In a lighter moment of William Blake’s life, a friend encountered him and his wife Catherine reading Paradise Lost in their garden. Naked. Blake supposedly told the friend, “Come in! It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.”
My English professor told this story early in our discussion of the Romantic poet, knowing it was a good way to get the attention of college freshmen. But Leo Damrosch hurries through the anecdote during a very late chapter. Damrosch, a Harvard professor whose works include biographies of Jonathan Swift and Jean Jacques Rousseau, is more interested in explaining Blake’s artistic accomplishments than in telling the story of his life, which he calls “relatively uneventful.” Blake’s work may have inspired rock bands, but he did not live like a rock star. Damrosch wisely offers this insightful book as “an invitation to understanding and enjoyment.”
Born in London in 1757, William Blake demonstrated a penchant for prophetic visions early in life: His parents were not pleased when he reported seeing the prophet Ezekiel on one occasion and a host of angels on another. But they did encourage his artistic talents. When he was 13, Blake began a seven-year apprenticeship with an engraver for the Society of Antiquaries. His training also included a brief time at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he at least learned to dislike the academy’s president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Blake resented what Damrosch calls “the condescension of Sir Joshua and the teachers.” Many years after leaving the academy, Blake wrote vituperative marginal notes in his copy of Reynolds’s Discourses: “Such Artists as Reynolds, are at all times Hired by the Satan’s [sic] for the Depression of Art.”
After the Royal Academy, Blake’s taste for the unconventional inspired him to develop his own unique method of etching. Using an acid-proof varnish, Blake would write—backwards—text and graphics on a copper plate, then drop the plate in an acid bath. When he removed the plate from the bath, the inked areas would be left in relief. He then dabbed ink onto the elevated text and design, printed it onto high-quality paper, and, finally, hand-painted the pages in watercolor (which he and Catherine mixed themselves).
Whereas traditional methods separated text and image, Blake’s innovations allowed him to blend the two seamlessly. The results were stunning and distinctive, and the technique gave him what Damrosch calls “complete control of the entire process from start to finish.” It also meant that there was greater variation between printings, as each copy was essentially handcrafted. These illuminated books are Blake’s most impressive creations and rightfully receive the bulk of Damrosch’s attention.
Blake published his first books with this process in the late 1780s, including Songs of Innocence in 1789. Though far from straightforward, these are easily his most accessible works. Adopting the ballad stanza form of contemporary songs for children, Songs of Innocence presents a view of childhood that “is trusting but not naïve, inexperienced but already anticipating immersion in Experience.” The poems are deceptively simple. Consider this stanza from “The Shepherd.”
The light rhythm and idyllic setting are subtly undercut by the diction. Why is the shepherd following his sheep? A good shepherd might walk behind them—but to direct, not follow, them. Nor should shepherds “stray.” The collection teems with such ironizing details.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience, completed in 1794, includes many poems that repeat the titles or subject matters of the previous collection, but which condemn British beliefs and institutions much more aggressively. It is, as Damrosch says, “an altogether different imaginative world, one haunted by loneliness, frustration, and cruelty.” During these years, Blake was also writing more abstract works, including his aphoristic satire of Swedenborgian religion, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and overtly political poems responding to the time’s revolutionary spirit. All of these works express Blake’s belief that oppressive laws and institutions—religious, civic, and state—cause human suffering, and that their victims have (as Damrosch puts it) “internalized a cruel ideology.”
Yet Damrosch challenges E. P. Thompson’s influential claim that Blake was deeply involved in radical politics. Although he sympathized with his radical contemporaries, Blake was not part of any underground political movement, and his most remarkable political acts were accidental. In 1780, he was arrested under suspicion of spying for the French because he went on a sketching expedition too close to a naval fleet. More than 20 years later, he was put on trial for sedition after throwing a drunken sailor out of his garden. (Blake was acquitted.) Damrosch contends that “by the mid-1790s he was retreating from any active political stance” and “becoming apolitical in any activist sense.” His poetry, too, became less politically engaged “and instead explored perennial tensions in human experience in ever-increasing depth.”
Damrosch’s greatest challenge is explaining Blake’s longer and very strange prophetic works, such as The Book of Urizen, Milton, and Jerusalem. “Many parts of the long poems are difficult,” says Damrosch, “at times impenetrably so.” The experience of reading these maddening and fascinating works is like a conversation over a bad telephone connection: Just when you think you understand what’s being said, the voice becomes indistinct, unclear, followed by a lucid moment, then another breakdown. The works develop an elaborate mythological system of recurring characters—with names like Orc, Urizen, and Los—and preoccupations. Just as the Songs of Innocence and Experience include multiple poems with the same titles, or companion pieces on the same subject matter, Blake’s long pseudonarratives integrate variations of the same events. Blake was not interested in traditional narrative but in depicting what Damrosch calls “the dynamics of psychic experience” through characters who represent “conflicting aspects of human consciousness.”
Fortunately, Damrosch excels at helping readers understand Blake’s unorthodox ideas, complex symbolism, and allusive imagery. Blake’s “goal is not to convey an explicit message but to rouse the faculties to act.” He “emphasize[s] symbolic significance, not literal imagery” and uses “symbolism that is equivocal.” The book also includes nearly 100 reproductions—with 40 color plates—of Blake’s stunning artwork, brimming with mesmerizing watercolors and muscular physiques. Damrosch’s interpretations of Blake’s illustrations are consistently sharp. Because Blake’s visual representations often vary from or even contradict the text to which they correspond, they challenge readers to reconsider the text itself. Why does the plate of “The Tyger” include a beast that looks more like a docile Labrador than anything fearful? Is Blake suggesting something about the limitations of human perception? The deceptive nature of evil?
Despite receiving compliments from the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge and attracting a group of young acolytes that included the painter Samuel Palmer, neither Blake’s poetry nor his art drew much contemporary acclaim. The meager living he earned was based in occasional commissions, often from friends, to illustrate other works, such as the Book of Job, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and collections by 18th-century poets. But as Damrosch explains, “mere illustration bored him profoundly.” At one point, he went nearly 10 years without a commission. He wrote very little of his own original work for the last two decades of his life, and his final years were marred by sickness, to which “years of inhaling copper dust, as well as fumes from nitric acid biting into copper,” probably contributed.
Blake finally ascended into the canon in the mid-20th century, and he has had much more influence on recent generations than he had on his own. He has inspired band names (The Doors, of course), song lyrics (World Party’s “Put the Message in the Box”), album titles (U2’s Songs of Innocence), modern sculptures (Paolozzi’s statue of Newton outside the British Library), and fictional serial killers (in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon). The same unconventional ideas and abstract prophecies that baffled his contemporaries are appealing now. This does not mean that Blake is a poet for our times: His work is still startling and strange, and his allure relies less on the coherence or persuasiveness of his ideas than on the intensity and originality of his execution.
Although Damrosch clearly admires Blake, this is not a hagiography. He is particularly sensitive to Blake’s treatment of women and sex. Despite his many radical social views, Blake is “not really a prophet of unconflicted sexuality” but “was aware that sex can be a means of exerting control, and at times he was tormented by it.” And Damrosch is blunt in his analysis of Blake’s mental state: “It is hard to doubt that deep psychic disturbances lie at the heart of his work.” Damrosch’s laudable attention to the details of Blake’s art occasionally distracts him from larger points, resulting in paragraphs and chapters that end with vague or anticlimactic observations unrelated to a broader claim. Nor is this the book to study for the most recent trends in Blake scholarship: Damrosch’s references to Freud and Jung hint at an old-school (though not necessarily irrelevant) approach. So does his apparent lack of interest in Blake’s representations of race and empire—although that oversight may be a selling point for some readers.
Damrosch succeeds in making a notoriously difficult poet and artist more accessible without resorting to Blake for Dummies. His sharp insights clarify both the context and originality of Blake’s art, and his passion for Blake’s work is often magnetic. Readers who accept Damrosch’s generous invitation will better understand and more deeply enjoy the enduring distinctiveness of Blake’s vision.
Christopher J. Scalia is a writer in Washington, D.C.
