William Blake spent much of his time in Paradise. Or so, at least, his wife Catherine reported. His protean genius is on display in “William Blake,” a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until June 24. The show (a scaled-back version of the Blake retrospective put together by London’s Tate Gallery last winter) collects the works that most people have known only by report or in reproduction. The actual things can be described only as an eyeful — and a mindful, and a soulful.
A bronze head of Blake, cast from a life mask made when he was in his sixties, ushers visitors in and out of the Met exhibit. Just to the right, in the section “One of the Gothic Artists,” hangs a large engraving from about 1820, entitled The Laocoon as Jehovah with Satan and Adam. It serves as an emblem of Blake’s strange intent. He filled the entire background of this Homeric cartoon of the Trojan prophet and his sons devoured by a serpent with rubrics, and dicta, and glosses. “Where any view of Money exists,” he proclaims across the top, “Art cannot be carried on, but War.” The large caption across the bottom of the engraving reads “YH [in Hebrew characters] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon’s Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium.”
Blake regarded William Shakespeare and John Milton as his peers in English poetry. As an artist, he claimed fellowship with Michelangelo and Albrecht Durer. His prophetic familiars were Isaiah and Ezekiel. For Blake, the true and authentic is Hebraic, or Celtic, or Gothic, while classicism, the making of art and poetry after Greek and Roman models, enslaves the imagination.
The Metropolitan Museum’s chronicle of Blake’s lifelong mental fight against the mind-forged manacles includes engravings he made as a commercial artist illustrating the works of other writers (his main source of income); sketches, drawings, and paintings in pencil, ink, watercolor, and tempera; illuminated books of his writings integrated with images and designs of his own devise; and large-scale prints without text that combine the engraver’s with the painter’s art. There’s also Blake’s copy of Paradise Lost, and his annotated edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. Blake has written on the title page: “This Man was Hired to Depress Art.” A bespectacled Sir Joshua gazes blandly back at the reader from the facing page.
Blake justified his resentment of Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough — indeed, of all the academic and social oil painters of his generation — on both artistic and commercial grounds. Artistically, oil painting could be reworked and overlaid, concealing all but the final effect. Blake advocated truth in line and truth in material: tempera, watercolor, and ink, unlike oil paint, accurately record the creative hand. But in the marketplace, bad art corrupts public taste and drives out the good.
Born in 1757 and living until 1827, Blake didn’t set out to be poor, or to be overlooked. Beginning in the 1970s, he developed a unique method for producing printed works that combined word and image on a single copper plate. The results of his technical and imaginative experiments were offered to the public through a prospectus and in the equivalent of a private gallery at his print shop in the Hercules Building in Lambeth. But he found few takers.
Thanks to the scope and quality of this museum show, it’s possible to compare Blake’s actual creations with the increasingly detailed and crisp reproductions of his handiwork (best available in the lavish catalogue that accompanies the exhibition and in a fine series of facsimile illuminated books published by Princeton University Press). Although mechanical reproduction was part of Blake’s process, to go to this exhibition is to discover the universe of difference between his original pages and even the most careful reproductions.
Blake’s method for producing works that unified word and image as a single act of imagination is both technical and artistic. Inspired by a dream-communication from his dead brother Robert, he developed a method of drawing and writing in an acid-resistant liquid on copper plate, so that his lines would be raised when the background was etched away by acid. Blake then taught himself to write legibly and backwards in his acid-resistant ink, a calligraphic feat that probably requires a Koranic scribe or master of the Chinese brush to fully appreciate. After the etched plates were finished, each was inked, then impressed on wet paper. After the impression dried, Blake added watercolor by hand. In later experiments, he used several colored inks, sometimes in several stages. Each impression was unique. The state of the copper plate altered from edition to edition, and each application of watercolors was freshly improvised within the context of the page.
Even this exhibition cannot quite capture all of what Blake was after. The plates from Songs of Innocence and Experience, for example, turn into something other than books when hung on the wall: A page read as a poster is not the same as a page in a book — just as reading “The Tyger” on the text-only page of a poetry anthology is not the same as reading it in its illuminated printer’s Eden. But there are nonetheless things the exhibition does that no book can capture: display properly, for instance, Blake’s large-scale (twenty-one by thirty inch) color prints Pity, Newton, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the color-printed relief etching God Judging Adam. The artist called them “frescos,” meaning the images were intended for walls, albeit portable.
The Met has, in fact, two versions of God Judging Adam. In one, God and Adam, Maker and Image, appear as warm-tinted figures against a misty heaven. In the other version, the Creator and his Image are depicted as pale, cool-fleshed beings, in heightened contrast to the darkened earth and God’s chariot of fire. The prints do not read like variations on a theme. They seem, rather, a set of successive impressions, a series of revelations.
Still, it is Blake’s books and illuminated texts that viewers come to see — and for good reason. His pen-and-watercolor illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost are so good they almost seem a confirmation of the direct inspiration the artist claimed to have received (which was from Milton himself, descending from heaven in the form of a comet and entering Blake’s left foot, as depicted in plate twenty-nine of Milton A Poem).
The finished state of the Paradise Lost illustrations is striking, especially when the series is compared with the sketches and illustrations for an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy that Blake was planning at the end of his life. Where Milton’s Chaos and Heaven and Hell were part of Blake’s vision of elemental creation and so could be realized in full detail, Dante followed Virgil. Dante’s hierarchic, architected Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven must have repelled Blake, even as the music of the Florentine’s demotic epic must have attracted him.
Indeed, Blake’s vision of his predecessors was established much earlier. He made a tempera-and-ink portrait of Dante in 1803, painted around the same time and in the same format as his portrait of Milton. The English poet wears a Puritan collar, his sightless eyes facing the viewer. An oak wreath circles Milton’s head, a medallion set against the green background. The serpent with apple slithers behind Milton from right to left. An epic poet’s lyre frames the left side of the picture; on the right stands a pastoral oaten pipe.
Dante, however, Blake portrays in prison. He wears a scholar’s hood, and is framed by the laureate’s wreath denied him by his native Florence. A heavy chain attached to a stone wall occupies the left side of the composition. Dante faces right, where Count Ugolino and his sons (Inferno XXXIII) await their cannibal horror.
Blake was a poet of contrary states; he celebrated impulse and decried moralizing, but he understood that appetite had a dark side. The Ghost of a Flea, done in tempera and gold leaf on a mahogany panel, is the spiritual apparition of a flea that visited the artist in the last decade of his life. According to his friend John Varley, Blake claimed that “all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature blood-thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects.”
In Blake’s Paradise, the contraries cease striving with each other. His poem “Auguries of Innocence,” from a manuscript of about 1803, accomplishes in verse what his fresco Nebuchadnezzar does in line and color, simultaneously compelling the opposites to be visible and remain there, for as long as one can bear to look:
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn & every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro’ the Eye
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night
When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day.
Like Shakespeare and Milton and very few others, Blake is his own place. London printer, draftsman, and autodidact, he employed his skills to depict an eternal mental war as yet in progress, and largely unremarked. Other mystics have brought tidings of the spiritual world that is located alongside, inside, above, or behind the physical realm. But no other major artist or poet leaves so little room for comfort as William Blake. Many readers who admire his songs feel compelled to dismiss his prophetic books as madness, and those who read the prophecies in order to explain them end up trying to fasten mercury with a tack. Blake’s cosmology looks something like the Cabala, his version of the physical world resembles alchemy, and his eschatology is probably unintelligible: How is it possible that he sees so clearly that which can’t be seen?
The answer, if there is one, lies in the fact that prophecy does not illuminate God, who needs no illuminating, or the prophet, who is the means, not the end. Prophetic works illuminate the reader. Take these lines from Jerusalem, Plate 91:
I have tried to make friends by corporeal gifts but have only
Made enemies: I never made friends but by spiritual gifts;
By severe contentions of friendship & the burning fire of thought.
or later, at the bottom of the same page:
I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I care
Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool.
Almost alone among artists, Blake left work that testifies directly to the dealings between man as he actually lives and God. His poetry presents a vision and a music descended from the Hebrew prophets, sung in a different country, at a later moment in eternity. On his engraving Laocoon, the poet-prophet Blake proclaims The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is God himself The Divine Body / It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision). To go to the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition and see these lines as Blake printed them is to visit the land of strong conviction.
Laurance Wieder is a poet and publisher in Patchogue, New York.
