英语诗歌赏析

William Blake 威廉·布莱克(1757—1827)

Of all the romantic poets of the eighteenth century, William Blake is the most independent and the most original. Blake, born on 28 November 1757, the son of a London haberdasher, was a strange, imaginative child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he received no ducation. His only formal education was in art: at the age of 10 he entered a drawing school and later studied for a time at the school of

the Royal Academy of Arts. At 14 he apprenticed for seven years to a well-known engraver, James Basire, read widely in his free time, and began to try his hand at poetry. At

24 he married Catherine Boucher, daughter of

a market gardener. She was then illiterate, but Blake taught her to read and to help him in his engraving and printing. In the early and somewhat sentimentalized biographies, Catherine is represented as an ideal wife for an unorthodox and penniless genius. Blake, however, must have been a trying domestic partner, and his vehement attacks on the torment caused by a possessive, jealous female will, which reached their height in 1793, and remained prominent in his writings for another decade, probably reflect a troubled period at home. The couple had no children.

In 1800, he moved to Felpham in Sussex, where he had a patron who wanted to transform Blake into a conventional artist and bread earner. But Blake had his ideals and wanted to pursue his spiritual life. He rebelled. After three years at Felpham Blake moved back to London, determined to follow his “Divine Vision” though it meant a life of isolation, misunderstanding, and poverty. He had a one-man show put on in 1809, which proved a total failure. Blake passed into almost complete obscurity. Only when he was in his 60’s did he finally attract a small but devoted group of young painters who served as an audience for his work and his talk, Blake’s old age was serene, selfconfident, and joyous, largely free from the bursts of irascibility with which he had earlier responded to the shallowness and blindness of the English public. He died in his seventieth year in 1827.

Blake was a very important poet in the history of English literature. His poems seem easy, but difficult to understand on

account of his use of mysterious images and symbols. And one cannot really understand him if not versed in religious knowledge.

He was strongly influenced by The French Revolution, the ideas of Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and others. His main works include Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of

Experience (1794), The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).