The Stranger from Paradise - a biography of William Blake
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Highlights
he did not mean that his parents neglected him or that he found no friend. Rather, he meant that “This World is too poor to produce one Seed”,^^ that our only sources of joy and mirth lie within us, in the mind, rather than outside us, on the earth. Blake’s parents were loving and giving, but they could not give him the heavenly beauty and spiritual peace which is to be found only within us, in Christ, or, as Blake came to call Him, in the Human Imagination. — location: 623
William Blake had a deep aversion to fashionable stipple engraving, because, he said, it softened and blurred the sharp, distinct outlines of a design. His prejudice may have begun with his encounter with the fashionably indistinct Mr Ryland. — location: 974
Blake was learning more and more explicitly that Heaven is the source of art, that the human imagination is the divine spirit, and that the road to temporal felicity lies through the creation of works of art by means of the divine spirit in the human imagination. Poetry, painting, engraving, music, sculpture, architecture: in the creation of these there is felicity. — location: 1308
The speakers ofthe poems in Songs ofInnocence are babies, children, and adults, black and white, birds, insects, and animals; none is William Blake. All speak from a sense of protection, of safety, of being in their proper places in an ordered universe. Each, whether child or adult or ant, is guided by the glow-worm, “the watchman of the night”^^ and by “God ever nigh’V^ by “angels bright Unseen… [who] pour blessing’and by “Thy maker… [who^ Heaven & earth to peace beguiles”.Each is protected by something outside himself; it is the sense of protection, rather than the reality of the protection, which brings joy and peace. These innocents do not know that there is nothing outside themselves to protect them. It is not society but vision which sustains them. — location: 3002
“Blake and Coleridge, when in company, seemed like congenial beings of another sphere, breathing for a while on our earth”.What a treasure any account of Blake and Coleridge together would be, striking sparks of fire from one another’s genius. — location: 3033
To Thel’s ears, to questioning reason,* the voice from the pit is terrifying—but the last image of the book is of three naked babes riding a docile, harnessed serpent (Fig. p. 363). Though Thel is terrified, the babes are not. Thel’s prying intellect cannot understand what is before her. Thel sees the world ofspirits which is all round her, but she believes only in a temporal, perishing world. The intellectual text ends in terror, but the design concludes in harmony. — location: 3044
are about failures ofimagination’and vision; the mourning couple look down at the rigid dead sculpted in lifeless stone and do not see the dancing figures and flourishing vines around “sONGS” above them. They look down to earth rather than up to heaven. They are earth-bound, worshipping death. — location: 3246
weakness, marks of woe” which the old man “mark[5] in every face I meet” must be imaginary marks, for the old man is blind. The social misery which he marks and experiences is real and pervasive, but it is not universal. The limitation of metaphorical vision of the old man is indicated by his blindness. — location: 3255
But before we are overwhelmed by the terrors of the tyger and his creator, let us look at the design for “The Tyger”. That is scarcely a giant, threatening predator; notice the scale ofthe tree behind him and the sedateness of his walk. What we see is less like an image of burning, deadly terrors, with twisted sinews and dread feet, than it is like a stuffed toy forgotten at the bottom of a tree. Blake was perfectly capable of depicting terrors, as he did in “YTe Great Red Dragon”, “Fire”, “A Breach in a City”, and “The Ghost of a Flea” (Pis 5, 24, 34, 126). The image in “ITe Tyger” is an antidote to the terrors of the text. — location: 3278
mind of the singer, one of “the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul”, not the nature of the universe and of its creator. — location: 3283
The Songs ofExperience are the complements to Songs ofInnocence^ not the answers to them. The singers of Innocence feel protected by powerful forces outside themselves, while the singers of Experience feel threatened by powerful forces they cannot control or propitiate. Neither set of singers has yet learned that the power of divinity lies not beyond us but within us. — location: 3284
Tiriel^ The Book ofThel^ and Visions ofthe Daughters ofAlbion are myths of humans struggling with their fates, and America and Europe are myths of nations struggling to shape their fates. The First Book of Urizen deals with the struggles of divinity, of the eternal mind, to define itself and its universe. It is a creation myth, or rather a series of creation myths, like Genesis, the first book of Moses. — location: 3371
One of the novelties of Urizen is that all copies except a late one (G, c. 1818) are colour-printed, with colours added on the copperplate. The sense of suppressed earth-forces, as of a smouldering volcano, is very powerful and is peculiarly appropriate to Urizen. — location: 3398
Africa ends as “The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent” (pi. 4,1. 32), and the same words begin America (pi. 5,1. 1). And Europe^ which concludes with Los calling “all his sons to the strife of blood” (pi. 18,1. 265), seems to be continued in Asia: “The Kings of Asia heard [The howl rise up from Europe!” (pi. 6,11. 1-2). The Song ofLos thus returns to the historical and social subjects ofAmerica and Europe. — location: 3402
Both poems rework the mythological material of The First Book of Urizen, as if they were the second and third Books of Urizen. The Book of Ahania begins with Fuzon’s rebellion against his father Urizen: — location: 3427
The vision ofthese years in his Illuminated Books and in his great colour prints is powerful but dark. Thel and The Visions ofthe Daughters ofAlbion end with the woes of women, and America and Europe end with the wars of Los. The Songs ofExperience are filled with a sense oflives blasted and years wasted, of a world governed by cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy. The cause of the waste and terror is often plain, in the perversion of reason and the neglect of inspiration, but the cure is neither visible nor imagined. God himself is in torments, whether seen as Urizen or as Elohim. — location: 3505
He was fundamentally concerned not with perspective and anatomy but with harmony and inspiration. He wished to “Teach these Souls to Fly”;^^ “I found them blind, I taught them how to see”.’*^ For Blake, at least towards the end of his life, “Prayer is the Study of Art”.^^ — location: 3963
In Felpham nature opened her beauties to him with a minuteness unheard in his poetry before. “Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale”.”^^ — location: 4646
Surrounded by the fourfold vision, Blake is protected from the mortal terrors of “Poverty Envy old age & fear”. He struggled with the terrors and transformed them. — location: 4703
But the chief difference visible in his works of about this time is the incorporation of Christianity into his myth, the identification of Los the imagination with Christ, and the dominance of Los-Christ in his myth. — location: 5740