William Blake (1757–1827) was an English artist, engraver, mystical philosopher, visionary, and poet. His watercolors and engravings, like his writings, were appreciated fully only after his death. His poems denote the beginning of romanticism and a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment.
Blake was born in Soho, London, where he lived most of his life. His early childhood was dominated by spiritual visions that influenced his personal and working life. Instead of going to school, he was apprenticed to an engraver; there, he learned skills he was to use throughout his career as a poet.
In 1784, Blake set up a print shop, but the business struggled within a few years. For the rest of his life, Blake eked out a living as an engraver and illustrator. Blake always wrote out poems by hand on an engraving plate, rather than using type, engraved illustrations and hand-colored them—he was concerned with the presentation of his poetry as well as the words themselves.
Blake’s first book, Poetical Sketches, was published in 1783. He produced his most famous works, Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794,) by engraving both the words and the pictures on the same plate; this was his distinctive style. The Songs of Innocence are simple poems, written as if spoken by children. They are generally hopeful and optimistic. However, the Songs of Experience are also childlike in approach, but darker and more pessimistic. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience had sold fewer than 20 copies in 30 years.
At the time of his death, Blake was an unknown figure, best remembered for his engravings of other peoples’ work, or perhaps for his one famous poem, “The Tyger.” Among those familiar with his life’s work, the consensus was that he was insane. It wasn’t until 30 years after his death that a husband-and-wife team, Alexander and Anne Gilchrist, published a two-volume biography of Blake that firmly established him as a brilliant and vital artist.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Blake
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.
—William Blake
Topics: Genius
What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair, eternal death.
—William Blake
What is the price of experience?. Do men buy it for a song?. Or wisdom for a dance in the street?. No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
—William Blake
Topics: Wisdom
What is now proven was once only imagined.
—William Blake
Where mercy, love, and pity dwell there God is dwelling too.
—William Blake
Embraces are cominglings from the head even to the feet, and not a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.
—William Blake
Topics: Love, Sex
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
—William Blake
For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.
Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.
—William Blake
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity … and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.
—William Blake
Topics: Imagination, Nature
When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.
—William Blake
Topics: Truth
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.
—William Blake
Topics: Appreciation, Blessings, Gratitude
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
—William Blake
Topics: Cunning, Intelligence
The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
—William Blake
Topics: Friendship
Gratitude is heaven itself.
—William Blake
The forms of all things are derived from their genius.
—William Blake
A man can’t soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.
—William Blake
He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
—William Blake
Topics: Attitude, Life, Work, Win
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
—William Blake
Topics: Forgiveness, Friendship, One liners
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
—William Blake
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory. The fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy.
—William Blake
Topics: Heaven, Understanding
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