William Blake and the art of engraving

 William Blake is one of England's greatest poets and artists, perhaps the greatest poet-artist of all. His vision shines through his verse and his extraordinary engravings. He was an artisan, working from home with his own printing press, producing unique prints, and while doing so, enjoying complete freedom, and bypassing any threat of censorship. I am a member of the William Blake Society which is organising an event: A Blake Printing Workshop with Michael Phillipps. This contemporary artist has spent a good part of his career studying how Blake used copper plates to engrave and print. He would apply an acid-resistant substance to them, and then let the acid eat around the rest, leaving his artwork to 'stand out', ready for him to apply his range of colours, and then put the paper through the rollers, pressing it on to the copper surface. 

Here is a short video in which Michael Phillipps demonstrates something of Blake's extraordinary creativity:

http://www.williamblakeprints.co.uk/

William Blake, the Bible and Western culture

I'm currently reading the poet and critic Kathleen Raine's great work on William Blake and Job. Blake was a poet and painter/engraver from the end of the 18th and early 19th century. Her book is on Blake's illustrations to the Old Testament book The Book of Job. Blake, like most western artists until relatively recently, drew inspiration from the Bible. This was seen as normal, and was sometimes even unconscious, so ingrained was Christianity in the collective mind and spirit, the "DNA" of even the most modest person socially and economically. So it is impossible to understand the West's artistic heritage on the deepest levels (often, even on the most basic levels) without a knowledge and appreciation of biblical text, particularly in the form of the stories, because the Judeo-Christian scriptures embody meaning essentially as story, "mythos". The meaning unfolds largely in narrative form. This is what is meant by "myth", which is not some invention to be opposed to "real historical fact". In any case, the deepest levels of meaning revealed to us when we hear a story are not on the historical level. They disclose themselves to us in the present encounter with the text, our experience of the text, as it were.

The Book of Job is the story of a wealthy and pious man who falls prey to a series of terrible events depriving him of all he had: family, material goods and pĥysical health. It is an archetypal story of Man's suffering, and transcending this suffering, thus prefiguring the Christ story itself. The Bible is made up of patterns of story in this way.

To be ignorant of these narratives (the Creation Myth, the Fall of Man, Noah and the Flood, exodus and exile in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, and the Christ narrative and the narratives within this narrative in the form of Jesus's parables, the list is endless) is to be alienated from one's own culture (and spiritual foundations, if one is open to such a thing as a spiritual nature). This on one level is nothing to do with "belief". We might begin more easily with "meaning". It is more than useful for example to have a Biblical knowledge when reading or watching Shakespeare. This takes its form mainly symbolically, including symbol in movement, as unfolding dramatic narrative. Even in King Lear, a play which takes place in pagan Britain, the blueprint is largely Christian.

Click below to access examples of Blake's illustrations (Job surrounded by his family at the beginning, Job suffering scorn, Job's final blessings), and the extract from Raine's work:  

William Blake: In the Beginning (Peter Ackroyd)

Following on from our class discussion today, here are the opening pages to Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, which I mentioned. It answers the question asked today about his social background; modest middle class. His father was a hosier (un bonnetier), and they lived in a London house Ackroyd describes as "solid if not exactly prosperous". I will leave you to savour the writing of this remarkable biographer and novelist; how he can make us relive moments in the past with vivid detail. Note the reference to 'the piping infant' recalling our study of Songs of Innocence and Experience. His account is never purely factual, but imbued with a sense of the times, and the meaning held in the smallest details of life. I also strongly recommend his biography of Charles Dickens.

Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

Poem for class 811

Here is the poem, or extract of a poem, to prepare for next week. It is one of the most famous examples of Romantic verse. Do your best and use your own ideas and own interpretations, not what you might find on the Internet. It can be easy to tell!

Click on the link to access the pdf document, and print it out if you can:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAVZ-krWZGO1D2IeB-gViUr46BUXROVl/view?usp=sharing

Have a good weekend.
AJ

A bower quiet for us...

The Romantics sought for a place where we can come back to ourselves, to essentials, away from the hustle and bustle of the world, and the mechanisation of life itself - which we surely still experience, in different ways today, and as intensely, if not more so, than at their time.

Keats reached the heights of poetic inspiration in his very short life. Some of his most extraordinary, and famous, lines come at the beginning of his long poem Endymion. Here they are:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Because the theme recently has been country folk, and because in class at the moment we are looking at the Romantics, I thought it a good idea to post an extract from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a seminal piece of writing which has come to be regarded as a kind of 'manifesto' for the Romantic poets - although they did not think of themselves in terms of a distinct movement of that name at the time.