William blake biography essay books

William Blake is one of the most renowned poets in the history of English literature. Born to the owners of a hosiery shop on Broad Street in the center of London in 1757, William Blake developed into a toddler of extraordinary imagination. While only a young boy (around the age of four), he spoke to his parents of seeing angels playing amongst him, encountering visions of heaven and hell throughout London and the nearby countryside, and spotting God keeping a close eye on him during tasks and chores. It was not long before the young Blake began to stencil out the visions from his imagination, and as an eleven year old, he enlisted in Pars’ Drawing School to learn the art of printing and plaster casting.

Soon thereafter, Blake began to apprentice under London artist James Basire, and as a fourteen-year-old, he was assigned to drawing monuments in Westminster Abbey, which led to a lifelong admiration for Gothic art and religious illustration. While working with Basire, Blake befriended contemporary apprentice James Parker. Parker and Blake would later become partners in a jointly owned print shop on Broad Street, right next door to the Blake hosiery shop and household, a partnership that only lasted one year (1784-85).

One must recall the historical context of Blake’s development from a young artist to a poet in his mid-twenties. In 1775, America began a revolution of independence from England, igniting tense controversy in London, and the young artist witnessed an angry society torn apart by liberal sympathizers with the American revolutionaries and conservative loyalists to the colonial empire.

In 1782, William Blake married Catherine Boucher, and one year later, he published his first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, at the encouragement of the Reverend Anthony Stephen Matthew and his wife, owners of a salon which was a frequent drinking spot for the twenty-six year old.

In the mid to late 1780s, two events came into Blake’s life that would change his me

The Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus." With selections from his poems and other writings is a two-volume work on the English painter and poet William Blake, first published in 1863. The first volume is a biography and the second a compilation of Blake's poetry, prose, artwork and illustrated manuscript.

The book was largely written by Alexander Gilchrist, who had spent many years compiling the material and interviewing Blake's surviving friends. However, Gilchrist had left it incomplete at his sudden death from scarlet fever in 1861. The work was published two years later, having been completed by his widow Anne Gilchrist with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti.

The book became the first standard text on the Blake, a foundation of the extensive scholarship on his life and work. The original 1863 edition was subtitled "Pictor Ignotus", Latin for "unknown artist", a common phrase used for unattributed artworks. Here it refers to Blake's obscurity at the time. The phrase was taken from the recently published poem of that title by Robert Browning, part of which was used as an epigraph. A second edition was published in 1880; this included additional material and revisions to the earlier transcripts of Blake's work and Gilchrist's bibliographical details. Both are referred as Gilchrist's Blake or Life.

Several of Blake's short poems, such as "The Tyger", were typeset during his lifetime and had become widely known since the author's death in 1827, having been reproduced in commonplace books by William Wordsworth and others; however, the larger corpus of his work remained in relative obscurity.

The second volume, edited and annotated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, included most of Blake's songs, verse and other poetry, his prose, and letters. These were often the first publication in typeset. The editors sometimes adapted the works during transcription, printing "Tyger" as "Tiger" for