The Making of William Blake

Ever wonder how an unknown, unread, eccentric engraver and visionary (rumored to have been insane) became the great William Blake? Over at The New York Review of Books, Richard Holmes is on the case, reviewing three new books that help place Blake's work (poetry and prints) in a new light, while focusing on the history behind the recuperation of his literary reputation. Holmes begins:

There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated) along a brick wall in Silver Street, Cambridge, England, in 1968. It was not poetry, but prose: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” It sent a strange shiver down my spine, as it did for thousands of other university students in England and America that year.

Holmes continues to think about the Blake of the 1960s, but he swiftly turns to consider a different Blake from a different '60s, the 1860s, where Blake's reputation was saved "from total obscurity" by Alexander Gilchrist's biography Life of William Blake: “Pictor Ignotus.” Holmes reminds us:

It has to be remembered that Blake was almost completely forgotten at the time of his death in a tiny two-room apartment in Fountain Court, a narrow alley off the Strand in London, in 1827. He had sold less than thirty copies of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). Of the great illuminated Prophetic Books, The French Revolution (1791) had never been published for fear of prosecution, only four copies of Milton (1804/1810) were printed in his lifetime, and only five of his tortured, apocalyptic masterwork Jerusalem (1810/1820), of which just two fully colored originals now remain.

Blake had been mocked in a notorious obituary in Leigh Hunt’s liberal newspaper the Examiner as “an unfortunate lunatic.” Both Wordsworth and Southey thought Blake was “perfectly mad,” and even Coleridge—who was exceptional in having read the Songs in a rare copy, thought Blake was gifted but deeply eccentric. The author of “Kubla Khan” wrote: “You perhaps smile at my calling another poet a mystic; but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common sense compared with Mr Blake, apo- or rather ana-calyptic poet and painter.” So Gilchrist’s biography was indeed an astonishing work of recovery.

Holmes covers a good deal of ground by looking at H.J. Jackson's Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame, Leo Damrosch's Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake, and finally a new Poems by William Blake, selected and introduced by Patti Smith. Read all about it and celebrate Blake!