake's cryptic prophetic books has been the preoccupation of many scholars. Blake wrote them in the persona, or 'voice,' of 'the Bard! / Who Present, Past, & Future sees'?that is, as a British poet who follows Spenser, and especially Milton, in a lineage going back to the prophets of the Bible. 'The Nature of my Work,' he said, 'is Visionary or Imaginative.' What Blake meant by the key
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terms vision and imagination, however, is often misinterpreted by taking literally what he, speaking the traditional language of his great predecessors, intended in a figurative sense. 'That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot,' he declared, 'is not worth my care.' Blake was a born ironist who enjoyed mystifying his well-meaning but literal- minded friends and who took a defiant pleasure in shocking the dull and complacent 'angels' of his day by being deliberately outrageous in representing his work and opinions.
Blake declared that 'all he knew was in the Bible' and that 'The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.' This is an exaggeration of the truth that all his prophetic writings deal, in various formulations, with some aspects of the overall biblical plot of the creation and the Fall, the history of the generations of humanity in the fallen world, redemption, and the promise of a recovery of Eden and of a New Jerusalem. These events, however, Blake interprets in what he calls 'the spiritual sense.' For such a procedure he had considerable precedent, not in the neoplatonic and occult thinkers with whom some modern commentators align him, but in the 'spiritual' interpreters of the Bible among the radical Protestant sects in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In The French Revolution, America: A Prophecy, Europe: A Prophecy, and the trenchant prophetic satire The Marriage of Heaven and Hell?all of which Blake wrote in the early 1790s while he was an ardent supporter of the French Revolution?he, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and a number of radical English theologians, represented the contemporary Revolution as the purifying violence that, according to biblical prophecy, portended the imminent redemption of humanity and the world. (For discussion of these apocalyptic expectations, see 'The French Revolution' at Norton Literature Online.) In Blake's later poems Ore, the fiery spirit of violent revolution, gives way as a central personage to Los, the type of the visionary imagination in the fallen world.
BLARE'S MYTHMAKING
Blake's first attempt to articulate his full myth of humanity's present, past, and future was The Four Zoas, begun in 1796 or 1797. A passage from the opening statement of its theme exemplifies the long verse line (what Blake called 'the march of long resounding strong heroic verse') in which he wrote his Prophetic Books and will serve also to outline the Books' vision:
Four Mighty Ones are in every Man; a Perfect Unity
Cannot Exist, but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden,
The Universal Man. To Whom be Glory Evermore, Amen. . . .
Los was the fourth immortal starry one, & in the Earth
Of a bright Universe Empery attended day & night
Days & nights of revolving joy, Urthona was his name
In Eden; in the Auricular Nerves of Human life
Which is the Earth of Eden, he his Emanations propagated. . . .
Daughter of Beulah, Sing
