Frankly, I was incredulous that the 18th-century English poet William Blake, whom I greatly admired in my youth for his mystically luminous verse, was primarily a professional artist who for much of his life “spent his days as a highly regarded freelance commercial engraver; his evenings he gave over to his watercolours and relief etchings... and it was only late at night that he became a poet.”
IMAGE CREDIT: WILLIAM BLAKE ARTWORK IN NEWSTATESMAN.COMAs described in a present-day profile of him by British art historian Michael Prodger in
TheNewStatesman.com, Blake was quintessentially an “offbeat character—from his naturism and convoluted, self-invented cosmology to his visions of angels sitting in trees and his political and religious nonconformism.”
WILLIAM BLAKE
Prodger says of Blake as a seminar figure in English poetry and visual arts: “Blake’s work may have been uniquely tied to the word, with illustrations to the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Dante and Bunyan at its core, but his greatest innovations were visual. For example, his illustrated books – versions of medieval illuminated manuscripts – were made by relief etching, a technique he called the 'infernal method' and which he claimed to have learned from the ghost of his brother Robert.”
Read “William Blake’s design innovations” in the September 18, 2019 issue of TheNewStatesman.com now! RELATED READINGS:Check out the Project Gutenberg eBook of William Blake's “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”
Check out this related 2010 reading , “Transcending the limitations of altered perception of reality,” in the Forum now!
