BLAKE, WILLIAM - Illustration for the Book of Job. Watercolor drawing.
BLAKE, WILLIAM. - English poet, engraver, painter, b. in London on 28 Nov. 1757, d. at Strand on 12 Aug. 1827. In childhood he was influenced by Swedenborg's mysticism and was subject to hallucinations, which were later to influence the strange symbolism of part of his poetic output. After two years of apprenticeship in an engraver's workshop, in 1778 he enrolled at the Royal Academy, where he devoted himself to drawing, fascinated by the masterpieces of Gothic art.
In 1783 he published the Poetical Sketches, a limpid, albeit astonished, gaze upon creation; in 1784 he opened a print shop, for which he adopted a new method of engraving, illustrating his own poems and the masterpieces of Cervantes, Dante, Milton, Young's Night Thoughts, Sterne's Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and the Book of Job. He died almost in poverty. Unpublished manuscripts and drawings were burned, because they were considered the work of the devil. Unknown until Rossetti and Swinburne rediscovered him in the second half of the 19th century, B. had a powerful imagination, which allowed him to embody the most abstract ideas in human forms and to transform the most concrete realities into symbol and allegory, according to his idea that «everything exists only in the human imagination». As a poet he was uneven: now simple and rough or grandly suggestive, as in the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794), now nebulous and hermetic, as in the Prophetic Books. Likewise in his drawings the robust classical manner taken up from Michelangelo is twisted into a dark and violent romantic fury: the illustrations to the Divine Comedy are typical. From the religious point of view, while for his rationalism and immoralism he is akin to the Enlightenment thinkers and to De Sade (foreshadowing Baudelaire's satanism in Marriage of Heaven and Hell), for his faith in the preternatural, albeit magical and visionary, he presents himself as a kind of prophet, self-affirming, inspired by God and in contact with angels and with the saints.
Bibliography11 worksWorks: Poetical Works, edited by J. Sampson, 2nd ed., Oxford 1913; The Writings of W. M., edited by G. Keynes, 3 vols., London 1925; The Pro
BIBL.: Works: Poetical Works, edited by J. Sampson, 2nd ed., Oxford 1913; The Writings of W. M., edited by G. Keynes, 3 vols., London 1925; The Prophetic Writings of W. B., edited by D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis, 2 vols., Oxford 1926. Translations: M. Prax, Poeti inglesi dell'800, Florence 1925, pp. 49-89; E. Dodsworth, Il matrimonio del cielo e dell'inferno, Canti dell'Innocenza ed altri poemi, Lanciano n.d.; G. Ungaretti, Traduzioni, Rome 1936, pp. 47-61. - Studies: A. C. Swinburne, W. B., London 1868 (reprint 1906); G. Keynes, A Bibliography of W. B., New York 1921; A. Gilchrist, The Life of W. B., London 1922; O. Burdett, W. B., ibid. 1926; D. Saurat, B. and Modern thought, ibid. 1929; J. Middleton Murry, W. B., ibid. 1933; J. Bronowski, A Man without a Mash: W. B., ibid. 1944.
Mei, Francesco. “Blake, william.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, coll. 1714–1715. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949. https://azioneromana.com/article/blake-william.
MLA
Mei, Francesco. “Blake, william.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. II, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1949, coll. 1714–1715. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/blake-william.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec2_blake_william,
author = {Mei, Francesco},
title = {Blake, william},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {II},
pages = {1714--1715},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1949},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/blake-william}
}
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